Police Training Prep for Violence – Jocko Willink

one of the best ways a police officer can condition themselves to violence and confrontation I currently train jiu-jitsu but I’m not cute I am but I am curious what else I can do to keep myself and others safe from unpredictable violence this is not a self-defense question or either a mental conditioning question very cool question I appreciate that question because this individual recognizes that there’s a little bit more to it than just the physical self-defense and that’s the mental and he’s 100% right so here’s some things that you can do when you get the opportunity you got to get some realistic training going and I’ve talked about a little bit on here with a kind of realistic training that we did in the SEAL Teams there’s things that up the intensity greatly simunition or like a paintball scenario another good thing is getting a you know really heavy sparring equipment on so face gear you know and really go to town when you’re trying to attack someone and take them down and do it you know three on one four on one got to be careful not to get hurt you don’t want go that extreme but if someone puts on head gear you know with a face mask and the whole nine yards shin guards and padded outfit on and people can attack them and you have to react to it the other good thing to do is do it in a situation where you know you don’t let the guy know what’s going to happen you know he’s got to keep his eyes closed until you say go when he opens his eyes there’s someone there with a knife right in front of feint knife right in front of them is gonna stab and he’s got a draws weapon and shoot or defend himself somehow so you want to hit him with these unexpected drills with your weapons without your weapons shooting and moving so those are those the kind of things as soon as you get the opportunity to do it and it’s even good I mean if you’ve been in a in a in a Oh in a shooting drill with like a barricaded shooter which is you know you put a shooter at the end of the hallway and he’s hidden but he’s shooting at you with paintball and you get you can get the intensity up very high it’s the getting shot with paintball hurts and if you’re getting nailed and you’ve got to do something and people are like I gotta make a call go do something you got to make it happen how you gonna stop this guy you can get your intensity up and you can get used to that you can inoculate yourself somewhat to that stress and learn to detach yourself from it and not let it affect you and not let it grind on you so that’s the realistic training and and honestly I when I watch some of the police videos of the bad shootings now we know police officers throughout the country every day are under a burden of hostility and they do an outstanding job over and over again making great arrests and helping people and saving people that are suicidal incredible amount of things right of course no one releases those videos and they don’t go viral the videos that go viral and the videos that people watch are the the bad ones the bad ones and I hope that the police departments across America are doing something to inoculate their troopers from the stress cuz that when I watch these videos that is what I see happening the the stress level and the the inexperience of the stressful situation and there’s one video that I watched which was awful and the guy gets a call you see is you see his the first thing you see oh no it the whole thing is a body camera and forgive me if someone pulls this video up and I’m not 100% accurate but he gets a call it’s at a 7-eleven guy with a gun guy pulls into a 7-eleven the cop pulls into the 7-eleven as he gets out of his car and he sees a guy kind of walk in one direction out of the 7-eleven and turn and walk another direction guys got a hoodie on he’s walking away so the cop gets out he’s yelling at him hey stop stop stop that guy doesn’t stop finally he’s now approaching him and he’s standing in the open and this is something that I see in a lot of these videos these cops they stand in the open when if you imagine that the other guy has a gun why would you stand in the open take cover hmm you take cover that’s the first thing you do if you’re even if you’re trying to stop somebody or trying to yell at someone you take cover so if they turn around to have a gun you only have a small portion your body exposed and you don’t get scared because you’re hanging out in the open yeah so so anyways this guy is approaching he’s standing out in the open he’s yelling at the guy finally the guy turns around and when the guy turns around he reaches in his jacket and boom the cop shoots him the guy falls down he kind of rolls into a curb the cop comes over as soon as the cop comes over you very quickly realize what’s going on and that is that the guy had headphones on underneath his hoodie and he couldn’t hear the cop yelling at him and then as the cop searches him he pulls out of his pocket his iPhone and so he was just listening to music reaching his pocket to turn it or turn it off and he got shot horrible situation so how do you inoculate yourself to that you’ve got to put yourself into training situations where you do have the instinct to take cover well you do have the instinct to see what people’s hands are we do have the instinct to realize that you put yourself in a better situation where if the guy does pull out a gun you have time to react to it and you can react to it from a safer distance you know as a so there’s a lot of things I would love to start to and I don’t know how you know I I don’t know how I’m I don’t know how to go about this but I would love to start working with police departments in some manner to get some training set up like the training we had in the SEAL Teams which was the training that I set up in the SEAL Teams was psychotic how stressful we would make it so that these guys were overwhelmed they were as explosions machine-gun fire