An interview with the Creator of Instinctive Response Assault Defense:

Could you tell me a little about the difference between IRAD and other Womens Self Defense courses? You mean aside from the fact that this course works and the other courses dont.

That's a pretty strong statement. Do you really believe that all of the programs being taught today are ineffective? They are ineffective. Its not my opinion its a fact. Unless they repeal the laws of physics the typical punch/kick programs are hopelessly ineffective.

How so? Well for a woman who has taken a self defense course few hours a couple of years ago would be up against in an actual attack. First she would have to see the attack coming which we know is a statistical rarity. If she were so fortunate, she would have to avoid the attack. Defense is unquestionably the most difficult aspect of self defense. First the defender would have literally have a fraction of a second to decide if it were a straight punch, hook, upper cut or a knee or an overhand, left or right handed, a kick, a elbow or a head butt. Surprise fighters times on All of this in a fraction of Under duress in poor lighting and caught by What are the odds of that? Keep in mind that Muhammad Ali was probably one of the greatest defensive of all time yet he was hit at least 1 out of 10 a good day and that was under the best of circumstances. In an assault situation being hit once is one time too many when your attacker is two to three times your body weight.

Most courses concentrate on the offensive skills. Couldn't a defender strike the attacker and disable him? Unfortunately things go from bad to worse. Earlier I said that the ineffectiveness of self defense courses was not an opinion but a fact. This area will prove me out. Lets assume that our defender was able to avoid the initial attack and respond with an offensive technique. What technique would she respond with? Lets further assume that she was taught 10 offensive techniques. An attacker could easily attack in a thousand different ways. Self defense courses teach, on average, ten techniques. Now lets keep in mind that it would be almost impossible to learn, let alone master these ten techniques in a few hours. If you could, what

would be the odds of remembering them a couple years later during a life and death situation? If you did remember everything you were taught your entire arsenal would represent 1/10 of 1% of the easily thousand different types and variations of attacks that you would have to defend against. If you could overcome all this and actually strike your attacker with the proper technique for the circumstances lets look at the physics of the strike. If a l00 pound woman strikes a 200 pound attacker with 80% of her body weight or 80 pounds of force, that amounts to a strike equaling only 40% of the attackers body weight. The effect on the attacker would be essentially non-existent. If we used the same formula to compute the percentage of the force the attacker would strike the defender with, it would be 160 pounds of force or 160% of the defenders body weight. The effect of just one blow would be devastating, possibly fatal.

I never looked at it that way. How does I.R.A.D. Handle these problems? A zebra, who has the ability to escape and survive a lion attack five out of six times, would never turn around and attempt to fight it out with the lion. At IRAD we teach our students to react immediately and instinctively. To survive not to fight head to head. To attempt to fight someone who has all the advantages on his side is suicidal.

Could you tell us about some of the specific concepts behind Instinctive Response? Instinctive Response is a totally new concept in self defense. As far removed from the way traditional womens self defense courses have been taught as any two methods could possibly be. The program is based on teaching the participants the value and effectiveness of their own instinctive responses to assault. We are all born with an innate ability to survive in life or death situations. This ability has been programmed into each of us at birth. As a species we have been on this earth for approximately five hundred million years yet we only began using crude tools fifty million years ago. I thinks its safe to assume that during the first four hundred and fifty million years we were the prey and not the predator, yet we survived. This course teaches students to understand the predator/prey relationship. During an assault the victim is the prey and can and should act accordingly.

I would think that if I had a choice to be the predator or the prey I would chose the predator. Wouldnt you? That would be a classic mistake.

How so? Have you ever seen a herd of lions or tigers? Have you ever seen lions and tigers covering an entire African plain, stretching as far as the eye can see? No you havnt but you have seen herds of zebras and wildebeest. The fact of the matter is that predators are successful in the hunt only l out of 6 times under the best of circumstances. The odds of survival are strongly in favor of the prey species. If they werent the predators would eradicate the prey species and then with no food source they would become extinct as well. Mother nature in her infinite wisdom has provided for the survival of the prey species.

I never thought of it that way but arent we far removed from the animal kingdom? No, not at all. Attackers DO follow certain patterns in all forms of assault and we can and do exploit that fact in this pattern. A case predators behave computer program in point of just how closely human like their animal counterparts. There is a used by the FBI Behavioral Science Division, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Scotland Yard to name a few. This program is called ORION and it takes seemingly random pattern of serial killers and compares the location pattern of the attacks to the hunting pattern of the lions of the Serengeti. The program can pinpoint the attackers home or place of employment, whatever location he uses as his home base, with amazing accuracy. Apparently serial killers (predators) follow the same hunting patterns as their animal counterparts do.

What can someone who takes the course expect to come away with? The ability to survive plain and simple. As I said earlier predators are successful only 1 out of 6 times which obviously means that the prey (defender) successfully escapes 5 out of 6 times. For the human prey the success rate would be substantially higher due to the fact that human predators are far more likely to abandon the attack due to numerous factors that their animal counterparts dont have to deal with. Animal predators must attack to feed and survive. A human attacker does not have anything to gain by continuing an attack that is not going his way. He is much more likely to simply call off the attack and run away. He realizes that if an attack is delayed or extended to an unreasonable amount of time that the odds of someone coming to the assistance of the defender increases greatly as does the chances of his arrest. People dont get attacked in the lobby of the local police station do they? IRAD students learn to easily stop or stall an attack indefinitely with minimal effort. Nothing has to be learned so accordingly nothing has to be remembered. We will show students how to bypass the slow, cumbersome conscience thought process and react from the sub-conscience. In other words. INSTINCTIVELY. The physical survival responses to attack are effective and universal but are almost always misinterpreted. We show the student what they WILL DO when attacked and just how effective these responses are. The conscience mind will turn the self defense (survival) duties over to the sub-conscience where they belong. Just like when you learn to drive. It is slow, jerky and difficult at first, but once the conscience mind realizes that the sub conscience can better handle the multitude of duties

that driving requires it will quickly turn these duties over as well. Imagine spending a lifetime driving the way you did the first few weeks after you learned. You would surely have killed yourself by now. Once the sub-conscience takes over you drive smoothly and confidently. When someone pulls out in front of you even though you never practiced and are caught completely by surprise you stop or swerve and survive. It all happens without slow conscience thought. You usually react so quickly that you dont even know what you have done until after you have done it. NO practice, No thought, just instantaneous effective action. Thats how IRAD students can expect to react to a self defense situation.

The Creator of this Revolutionary New Concept in Womans Self Defense is Bob Jones, an instructor and adviser at Hamilton Martial Arts with over 42 years of Martial Arts experience.