Episode 9: Vertical Growth in Krav Maga - going deeper not wider.

Joel Ellenbecker

Hey, CJ, it's really great to be back with you here on another episode of the Krav Maga Worldwide podcast. And we briefly talked about it beforehand, but it's something that's been coming up in conversations and in some of our recent courses, seminars in San Diego and also at the recent handgun certification. But this idea of horizontal versus vertical growth, and I think that's a really interesting topic and I want to chat about it.

CJ Kirk

Yeah, I think one of the things that's really relevant about this discussion is how the system was initially built as a system first architecture. And I don't think a lot of people give that enough thought specifically around the topic of vertical or horizontal development. And what I mean by that is you think about a system that was designed with a system first architecture.

The goal was to avoid cognitive overload and to allow the smallest number of effective movement in a defense to populate the system itself. So as human beings, we have a desire to optimize everything. So when we see a defense, we're like, I can make the defense better.

But in making defenses better, we end up making every version of an attack better through the proliferation of defenses and techniques. And the result is a catalog of defenses that far outstrips the cognitive capacity to respond to sudden danger. And so we really have a choice.

And as human beings, we always want to grow. And I'm fully on board with that. As a coach, a couple of different types of coaches, health coach and a master coach, performance coach, I think growth is paramount.

In fact, it's part of my ethos, lifelong learning. So the question is, what are you going to learn and why? And for people that are always looking for the next shiny thing, they seek out horizontal growth, which is sort of adding more their toolbox.

The issue is, if you add too much, you end up with cognitive overload. And with Problem Without, we have to keep in mind that the core issue with Problem Without, it has to be available and accessible to men and women, big and tall, short and small. And so in my view, vertical growth is really where growth is at.

I made a note to myself over here, and I wanted to sort of simplify the conversation for people. And so what I wrote is, horizontal growth expands your operational menu. Vertical growth transforms your capacity to perform.

Those are the two ideas I came up with.

Joel Ellenbecker

Ties into something that I was thinking about. I've thought about this in the past. I think I've even talked about it in Problem Without classes.

But for me, there's times where it's like, yeah, I want choice and I want to go to a restaurant and have a lot of options. Or if I go get an ice cream cone with my kids, it's like, oh, it'd be cool to have all these different flavors. And then there's also times though, where it's overwhelming, even just in normal daily life, where it's like, there's 32 different flavors on the board.

And I'm like, which one do I want? But if it's chocolate or vanilla, it's much easier to make that decision. And so if I'm in a fight for my life, or I'm trying to protect somebody I love and care about, and the stakes are as high as life and death, I don't want to have 32 options.

I don't want to try to flip through my Rolodex of whatever. And we also only have so much time in our lives to train and be proficient at things. So to keep up with those skills, the more horizontal we go, the harder it's going to be to be proficient at everything.

CJ Kirk

Yeah. And I think the way to approach this, that we've discussed in the recent past, is to develop a knowledge management working group with the goal of identifying how, when, and where attacks or ambush attacks, or the nature or quality of an attack seems to be changing. And then to ensure that as we examine that, that the defenses are still capable of effectively addressing that danger.

And I'm excited about that group. And a lot of the guys in the system now who are looking for something to grow into, this is a great opportunity for them to engage into really, we talked about peeling back the layers of the problem they've got. We had a handgun certification last weekend.

And our handgun certification is a review of your handgun defenses, a discussion about handgun retention, and the various issues in play there, as well as some practical stuff. And then there's the shooting course. And there were so many discussions about, well, you know, I was taught by a CO to pull my shirt all the way up to here when I go get my concealed weapon.

I was like, don't do that. And why not? Everybody does it.

It's like, well, it doesn't fit the system. And this is a great example. When I started saying, what if you do that?

I'm standing here. What if you do that? And there's another attacker.

And I gave like five different scenarios where that movement would actually only be appropriate if you were shooting at one target with enough room. And I said, look, we have to always fall back to, as one of our original filters for Problem Guy, and the integration of adjacent skill sets. We have to fall back to the filter of danger, distance, safety.

And so if you even apply just that filter in the context not of shooting a handgun, self-defense with a gun in your hand, how does that change things? And the guys were like, yeah, no, I see where you're coming from. And we discussed, you know, when is that possible?

