05.11.2023
Day two of my extended ve
rsion of “When Parents Aren’t Around” seminar for Hostlebro Taekwondo, Denmark was covered by a Danish news programme on TVMV.
We began with the same warm-up and scenario training from the previous day. We layered commentary walking with tactical escapes and various other tasks. This time the controlled breathing provided an opportunity for some focusing exercises before we moved onto the soft skills side of matters again.Picking up from yesterday, I taught the basics on situational awareness. We discussed the elements that made up this type of thinking and training, providing examples on context. I also introduced the concept of a qualifying a confirmed immediate threat.
We then trained another Predator versus Prey game but this time we a greater emphasis on recruiting adult bystanders. This was followed by our usual debrief and discussion on what worked and what didn’t. The pre-fight soft skills had improved.
The next stage of the seminar was to introduce the concept of boundary setting. We white-boarded the “Circle of Trust” to explain the concept of trustworthiness and how boundaries might be breached and re-set as a consequence.
This moved us onto personal space and a practical activity. Students trained responding to confirmed immediate threats breaching their personal space boundaries. We trained striking responses and the importance of repetitive strikes. This was then pressure-tested and put onto the focus mitts. Next, along with a reading from the book, we covered building the fence. Here students were shown a way to better measure whether an individual intended to be physical as well as maintaining one’s personal space. The pre-emptive striking was then tagged on. I then introduced the longer range fence, emphasising the importance of attacking whatever breached the fence-line rather than just aiming for the head. Children typically will need to strike at incoming hands. We looked at power parries, bites and stamps. All of these tactics were combined with tactical escaping.
The last hour of the seminar focused on the cover (regaining the initiative), transitioning through postures (standing, kneeling, seated and on the back), multiple attackers and anti-grappling exercises. These were all scaled up in intensity.
We finished with a discussion on the post-incident – maintaining awareness, secondary threats, first aid, reporting an incident and dealing with post-incident trauma – and working with parents to create effective self-protection habits.
Watch the news broadcast here.