In most striking arts, it’s common to position your opponent directly in front of you, establish a measured distance, and prepare for engagement from a stable, standing stance. I often refer to this distance and posture as your fighting measure. It’s the calibrated range from which strikes can be delivered with precision and timing. While critical to study and develop, I’ve come to view this idea more and more as a sport-based concept that assumes conditions rarely guaranteed in a real-world combative situation.
Make no mistake: learning to establish your fighting measures is essential. You must understand range, timing, and angles. You need to develop your structure, footwork, and ability to strike effectively from a stable platform. These are core skills. But when it comes to real-world conflict, especially outside the walls of the academy or the ropes of the ring, this setup doesn’t always align with reality.
Sport vs Street Scenarios
In most sport-based scenarios, you have time. You know who your opponent is. You face them. You square off. You assume your fighting stance and engage from a known range. But real violence is not always so courteous.
In the street, in a crowd, or during an unexpected confrontation, you likely won’t have the luxury of space or time. You won’t have the benefit of being able to adopt your ideal fighting stance. You may not even know the moment is about to turn violent. Often, these situations begin from a casual posture, a neutral shoulder-width stance, the same position you use when ordering food, talking to a colleague, or waiting in line.
There’s also a legal consideration that’s often ignored in sport-focused training. If you ball your fists, square off with someone, and take a fighting stance in a public space like a movie theater lobby, you could be legally viewed as the aggressor. That could result in you being charged with assault, even if you never throw a punch. In many situations, the law requires you to demonstrate that you were responding to a threat, not initiating one. That means posture, intent, and timing matter. You cannot assume your fighting position until the moment is legally and ethically justified.
Another limitation of this sport-based model is that it often conditions you to expect a single opponent in a clear, open space. But real-world violence rarely looks like that. You could be surrounded. You could have a secondary threat standing just out of view to your right or left. The environment could be crowded, confined, or chaotic. You may not have visual clarity on who is involved or what weapons are present.
The Optics of Sports Training
Even the optics of sports training can become a limitation. In the ring, your focus is forward. You track your opponent’s shoulders, their hips, and their lead hand. But in reality, the threat may not come from straight ahead. Predators don’t want a fair fight. They’re looking for an easy win. They want to strike when you’re unaware, distracted, or out of position. Their goal isn’t to test your skills. It’s to take what you have and disappear before anyone knows what happened. A predator may appear calm, cooperative, or even as if they’re working to de-escalate the situation. In reality, they could use that moment to position themselves for a surprise attack.
They often hide behind social norms and expected behavior to lower their guard and gain an advantage. Their goal is not a fair fight. They don’t want resistance. They want to shut you down quickly and easily to ensure they come out on top.
None of this is meant to discredit sport-based training. On the contrary, I believe it is incredibly valuable and something you should be doing on a regular basis. It sharpens timing and sensitivity, hones technique, develops cardio, and teaches pressure management; it helps get you comfortable being uncomfortable. Some of the most skilled fighters I know come from sports backgrounds. If you are training, you should absolutely have sport-based methods as part of your routine.
But you must also understand that sport is a controlled simulation, and it represents only one slice of the combative spectrum. If that’s your only frame of reference, your skillset and your mindset are limited.
True combative readiness comes from understanding the difference between the gym and the street, between the mat and the chaos of the real world. It means training for unpredictability. It means being able to function under legal constraints. It means preparing for multiple attackers, tight spaces, and unclear intentions. And it means being aware that your first “stance” may be something as simple as standing in a line with your hands full.
Expand your training. Sharpen your awareness. Add depth to your skill set. The more complete your perspective, the more capable you become not just as a fighter but as someone who can protect themselves and others when it counts most.
Multi-Opponent Awareness and Tactics
Multi-opponent scenarios are not typically part of sport-based training, which is often focused on one-on-one engagement in a controlled space. This makes it essential for the everyday combative artist to actively seek out this kind of training or develop it on their own.
The reality is that real-world violence is rarely a one-on-one affair. You might be dealing with two or more threats, and they may not announce themselves all at once. One of the core skills we emphasize in the PRT program is the development of 360-degree awareness. And we don’t just talk about it; we train it.
We focus on sharpening your visual awareness and optical processing under stress. That means training your eyes and mind to constantly scan for threats, identify movement from different angles, and avoid tunnel vision on the person directly in front of you. It also means learning to assess your surroundings and use the environment to your advantage.
Walls, doorways, furniture, vehicles, and everything around you can become a tool if you’re trained to see it that way. Whether it’s breaking the line of sight, creating separation, or funneling movement, your environment can be used both defensively and offensively. I’ve touched on this concept in other articles, and it continues to be one of the most undertrained yet vital elements in true combative readiness.