Like, well, it's possible if you're an appendix carry. In case you're not draped across yourself, you're pulling straight up the line, so you can still deploy your hand out in front. Great space.

So we had a robust discussion. The last thing I'll say about that in terms of the handgun is that we were doing handgun defenses where we were offset to one side. We had cupped the handgun.

I said, okay, so what's your philosophy here? What are you going to do? Are you going to counterattack?

Are you going to immediately try to break the gun by sort of a tomahawk motion, capturing the weight shift back to the left foot? And everyone was kind of like, well, you know, what's the real question? The real question is, how do you inform, define, train, teach around your philosophy of Problem of God?

Because in one sense, we have RCAT, right? But what if it's mixed up? What if it's RCTA?

So if there are two principles in competition for your next movement, which principle do you prioritize and why? And that's really just the second layer of the philosophy, you know, as you look at the various layers. So all these things come into play, and this is the vertical development we're talking about.

It's about understanding the system from inside out, getting in the center of the system and looking at it from different perspectives.

Joel Ellenbecker

Yeah, interesting. So tying the two things together, you kind of said in the beginning where if we optimize each defense, you know, you're talking about the pistol, you know, draw, pulling the shirt up, that kind of thing. It's like, maybe in one scenario, pulling the shirt up is really, really great.

But then in these five other scenarios, if you do that, it's, you know, catastrophic or dangerous or suboptimal or, you know, whatever the case is. So what if we just had one way of doing it that works in all five of those areas? And then that's, that's more in line with like, what we're talking about with like, vertical development, or like, going deeper.

And this was another thing when, when I first started thinking about this, that just kind of came up to me, and it came up in another conversation with someone where it's like, you know, I had, I had gone on my journey in Krav Maga. And a lot of it was a solo ish journey where like, I'm out here in Wisconsin, and I'm training and I'm learning, and then I go to LA or Maryland, or now down by you to Houston, I learned a little bit more, and I come back and I'm doing it and had gotten, you know, to second Don, and I thought I knew everything. And I was like, Well, now it's time to do something else.

Now it's time to maybe do jujitsu. And as I was peeling back the layers with that what I was coming to and what I want to hear from you on and I'm sure other people might be interested in hearing is like, when switching, like going horizontally, so going, okay, now I'm going to do jujitsu. The effort that it takes to learn in the beginning isn't as great.

It's like, Oh, I can put a little bit of effort in and I learned a lot of cool stuff. And this is really fun. And it's really rewarding.

CJ Kirk

Yeah.

Joel Ellenbecker

And the longer we stay in one like silo or in one discipline, or like Krav Maga, it's like the deeper we go or higher, whichever way you want to look at it, it's like it takes so much more effort to what seems like to get like a little bit of a, you know, a nugget or a piece. And so, you know, I'm curious on your thoughts on that. And also, it's like, well, yeah, it's so much harder alone, but maybe not when you have someone who's already done that work for you.

And who's now sharing it in different courses and seminars and things like that.

CJ Kirk

Yeah, I think that's a good point. And I want to sort of address it by by talking about something that that I talk about with my instructor all the time, which is the concept of rent to own. And a lot of times people will get in all the way through black belt in some cases, but because they haven't proven the defenses to themselves, because they haven't tested them enough, because they haven't gone deep enough vertically, they're still renting information.

And that's not a great place to be particularly under stress, right? You need to know it works and why it works and how it connects and really that it's essential purpose, that all the movements in the defense, what is their essential purpose? And go beyond that and say, well, if that fails, what is a plan B for me?

What's another option for me? Within the framework of Pravda Gan, all the principles and the movements that populate the system. And that's where Da Vinci Man came from, for instance.

But you begin to own the information. And I would say I've been in vertical development really since my black belt, which was a long time ago. Maybe, I don't remember.

The dawn of time. Yeah. It was, yeah.

I mean, cars had been invented, but still, it's been a long time. And I will tell you that I continue even to this day to find more things in the system. And I think that that is one of the things that is most engaging to me.

It's not about, for me, learning necessarily something new. And I'm not against learning new things at all. I love new things, but they have to fit within the principles and the system, the design, the architecture of Pravda Gan.

