Adrenaline is a hell of a drug.
On the one hand adrenaline makes you stronger, faster, and hugely increases your pain tolerance…
On the other hand it destroys fine motor function, gives you tunnel vision, or even makes your mind go blank.
Adrenaline is a powerful horse to ride, but you need to control it so it takes you where you want to go!https://t.co/9ywxoUuuts
— StephanKesting (@StephanKesting) June 30, 2018
But in a real life situation you can’t just go into full berserker mode!
Tunnel vision will get you killed.
You need enough environmental awareness to scan your surroundings for additional opponents and monitor your opponent’s hands for weapons…
Unlike how we train in most martial arts classes, a fight on the street is unbelievably variable.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. No one strategy or tactic to rule them all.
Instead you to assess the situation and figure out whether you should fight, run, get in your car, scream, call 911, stay silent, escalate the fight with a weapon, or try to de-escalate it with verbal tactics and body language.
In other words, you need to keep on thinking, which can be very difficult to do when there are massive amounts of adrenaline clouding your mind!
So what exactly can you do to deal with all of that mind-killing fear and adrenaline?
Some of the steps include
- Familiarising yourself with the physical and psychological effects of an adrenaline dump…
- Reframing those effects and realising that they are signs your body is getting ready to fight…
- Having a high level of cardio so that you can still perform effectively even if your heart is racing…
- Gradually inoculating yourself to using your combative skills in stressful situations (any form of martial arts competition is good for this)…
- Using visualisation and meditation so that you feel more at home in the chaos of a real fight.
I recently had a great conversation about these exact topics with Shane Fazen. Shane has fought Muay Thai in Thailand, competed in boxing, and has even challenged himself in some MMA smokers.
We go into detail about many of the exact steps I mentioned above.
You can listen to my talk with Shane in the video below, or in podcast form (scroll down below the video for those links)…
Managing Fear and Adrenaline in Podcast Form
You can also listen to this as Episode 152 of my podcast, The Strenuous Life, available on iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud or Google Play.
Or you can listen to it in the embedded player below:
Thanks for reading, watching and listening!
Stephan
Find out more about Shane Fazen at http://fighttips.com or on his youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/fighttips