Basic self-defense should be taught like first aid.

You can't teach boxing in a day. You can't teach jiu-jitsu in a day. You can't teach Krav Maga in a day, or taekwondo, or aikido, or kung fu. You get the point.

But you can learn to Be Your Own Bodyguard®.

Protecting yourself has always been a problem for regular people. When I was twenty, I decided I wanted to make the world safer, and I knew you were never going to get all these different demographics to train three times a week for years. They still need to be safe, because of their job, or because they don't want to be the victim of violence.

So in 1988 we launched Be Your Own Bodyguard®. It covers the startle-flinch and where it comes from, why physiology overrides physicality, how to use primal gross motor movements, how to improve situational awareness, which verbal de-escalation strategies actually work, how to use non-violent postures to calm an escalating situation, and how to protect yourself using the most natural, instinctive movement possible.

It's built on psychology, neurobiology, and kinesiology. If you're a human, you can learn this system.

In 1987, I designed an experiment that guaranteed my failure.

My student Warren, a very skilled boxer, wore 16oz gloves. I wore only a mouthguard. The rule was simple: he could hit me whenever he wanted.

For an hour, I got my face punched in.

I found out that proximity was everything. A further disturbing reality was that if you were talking, you could not access your fighting skills the way you did in the ring.

A horrifying thought hit me: How are people supposed to do this in a real fight?

I realized something deeply irresponsible was happening in the martial arts world. We, as instructors, were telling people, "Just do this," when "this" didn't even work under pressure.

Because of fear and how ineffective my tactical toolbox was, my body's survival system bypassed my thinking brain. A primal instinct took over. I flinched.

There is nothing faster than the flinch. In that moment, I was immediately safer. I was getting hit less.

That's when the question changed. I stopped asking which technique to use, and started asking a different one: what does your body want to do prior to any training? Does that have a protective or tactical application? If so, why aren't we using it?

Everything we teach came out of that question. And the thing it points to is already hardwired in you.

The science underneath it

At its core, the SPEAR System® is built around the central nervous system. We reverse-engineered it by dissecting real violence and interviewing real victims and real victors.

Sudden violence triggers your survival system's crossed extensor reflex. It's non-conscious, which means it bypasses your thinking brain.

That's fantastic news, and it's confusing to people who want to believe in muscle memory. If muscle memory were a thing, we would see a lot more John Wick, Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris and Jackie Chan footage coming out of real violent encounters. The truth is we don't see any.

Back to the sudden attack.

In that moment it's near impossible to access complex motor skills, which is why people flinch. That isn't my opinion. It's neuroscience.

Executive function gets hijacked through what's called an amygdala hijack. Your cognitive brain is bypassed and your body deploys the crossed extensor reflex.

There is nothing faster than the flinch.

So we stopped fighting it.

You're going to flinch whether you like it or not. It's already hardwired in you, and you don't even need to know how to use it. What I'm going to teach you is how to convert it — how to turn that flinch into what we lovingly refer to as a biological airbag.

The mind navigates the body.

If you're a human, you can learn this.

Everybody flinches. The black belt, the highly skilled firearms expert, the person who has never taken a class in their life — if it's a true surprise, the response is the same, because the wiring is the same.

That's why one system can serve everybody.

It's why we train Tier One military operators, SWAT teams, police, EMS, fire and rescue, and everyone else in public safety.

It's why we work with doctors, nurses, hospital staff, and care providers in the "do no harm" world through SPEAR Care®, our trauma-informed version of the SPEAR System® research.

And it's why we've been brought in for corporate personnel, entrepreneurs, moms, dads, and teenagers. You name it, we've taught them.

Every one of us is united by physiology, kinesiology, and psychology. And none of us wants to be the target of a surprise attack.

(Professional instructors are part of this too. Hundreds of affiliates around the world have brought this research into their schools, because complex motor skills are real and the missing link is still knowing what happens when the fear spike hits and the startle-flinch overrides the toolbox.)

The second discovery, and I found it by accident

Through the eighties I kept noticing that the people who performed under pressure were not the most skilled ones. They were the ones who managed their fear.

Then I started hearing the identical thing from people who had never trained a day in their lives, describing what had happened to them. The ones who could manage their fear could still function.

Nobody was teaching that. In all my years of training, not one person taught me how to think about fear or what to do with it. It was missing then and it's still missing today. For the most part, our parents, our teachers and our coaches don't have a clue how to teach anyone to think about or manage fear.

So I built it. That's Know Fear®.

Fear wasn't the problem. Fear was the solution. What hurts people is mismanaged fear, and once someone understands that, they stop trying to feel nothing and start learning to do things scared.

The Cycle of Behavior® is how we teach it. It's a virtual script map for the mind: it shows you where the danger is, what direction you need to move in, and what questions you need to ask to get out of the fear loop, onto the duress path, and into a flow state. Detect, defuse, defend — in that order.

This part has nothing to do with fighting. It's what you do with the moment your stomach drops, and that moment shows up at work and at home too.

And then we tested it

We had to find out whether any of this held up under real pressure.

That's why I created HIGH GEAR®. It's impact-reduction equipment that lets people move at close to full speed and real emotional intensity, so training reveals what actually shows up under fear instead of what looks clean in a drill. We pressure test not to make training look good, but to find out what a person can genuinely access when the moment is sudden, close, and ugly.

That's where the research came from. Decades of watching real people under real duress, on the road more than 200 days a year.

The record

Since 1977, we've taught over half a million people. Thousands of defensive tactics and combatives instructors, and thousands of martial artists, have been certified to teach our program.

We've worked with multiple governments to enhance the training of their protectors.

We are the only system in the world vetted on three different continents by independent physicians who have no professional relationship with us. They're not on our board of directors.

The SPEAR System® covers pre-fight, in-fight, and post-fight. It's court-defensible and already embedded in police policy in agencies around the world. We're certified in multiple states and hold certifications with governing bodies internationally. SPEAR Care® has been adopted by many organizations in the trauma-informed community.

Here's one example. Dorset Police adopted our system, and across an independent five-year study they recorded a 41% reduction in head trauma and a 29% reduction in use-of-force complaints. Could you imagine if you knew you were getting into a violent encounter and you could train for a day and reduce head trauma by over 40%? (The official report is available to government agencies only.)

The people who run toward the danger trust this program.

Where to start

If you want to be safer sooner, if you'd like to improve your self-defense IQ, if you want to know that you could protect yourself, your family, or your team, or if your job requires you to put yourself in harm's way, we can help you enhance your survivability (even if it's by 1%).

We have a program for you and we'll meet you where you are, whether that's a complete beginner or a black belt, a social worker or a Tier One operator.

Now do your research. Look through the site. It's quite robust, and we've done our best to organize it so it's easy to get around. We've even built AI in the background so you can ask for directions, and if you want to speak to a human, we can set that up too.

Stay safe.

Coach Tony BlauerFounder, SPEAR System® and Know Fear® · Creator of HIGH GEAR®