And a lot of times what happens is we try something new. It works for some people, it works for other people. Look, you can train things you want to train.

But what we're talking about is you may have a teaching philosophy. You may also have a slightly different training philosophy. And Jeff and I were talking about this after San Diego.

And I said, there's always someone bigger, faster, and stronger. And so if your defenses are dependent on any of those variants, it could be a catastrophic issue. So rent to own is a big issue.

I think people rent information until they get enough vertical development and really begin to own it.

Joel Ellenbecker

Yeah, that's, yeah, that's cool. So how do we, you know, I think for, I can share my experience, but then I also want to think, you know, about other people. But for me, it's like I was kind of stuck in that a little bit of like, hey, I've gone as deep as I can go.

So now I'm going to go horizontally and I'm going to learn other things. And what really changed it for me is when I came to Houston, and I don't even think it was, it wasn't an actual class or something. It was just like, hey, let me see your straight stab.

And you're like working with me on straight stab. And I just started to have like these light bulb moments of like, oh man, I thought I knew this. And there's layers here.

There's nuances here. And it's nothing, it's not more complicated. It's more simple.

But that was the light bulb moment for me where it's like, oh, there's more to learn. And this is exciting again to go deeper on it.

CJ Kirk

Yeah. One of the things we talk about, well, we talk about a lot of things, but a few things we talk about are, how does this fit into the system? Does this movement show up again?

If it shows up again, it has to be a movement that is effective wherever it shows up and consistently trained that way. Well, how am I going to do that? Well, what's your initiating movement?

Are you anchoring to something? What's your physical cue? And there's so many layers that you can get into just in teaching people how to more quickly replicate a movement so that myelination or muscle memory becomes faster.

And at the same time, you're explaining to them by virtue of this process, why this movement needs to be made the way it's made, what the cue feels like, whether you're anchoring or reaching. There's so many aspects of even just exploring the physical movements or what we call the Legos of Krav Maga that I think people miss. And to me, that's more exciting than learning a new movement that may or may not be useful within the system architecture.

That's my view.

Joel Ellenbecker

Yeah, I like that. And I think something that kind of popped up for me as you were speaking to is just maybe tied into some of the coaching things that we've talked about. It's like, well, what is my motive or what is my underlying reason for wanting to learn a new thing?

Sure, it could just be like, I want to have fun and I want to enjoy a hobby or relax or whatever it is. And when we're looking at things that belong in the Krav Maga system that we're responsible for disseminating to instructors all around the world, and then they're responsible for disseminating to their students, it's like the motive there can't be because it looks cool and it's fun. It has to be because it's effective and it's going to be the thing that brings them home safe to their family.

So I think that's maybe a reframe, too, for me of understanding. It's like, well, yeah, I like to learn these things because they're fun and cool. But what is the safest thing?

What is the most effective thing? And that's got to be where energy and time are spent and focused on.

CJ Kirk

Yeah, I think I don't want people to misunderstand. I'm a huge fan of wrestling, a huge fan of judo. I did a lot of jujitsu after UFC1 back when I was in college.

I'm a fan of the martial- I love kendo. I'm a fan of the martial sciences and I grew up being a fan of the martial sciences or the arts. That's not the issue.

We're really just talking about self-defense right now. And within the framework of self-defense, less is more as long as the less is well conceived. Because when the people jump from art to art, I think of them as tourists.

They're seeing the sights. They love what they see. They have a great time.

But it becomes a mishmash for people and there's cognitive overload in some cases or there's wildly suboptimal responses to danger. And so it's sort of like the allure of being a tourist, which is attractive, or the allure of being, in essence, an archaeologist and constantly digging and uncovering new things in the same area. That's really what we're talking about.

Horizontal development is your tourist and an archaeologist is your vertical development.

Joel Ellenbecker

I said this, I think, with the podcast with Christian where it's like, you know, we learn swimming as almost like, you know, most people learn swimming as like a life skill so that they don't drown. And I think that everyone should learn self-defense as a life skill so that they can protect themselves from people who try to harm them or kill them. Right.

And it's like, if I was learning to swimming, I might choose to get into synchronized swimming because I think it's cool. But that has nothing to do with not drowning, right? It's like, it's two different associated similar type looking things, but two totally different things.

