“The will to win compares little with the will to prepare to win.” Coach Tony Blauer, referencing coach Bear Bryant who is quoted as having said, “It’s not the will to win that matters – everyone has that. It’s the will to prepare to win that matters.”
Similarly, Bobby Knight is quoted as saying, “Most have the will to win, few have the will to prepare to win.”
The message is: You have to train. You can’t expect to be at your best in an ambush without training. But the good news is that you can learn fairly quickly the basics of how to convert your body’s instinctual primal reactions into tactical defense and counter-offense.
Of course, the more you train, the more you myelinize your neural pathways and the more you speed up your reaction time. See my earlier post on speeding up your reaction time.
As just about everything in SPEAR self-defense, I find, that this training principle applies to my every-day life in Patagonia and Montana as much as to traditional self-defense. For example, I won’t stop training my kayaking, including for sudden ambushes like wind or foul weather, just because there’s a little snow in the mountains. You just dress for more protection —a layer of neoprene, a drysuit. Both in Montana and in Patagonia, weather changes rapidly. You prepare.
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