360 Degrees of Destructive Force: Training Beyond the Traditional Fighting Stance
One of the core principles we follow in PRT, and what I want to focus on here, is the concept of 360-degree destructive force. As I mentioned earlier, when discussing the combative measure and the traditional fighting stance, most systems train from a position that assumes the threat is directly in front of you. That fighting stance is designed to send force forward. It’s efficient for sports or one-on-one engagements, but it’s based on a limited set of assumptions.
In real-world violence, those assumptions fall apart quickly.
Violent encounters are rarely clean or predictable. You often won’t know where the threat is coming from. You may not have the space or time to position yourself, and the attacker may not give you the luxury of range. The predatory mind doesn’t want a fair fight. They want to catch you off guard. They want to take what you have before knowing you’re in a fight. And sometimes, what they want to take is your ability to respond, your space, your timing, your options. They want to place you out of position and behind in time. A fair fight is not what they are looking for.
That’s why you must train to generate destructive force in any direction, position, and range.
You should be able to strike and apply force forward, to your right, to your left, and even behind you. This has to be functional whether the opponent is in front of you or standing beside you. You must be able to generate force at striking range, trapping range, and even at grappling or “hugging” range, where the threat is so close you can feel their breath. At this close range, you have to consider that you may not want to use a kicking tool. Standing on one foot in close proximity to potential or realized threats is not the best idea. Although powerful, you are giving up your connection to the ground, which can ultimately place you in a worse position.
Think of a crowded elevator. You might be shoulder to shoulder with strangers. In that moment, if violence erupts, there is no time to assume a fighting stance or find your measure. You must be able to act instantly.
And it’s not just about standing. You need to develop the ability to generate 360-degree force from a variety of positions:
- Standing
- Squatting
- Kneeling
- Sitting
- Laying
- Quarter position
You should be able to explode into action, deliver power, and control your space from any of these positions. This type of training takes thought. It takes repetition. And it takes deliberate practice across different environments. You don’t always get to choose your placement in a violent physical exchange.
Around the World Drill
In PRT, we use a drill we call the Around the World Drill to address this. It’s a positional flow drill that provides a framework for training all of these positions. We begin by exploring them in an open space where you have room to move, strike, and reset. But that’s only the beginning.
True combative readiness means going further. We train these positions and skills in confined environments like against walls, in corners, inside vehicles, at tables, in stairwells, and anywhere you might realistically find yourself during a violent encounter.
Surface Engagement
When you begin to incorporate what we refer to as Surface Engagement, you must start considering the specific mechanics required to generate force against different surfaces like a wall, a chair, or the ground. These mechanics are not the same as the ones you learn and apply when standing in an open space.
Each environment or surface presents its own unique challenges and demands a different approach for creating effective ballistic force. If you haven’t trained those specific mechanics, you’re at a disadvantage. When chaos erupts, and you find yourself in one of these unfamiliar positions, your instinct will be to return to what you know. You’ll default to the mechanics you’ve trained the most.
That hesitation or attempt to reset can cost you valuable time. In a violent encounter, that delay can put you behind the action and give your opponent the upper hand. Recovering from that disadvantage under pressure is not always easy, and sometimes, it’s impossible.
This is why it’s critical to train deliberately for these transitions and surface-based engagements. The more environments you understand, the more adaptable and dangerous you become under pressure.
This knowledge gap is why we build outlines and training models into the PRT program. We don’t rely on guesswork or leave training gaps. We create a structure that ensures our students and instructors train across positions, postures, ranges, and environments so nothing is left to chance. We look for the holes in our application and fill them with functional, principle-based training.
This is what separates preparation from performance.
You must build the habit of thinking and seeing in all directions. You must cultivate the ability to respond from anywhere and deliver force in any direction from a variety of different surfaces because real violence will not wait for your fighting stance, your measure, or your preferred conditions.
Universal Principles
These thought tools come from a broader set of mental frameworks I rely on when I teach, train, or develop programs. This collection is known as the Universal Principles, and it serves as a guide for deeper exploration and self-assessment.
I use these tools to uncover my own knowledge gaps and to help others identify theirs. The truth is, we don’t know what we don’t know. And because of that, the only way to expose our blind spots in knowledge and wisdom is to actively seek them out. We must challenge ourselves, question our assumptions, and stay engaged in the pursuit of understanding.
Complacency is the enemy. The mind wants comfort, but as warriors, we cannot allow it to settle. There is no final destination on this path. There is no arrival point. Growth is continual. Learning is endless. The search for truth must be relentless.
We must also be cautious not to become systematized by a system. That is, we must avoid falling into rigid belief structures that limit our thinking. Systems are tools, not truths. They can serve us, but they can also confine us if we stop questioning them.
Our goal is to study the human machine, to understand how it functions under pressure, how it responds in violent encounters, and how it interacts with other human machines in dynamic and unpredictable environments. This is the foundation of the work. This is the path of the evolving warrior.