paintballs hitting them a smoke everywhere screaming civilians screaming wounded actors we’d hire actors that were amputees they’d have blood spurting all this it was incredibly realistic and that way when guys got into combat like one the first time I ever got shot I was like okay here’s what’s going on so I hope at some point I can I can help the military with that now in addition to that as you’re trying to knock yourself you’re to this violence and get used to this watch those YouTube videos watch those YouTube videos of street fights of stupid encounters with with bars with drunk people and bouncers with the shoot or don’t shoot scenarios with cops military situations where they have helmet cams on and you can see things happening and what you want to do is you want to watch those videos and you want to pay attention to the people to the humans and watch the reactions and watch their movements and watch their body language and watch their expressions on their faces and see and judge and predict and go to another video and hit pause and say this is what I see right here this is what I think is about to happen and educate yourself on human nature yeah because human nature is what you’re going to be dealing with and violence is a part of human nature and sometimes things go violent and sometimes they don’t so how do you predict that and if you’re unsure which you will be how do you protect yourself first and give yourself the maximum amount of time to make a judgment call so you don’t have to rush on top of that it’s awesome that you’re doing jiu-jitsu do boxing do MoIT I do wrestling so you get used to getting hit so you start to see what a person’s face looks like when they’re about to hit you so you start to see what changes in there there’s their posture makes when they’re about to throw a punch those are all things that will help you jiu-jitsu is obviously great for the grinding physical grappling situation but a lot of times hopefully as a cop most the time you’re not in that situation you’re standing at a little bit of a distance and or you’re you know you’ve got a little bit more time to judge so fight as much as you can watch those law enforcement of military videos again see the reaction see the noise see the fear see the panic look at people’s eyes judge them predict what they’re going to do press pause and figure out if you were right or wrong watch horrible violence happen so that you can understand it better so that you can handle it when the time arises yeah oh and um and just kind of to add on some of the stuff you’re saying I would even say compete if you can because a lot of times in training you can especially if you’re training every day or pretty often you can get into the mindset that I can just train casual today and if a guy taps me out which everyone says it doesn’t matter that much you know so when you compete that’s that’s one of the significant things that I got bored that I realized when I was competing it’s your your your senses are heightened because everything matters if you get taken down it matters if you go for a submission and you don’t get it it matters in in competition so you have that that mindset more so and you’ll get used to that mindset and to your point I tell this guys at jujitsu when you’re training for competition no matter what we do just about no matter 98% of the time I can’t get two guys in training to go as hard against each other as they’re going to in competition as someone when someone gets a grip of your gear in competition yeah it is ten times stronger than it is when you’re training because if you rip if I get to grab your geek collar and you go through some effort to rip it away and we’re training I’m gonna let it go right because I don’t care yeah if it happens in competition and I only have seven minutes to work and get you submitted am i hanging on to that thing hang on to it harm ya and I’m not gonna let go and so you end up with a much much much more intense seven minutes in a competition or three minutes in a boxing sparring match or in a more tie the intensity you cannot simulate the intensity income in training that you’re going to get in competition and take that one step further when you get into a life-and-death struggle you’re going to have the same level of jump as you the intensity that’s going to be there so that’s a good point as well yeah and that kind of goes from my eyes well I’m not even that certainly saying compete in Muay Thai but we ties a good one because right you get cracked in your body and your legs and you get to feel some pain and if you’re not used to that okay before I even started Muay Thai I went in remember Terry and so could you he was like hey you know we we’ve trained jiu-jitsu together soon as I can I’m training MMA today come let’s spar with me my other partner doing and I was like hey I don’t have any striking 3-cycle I don’t care you know Jiu Jitsu so destroyers means occur yeah so Brad he punched me in the face really hard and that was you know and I was like man just how you’re talking about this crash grenades before it was kind of like that just the fact that I got my to knock me out it didn’t dazed me in that way it was just the fact that dang I wasn’t used to this I didn’t know he was just gonna start punching me in my face you know I thought we were just gonna warm up so that’s actually the main thing that made me go into my type specifically so so who’s to get cracked yeah cuz I was like bad I’m not even I thought I was pretty good at Jiu Jitsu so I figured you know like I was solid you know but breaths so what if I get into something you know outside of the gym I got cracks me in my face and I’m not usually yeah you know so then so I the what the myth I did help is when you get hit in the face it’s like Jiu Jitsu someone grinding on you and they’re breathing all in your nose or they’re sweating all in your eye or whatever that doesn’t bother you at all you barely notice your