CJ Kirk

Yeah. In the military and in other disciplines, they call, so using the analogy of swimming or the pool or treading water, they start with something called water confidence, right? Which is just, it's a misnomer because they're terrorizing you while you're in the water.

And then you go to something called drown proofing in some cases. And that's really what you're talking about. You build a system that can respond to as much danger as, you know, conceivably possible.

And you limit how large that system becomes by, not by creating more things, but by creating the things that can adequately, effectively address danger and can be utilized by the human mind and body under the stress of on attack. So many people discount the stress of on attack and the human response and the cognitive overload concept that comes as a result of losing 50 IQ points, of losing your fine motor skills, of being surprised, of having adrenaline and cortisol and norepinephrine running through your body. It's just people discount that.

We don't talk about that enough. And the way I've told people before is, would you rather have a thousand defenses to, you know, a thousand attacks or would really a thousand defenses to 200 attacks and all the versions of those attacks or one defense for a thousand attacks? As long as that one defense is effective, everybody wants the one, but then they can't translate that idea of vertical development, which is really getting good at that one into their training going forward in an action in their lives.

It's, it's surprising sometimes.

Joel Ellenbecker

Yeah. I've always thought if I could just solve every self-defense situation with a straight punch, I would just choose that. If I could more, if they could just have less.

CJ Kirk

And so the question is, do you understand why less is effective? And do you, do you fully grasp how sort of awesome and exciting it is to discover new things? I remember the first time I was having a conversation with somebody about why, why is our fighting stance, our fighting stance?

I go, well, it's so that we can have some level of certainty around where the attack's coming. We're drawing the attack in. Okay.

I was like, okay, fine. But what if I take a Wing Chun fighting stance and I protect the center line, right? I can still draw the attack in.

I'm just drawing it on a different line. Oh, and by the way, that line is longer than a straight line. So by, by that sort of criteria alone, our fighting stance is wrong.

You got anything else? I was like, well, not really. And I tried to show everybody, we'll use the fighting stance a little bit.

And what happens when a straight punch comes down the line? Well, we make this redirection and we go here. What happens when something like 360 comes, you know, through?

Oh, we make a defense, we go there. Are you at the same place? Like, well, we're, we kind of aren't the same place.

And it's like, well, okay, what does that tell you? And what it told me was in the framework of the basic framework of self-defense, it told me that Imi was trying to communicate something super important, which is that you may defend a slightly shorter line or a longer line, but I've created this fighting stance so that you can always push away from the free hand or the body, the hand that hasn't been launched in this case, right? So leaning towards the concept of a dead side and what that means in terms of the tactical significance.

So it's like, okay, so we address the danger, we counterattack, we control and finish. And what Imi is saying is by virtue of this fighting, or virtue of the fighting stance is that the counterattack and the control need to be synonymous with a strong counterattack and a control position that takes you away from secondary danger. And it's so important that we're not going to default to something like this that gives you a little bit more certainty, but leaves you exposed, right?

And so people are like, whoa, and it's like, you got to keep thinking, you got to keep digging, you got to be an archaeologist, not a tourist. Because if you have that level of understanding about everything you're doing in the problem of God, you're convinced that this is what you need. That's what I found.

Joel Ellenbecker

Yeah, and another thing too is like, how are we measuring the success of the system? Are we measuring it by the noise on the internet or in the world of, oh, we have to evolve or we have to change things because of how it looks or how it how people feel about it? I'm not exactly sure.

Or are we measuring it based on like, we're in San Diego, the chief instructor of the force training division was story after story after story of people that he taught and his team taught use this to save their life. And like those reports are coming back of like, the things that they're doing are saving their lives. You know, we all know that law enforcement don't get as much training as they would like to, or as they need.

So they have less training time, they're doing a dense version of it. And they're still saving their life with it. Versus looking at some of the other things.

It's like, well, this might take more training time, it's going to add more options. And then we're going to have this cognitive overload. And we're going to be, you know, struggling.

CJ Kirk

Yeah. Yeah, I thought one of the interesting things that that he said was, if I heard him right, you can confirm this for me. In the 30 years that LA County has been using Krav Maga as a primary defensive system, there have been lots of gun defenses, but no gun takes.

