Session 10: Lowering the Center of Gravity

We'll tart with the external one. The reason we start with the external ones generally when we're talking about these as a group, is that the external ones are very easy to observe in a video camera. They're very easy to test clinically. They're very easy to even elicit and in a way that's, that's observable by people participating, or we run a video camera or people that are just observing the scenarios. They're easy to elicit in a scenario training environment or in a simulation environment.

The external natural reactions. The first one is, we lower our center of gravity when we're startled. It's the first thing we talk about. And I say the first one a reason I hesitated was I don't wanna imply that we lower our center of gravity first and then other things happen. It's just the first one we talk about.

Because it's the most obvious it's the most universal. Even if you're seated, you tend to close down at the hip hunched down a little bit and lower that center of gravity. When you're startled, right? You don't go both upright. You don't open the hip and stand up as straight as you can or get up on your trippy toes, right?

You tend to lower down weight on the balls of the feet, knees bent hips closed. When we talk about the natural reactions we look at four components. So we talked about lowering the center of gravity. That's the terminology that we use. I think it's really important to think about how we use words.

Words are incredibly powerful behaviorally not just intellectually. So when we define specific terms, we wanna agree that we're all using the same language, the same vernacular we understand what each other means. It's important to have definitions in some of these areas when we're talking about things. And it's important to articulate things accurately, from an intellectual standpoint. But also I think, especially for those of you who are teachers, for those of you who are gonna be sharing this information with other people, it's important to send the right message behaviorally.

You remember all of these things are survival positives. That's another one of the things that we wanna know. We wanna know what is the survival positive especially in the natural world, right? If we take out the tool, the gun tool if we take out the specific context of a fight in an urban environment or sitting in a couch or whatever we just think about the natural world human beings in a natural environment these things are all survival positives. And it's important that we understand that.

And part of that is also gonna play a role in some of our terminology, right? Reminding people that these aren't negative things that we should be fighting, right? These are positive things that help us. There's a physical thing that happens, right? We wanna know what is the physiology of this natural reaction.

And we also, again, by definition the reason we're talking about it, is because because there is an effect on our training. There's an effect on the way that we choose to train or the gear that we choose to train with. Tactic that we are gonna train to employ. So those are the four categories that we're gonna have for all of our natural reaction. So lowering the center of gravity, the survival positive is that by lowering the center of gravity, we are better prepared to move.

We are also more on balance because we can adjust to pressure from one side or the other. We can be more stable on varying terrain. We're on a stairway, right? If you try to stand up perfectly straight on a stairway, you lose one foot, either comes up off the back or the front you have to lean back and your front foot comes up and it gets caught up and you can't do it, right? You can't stand straight up if your feet are on different levels.

Your both feet can't be both knees can't be locked. both hips can't be open unless you're on perfectly flat ground. So lowering your center of gravity makes you more stable and makes you better able to adjust to pressure if someone's pushing you or grabbing you or if you're trying to exert pressure on someone else and it also prepares you to move. So you've got a really big, strong survival positive in movement, right? Especially in the natural world movement saves humans a lot getting out of the way of the train or the bull or the bear , right?

Or just running away from the guy who's trying to throw a rock at you. Those are big survival positives. Or lowering your center of gravity, prepares you to move. You can't move if you're standing up perfectly straight. Human beings don't move this way.

We have to bend and then either pick up a foot and put it out here or bend and propel ourselves over here and move and start to run. Even if I wanna go straight up, right? If I wanna go straight up other than that, I've gotta bend lower my center of gravity and then jump up. So the physiology is bending at the knees and closing the hip. The effect on our training is really pretty self-explanatory when it comes to the external things that we're gonna talk about.

If we know that the human body lowers its center of gravity in a flight mode, or when we're startled, then we'd be pretty foolish to train to fight in a perfectly upright posture. Because it's incongruent with what the body does naturally. And that means it's not intuitive. It doesn't work well with the body as naturally. We're trying to develop an intuitive learned response that we can use efficiently to defend ourselves.

So we lower our center of gravity in a fight, cool. Let's train whenever we can that's always gonna be the asterisk, right? We try to avoid absolutes whenever we can. Let's train to fight in a lowered center of gravity position, relatively simple one to get started.