knees or it doesn’t matter right so the same thing with my tie when you get punched in the nose and it’s bleeding and you see your own blood or whatever but if you’re not you still you that’ll mess you yeah and if you notice back in the day like their old UFC’s or whatever guys will get cracked in the face like three four times hard and no tap holy cow you know because they’re just not used to it nowadays guys were just but they won’t they won’t done yeah the referee got a start on is they’re used to it rarely does anyone tap in the UFC from strikes yeah everywhere unless they’re like injured even though you won’t primary McDonald did no yeah so anyway so the point is so a Muay Thai situation in specific because that’s where you feel the most pain like more than boxing like even even I mean you’ll take brain injury for sure but it’s not actual pain wait I get kicked in the leg they teach you to hide the pain and to not let it affect you and go in the end and the ribs like body like means to the ribs this is super painful when you get used to that I think that would help yeah it’s like if you’re in a situation sweet some cracks you hard about this you know what’s interesting about that though is that there are some people that can can easily or more easily take the pain of more time or boxing like it’s okay with them then then they then they can take the grind of jujitsu and some people can take the grind of jujitsu all day long but they can never take the striking pain so it’s there’s just some genetic or mental situations but to your point you need to be comfortable with both those situations yeah and at the very least just familiar with it Oh like I said that’s first punch that I took in my face and granted it was I wasn’t ready for him to just wail I mean I definitely won football – yeah I mean so you’ve been hit you’ve been knocked out before on the field right so it’s it’s kind of it if I were to try to remember it was a combination of sure that physical impact but just the fact that this guy just punched me in my face right now so it’s almost a thing to just punch me in my face right now but we’re gonna yeah like that but yeah after a while it doesn’t man the hardest I ever got punched in the face was from Greg right in the like right between my eyes and it was like happenstance he threw a real solid one as I went to kind of shoot who’s kind of coming up off his knees kind of and I went to shoot like I got I got from off my back and then forward and shot forward and he did went boom and the the the force of me shooting forward and went boom and I felt it in my neck is really bad but it was in a hard part yeah lucky the legend Kayode but yeah fully that was a KO punch she just happened to be in that really hard part um but I been through that before I trained Muay Thai before and it didn’t it didn’t even slow me down I remember thinking that was probably the hardest punch I ever took and it was with an MMA glove it wasn’t the big boxing glove well yeah back in the old days we used to just spark all full-on with MMA gloves on a regular basis yes stupid yeah and but don’t do that folks yeah yeah don’t do that that’s a whole day but what I’m saying is that that you were used to it good again I was used to it it didn’t slow me down if that was like a situation where I took that kind of hard hit in a you know or a cop would take that kind of hard hit and they’re used to that in training or whatever that’s not gonna slow him down that’s not gonna stun him unless it’s physically stuns us like get some other jobs yeah and that’s you know even if you’re trained that that’s not that’s gonna that’s gonna join in fact if you train too much and you get yourself hit too often you’ll actually decrease your ability to withstand punishments yeah careful about that yes you want to Train enough that you’re used to it you want to know that you can take it but then you don’t want to over train at all yeah you never get better at taking well nobody phrase that you get better at taking punches for a short period of time and then it goes starts to go backwards yeah you know unfortunately that’s just the way the body’s built you can see as some of the older UFC fighters get older you know there’s no doubt they don’t have the chin that they once had and that’s when they usually you know decide to hang it up if they you know if they get the right counsel from people but nowadays people are sparring a lot less and they’re trying to not take all that punishment because everyone realizes that you have a you have a limited number of hits you can take to the to the head and then it starts to go backwards and it’s just you know a lot of this information is coming from the soldiers overseas the Marines overseas that have taken concussions and Eydie strikes and they’re realizing that that is a permanent you know downgrade of their systems and they they you know so they so they that’s where a lot of this information came from about football this concussion stuff with football a lot of that is coming from the IEDs that our soldiers and Marines have taken overseas and they’ve realized that this traumatic trauma traumatic brain injury is problematic and so we need to we need to watch out for it so yeah specially if you’re being a company you got to be alert yeah yeah but that’s why I and that’s why I like the Muay Thai that’s why I personally I did yeah because it was a lot of like clinching knees in those if you were if if you’ve never done it you would think that being punched in the nose square in the nose real hard would be probably one of the more painful things but it wasn’t compared to the ribs and the legs man so if you’re kind of used to just taking impacts in pain yeah you just you just and not to mention the physical part but just mentally like when that one that comes about you can just just keep on keeping on now yeah because you used to it regularly familiar yeah inoculate inoculate yourself not kill eesh