In other words, the gun either comes out redirection or comes out when they punch. And the break and take literally has not been performed outside of a third party defense.

Joel Ellenbecker

Yeah, very interesting.

CJ Kirk

Yeah.

Joel Ellenbecker

That's what he said, for sure.

CJ Kirk

Yeah. So that's a piece of the knowledge management working group that, you know, we need to be tapping into, right? People need to know, yes, you need to know break and take.

But however, there's some data in the world that suggests that either the redirection or the punch or the combination of the two is going to get you what you need. I think one of the things that's funny about vertical development versus horizontal development is the confusion. So is shooting, shooting a handgun, for instance, is that horizontal or vertical development?

And for me, it's vertical development because we're training to take a handgun. And if you're training to take a handgun, you have to know how to manipulate it, how to operate it, how to work it when it's in a malfunctioned state. And I think people are starting to see that even there are activities that look like horizontal development that are really just natural vertical development within the scope of Krav Maga.

Joel Ellenbecker

Yeah. And I think for me as someone who has, you know, way, way less firearms training and information, it looked to me like horizontal development for a long time because there weren't courses or certifications or things that integrated the Krav Maga principles. So it was firearms experts with their firearms information and their firearms training who would be like, hey, here's what I think is, you know, great for self-defense, which I'm sure there's a lot of amazing things out there, but I've aligned with this system and Krav Maga is what, you know, I believe works the best.

So now having a certification where it's Krav Maga principles with a gun in your hand, you're doing Krav Maga with a gun. It's like, it's a no brainer. It's vertical development.

CJ Kirk

Yeah. Yeah. I remember Aaron Cohen calling me, I don't know, years and years ago.

Aaron, he's on news a lot. He wrote a book called Brotherhood of Warriors. It's a good read.

He's a kid from Beverly Hills. He went to military school. He came back.

I think one of his stepdad knew maybe a general from the Israeli army. He was really jazzed about, you know, the military and the general said, why don't you go back and exercise your right of return and join the Israeli military. And he decided to do that.

He wanted to be an operator in a tier one unit and faced a lot of pushback, let's say that. And he just stuck it out. And when he stuck it out long enough, they gave him a shot through the selection process and he ended up doing well.

He became, I'm going to get it wrong, but I think he became one of the guys in the Duvdevan unit, which is their counter-terror unit. And I've known him through several courses we've done with him, some of which I really liked. The Israeli point shooting thing is not something I'm a huge fan of, but there's so many things that are interesting about his experience.

And at one point he called me and said, hey, I'm going to be at this range. I'm going to be teaching armed pilots and air martians. Would you come out and show them, you know, simple weapon retention?

I said, sure, I'll come and show them. And we went out and they were doing this deal here, like to get to their gun. And I pulled Aaron aside and I said, hey, I can't teach that in the context of weapon retention.

My feeling is, you know, for your consideration, it's maybe a bad idea. And he said, well, you know, I'm open to whatever you're, to his credit, I'm open to whatever you have to say. And so I said, look, when you operated, how did it go?

He's like, I read your book. I saw several missions in your book. He's like, yeah, we would essentially surprise a target.

He would pose as a reporter and, you know, grab a guy responsible for a massacre and take him back to Israel and, you know, get in a fight with the bodyguard. But it was always, he always had the element of surprise or in most of the missions, I posed as a wedding guest and grab somebody at a wedding. But when you're on an airplane and there's potential violence involved, you identify yourself as an air marshal or you take action as an armed pilot and you're in the small non-permissive sort of tubular environment where you can't go anywhere.

Joel Ellenbecker

And I was just saying in that context and in in hold on we lost the uh we lost the audio for a second there so when the last thing i heard was in a tubular environment do you want to restart from there

