“Fighting to End the Fight “
Understanding the mind set of “fearless and determination”!
Combat condition:
In order to analyze how a person functions during combat and under stress, it is important to understand the mental and physical states that a person may experience beforehand at the Pre-Conflict stage. One example of such a mental state can be described as Combat Anxiety - defined as "the anticipation of danger". This anticipation may lead to a gradual deterioration of both mental and physical skills.
This type of condition is typical mindset of any person that finds himself in a survival conflict (rape, mugging, attacked, war, etc’).
Combat Anxiety can manifest itself in several ways:
A. During the Conflict as combat stress - objective fear perceptions including a person having fear of death, injury, killing, incorrect decision-making, failure, or just fear by itself.
B. Post conflict as the survival stress - deals with the post event mental & physiological symptoms known as "backlash", which may distort the memory.
As the ability to predict fear increases, so does the pre-conflict level of arousal. Once you feel threatened, your level of arousal is not under your voluntary control. However; your perception of the threat level and your behavior during levels of high arousal can be strongly influenced by training you receive prior to the threatening situation.
Our arousal is controlled by our autonomic nervous system, which operates automatically in the same way that we breathe and our heart beats automatically. Our autonomic nervous system has two parts; the parasympathetic part is operational under no threat conditions. However, under threat conditions, the sympathetic part will switch on and cause profound changes in our body that prepare us to do one of three survival behaviors:
Fight, Flight, Freeze
The profound changes that take place in your body during high arousal states will not only influence behaviour, but also you’re thinking processes during the event as well as your memory of the event.
Unlike fight or flight which is an instinctual behaviour and is designed to help you survive a conflict, freezing is extremely dangerous and must be avoided in any shape.
Backlash effect, which is known as vasodilatation will increase the normal blood flow Therefore, it is critical that all gunshot / knife wounds be treated as soon as possible. If a wound is bleeding excessively during stress activation (sympathetic nervous system), it indicates arterial bleeding and appropriate countermeasures (such as pressure point and/or tourniquet) should be given strong consideration.
Backlash effect can also slow down the visual process. It reduces oxygen delivery to the photoreceptors, especially to the cones. This in turn, results in a temporary loss or distortion of a person's vision.
All perceptual senses, (sight, sound, touch taste, smell and the sixth sense), provides the brain with a constant flow of information. However, when the brain becomes focused on an activity or a threat, the brain will "tune in" to the sensory system that provides the most relevant information at that given second. Other sensory inputs will be "tuned out" by the brain because they lack immediate significance for the victim at that given second.
This is a phenomenon referred to as perceptual narrowing or selective attention. As a result, the brain stops processing information from the other senses, particularly the auditory or hearing system. This is referred to as auditory exclusion.
Each of these physiological changes will affect combat performance as it relates to our vision, our ability to perform basic motor skills, and our ability to cognitively process information, accuracy skills and a significant increase in reaction time.
When stress (activates the SNS) arousal occurs, these negative effects upon vision cannot be avoided, but they can be minimized through proper training. For example, training to pivot the head, rather than just darting their eyes, in order to compensate for tunnel vision. In addition, shooting programs can emphasize instinctive shooting techniques that reduce the need to rely on the gun sights when firing at close range.
Combat Fitness is recognized as an integral component of survival and use of force training. The combination of aerobic (cardio/respiratory) and anaerobic (strength) conditioning not only enhances a person's ability to control a subject and survive, but contributes to long term health.
This information is based on a research of case studies from Israel’s leading tactical unit- YAMAM, where the modern Kapap combat system was developed. While examining the most common techniques and the most common types of resistance encountered, our mission was to find the best suitable combat system based on limited budget, time spent on training and complexity of the training program. Addressing these goals for both the civilian and law enforcement community, it was also vitally important that our program be defensible in court in the post conflict stage if need be.
The training must be based on research and focus on examining performance under stress.
Kapap practitioners discovered that when one’s fine and complex motor skills are being trained constantly in a specific way, they immediately affect the performance of the gross motor skills that are used naturally by our body in a combat (stressful) situation, thus enhancing the overall performance and ability to overcome any threat situation with an increased probability of survival.
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