Martial arts instructors teach some pretty brutal moves.

Some show the moves without providing much context. “This is the person’s attack. This is your defense. Practice it,” they say.

But self-defense is much more nuanced than that. Luckily for me, I train under instructors who challenge my assumptions about what I would do in a certain scenario by asking me about physical characteristics, location, time of day, and other pieces of data that are not mentioned in the basic scenario. 

Lawrence Kane and Kris Wilder’s latest book, Dirty Ground: The Tricky Space Between Sport and Combat, addresses the details of a self-defense situation. More than just how to respond to an attack, they look at the types of applications that can be performed with certain techniques. These are broken down into sport and combat.

In a sport environment, Kane and Wilder take into account the attributes of any sport: pageantry, timelines, scoring, and the ability for competitors to compete again after the match.

“Combat differs in that it is an open and armed conflict with intent to kill the enemy and/or destroy their infrastructure,” the authors write. “Those who (survive) are often never the same again, requiring lengthy rehabilitation for serious physical, or in some cases, mental injuries.”

The third type of application is the drunkle, who represents your “drunk uncle” – somebody you might need to tame when he’s wild, but not somebody you would want to do any serious damage.

The latter half of the book shows Kane and Wilder’s depictions of what they think certain applications would look like. They cover a total of 12 techniques – including osoto gari, hammerlock and ogoshi – and break them down for how you might deal with them in a sport environment, against a drunkle, or in a full-fledged combat scenario.

As safely as they can be practiced in the dojo, this book makes a great training companion as the authors show these techniques step by step.

While some may argue the meat of this book is the applications, I found the “Highly Selective Overview of Combative Arts Throughout History” very informative and well-written. The authors cover some of the classic martial arts (jujitsu, judo) and boxing. They discuss pankration and sambo, arts I’ve heard of but have not studied. As a pro wrestling fan, I was especially surprised to see Kane and Wilder talk about catch wrestling, even mentioning the Stu Hart and his sons Bret “The Hitman” Hart and Owen Hart.

But I digress.

As usual, Kane and Wilder have written an insightful book that deserves a spot on your bookshelf. Do yourself a favor and pick this up today.

Full disclosure: I was given a copy of this book in order to write a review.

Last week during Old Settlers, the annual small-town fair, I saw three of my former martial arts students.

They were some of the first students who started training with Metamora Martial Arts in 2005 when we we began teaching teaching there following a year-long experiment teaching kids in Sunnyland.

The two boys were excited to tell me about how they were starting high school next year. One will try out for the soccer team, and the other is joining the band. His sister will be going into 7th grade, in school for the first time without her brother nearby. She’s nervous about it, but I told her that I’d been through that situation with my older brother.

I happily asked all of them about what they were looking forward to, especially with the boys going into this new phase.

I’d like to think they became friends because of the martial arts, and that, as Kelly Muir helped point out to me today, maybe they had the courage to try new pursuits like soccer and band because of their martial arts training.

I wish for nothing but the best for all of these former students.

If you’re a former student of mine and you happen to run into me somewhere or find me via The Googles, please let me know what you’re up to. I’m always happy knowing where you wound up and where you’re headed.