CJ Kirk

yeah so um can you hear me now good um that strategy that tactic would not serve them in a tubular environment where someone's pressing against them they're going to get pinned against the wall they're not going to be able to access their firearm they will have clearly show where it was um there's there's problems with it and so we talked about potential for doing something different which and this is the system first approach which may take slightly longer but um addresses so many more tactical problems right so i anticipated like let's let's do this so he got he got him away he built a three-sided circle let's demonstrate a new way to access our concealed firearm that allows the offhand to be able to punch and post grab push pull whatever you need to do um and in this environment that makes sense and so even in that environment we were able to talk about crowd my god as something that um not only responds to the threats out in the world but that has a contextual element that allows it to thrive when when those the contextual and tactical environment change i thought that was it was significant for two reasons it it um it dawned on everybody training that this was a better way to do it and it was also significant because you know aaron's a skilled and and seasoned operator and totally open to any number of different you know suggestions i thought it was it was going to his part to to be open to that I was impressed with him on that day in particular i think that that's a very very admirable quality of leaders that like at least i find really admirable is like it doesn't matter how accomplished how skilled how much someone knows if they're willing to keep an open mind and to still keep improving like those are the type of people that like i want to be around and that i want to learn from and like i think it's important to bring up in the context of this conversation is it's like that's what we're about and that's what krav maga is about too it's like the kufman has the openings at the top and the bottom so things can flow in and out and that's why we want this knowledge management working groups because like we want the best possible solution not for each individual but the best for the system um and we want to learn and we want to grow in a way that

CJ Kirk

is is a vertical development yeah you know i think we had an instructor at one point in in our system say you know i like the russian two-on-one and i understand why um but i said if you're going to teach the men and women big and tall short and small uh that's not in this loop and another guy came in and said hey um how come that's not a good solution and then um this first guy said if you can follow this story he said well i would like to see you know a person or two people of equal skill try to pull off like a problem like a knife disarm versus two-on-one with a knife and i i tried to tell that person you're not even making the right comparison and specifically um you know without look i'm i'm not trying to be negative but it's like you don't even know what the question is and that's why vertical development is so important that's not the question.

Joel Ellenbecker

the question is yeah there's and there's this interesting thing too where it's like what what what is the thing that we're finding it's like most people aren't doing disarms anyways and i know we were specifically talking about a handgun before um but i think the same thing so applies with a knife defense like if you're able to throw counterattacks and strikes i saw a video it was a training video but it was a guy with you know a full suit on coming full speed with a downward stab um at a guy and he just 360 encountered and the guy almost did a backflip with like how hard he ran into that punch and it's like i think we underestimate in training scenarios the um the effectiveness of violence and you know how much that's going to change things and you know like if if i'm in if i'm on the dead side and i have the wrist control that i just punch this person in the face and i grab their hand and i go for a disarm and it's not there well then i'll kick them in the groin like i'll you know i'll do what i gotta do or i'll disengage like you said so i can keep my mobility rather than feeling like i have to take the knife away i know there's going to be scenarios or situations where that is a goal that we want to maybe take the knife away um but i don't think it's every situation at least not that we're hearing stories coming back from in real life and on that note you know we have our next round of our courage coaching certification coming up and like what do you say or or like how do we help people who might be interested or who don't really know understand why coaching is also vertical development and not just some other new shiny thing that's going to distract me from my krav maga and like how that integrates yeah i can speak for us you know they're this even the students at fortitude would be able to say like hey i can tell a difference in the instructors who've gone through coaching like they can they can feel it on the mat and in the conversations and and i think for you know instructors or school owners who are listening who are maybe on the fence or not sure it's like you know we're better together and we learn from each other and we grow together and like this is a way to connect with our our krav maga worldwide family without having to travel and without having to you know like you ask somebody at our san diego seminar like what do what do these high value coaching certifications cost and where they go for and like the guy said you know the best one is like twenty thousand dollars and we're giving this access to our licensee is you know um at a much different cost because of that connection in that family yeah all right i got one last thing and then uh we can wrap it up here so we've we've talked we've really hit on the the vertical and horizontal development um and then we've talked about these adjacent like handgun and coaching things that may appear as horizontal but how they're actually related and how they go more vertical what are what are your thoughts or recommendations to people who are are still you know whether they're obviously when you're in level one phase abc like that stuff like the progression seems to make a lot of sense where it's like okay i go to the next course that's how i keep getting my vertical development what are you saying to people who are either with krav maga worldwide or have been studying krav maga a long time you know they're a high-ranking black belt like what do you say to them for them to go more vertical like what like what do you what is your recommendation there i love that well thank you cj these conversations are always really insightful for for me and i grow and i learn a ton from them so i'm looking forward to the next one