The Martial Umbrella

“Martial Arts focus on the pursuit of skill, discipline, and personal development through a structured, often ranked system of movement, tradition, and philosophy. These are commonly centered around aesthetic and sometimes fantastical practice of grappling, striking, weapons, and psychology derived from ancient military practices and warfare. Combat Sports emphasize using a fighting style or multiple for symmetrical violence in agreed upon competition under controlled rules to win points, titles, trophies, and seek victory overall. It’s often sought as a form of proving and showcased as entertainment, prioritizing athletic performance and safety rather than survival and realism. Self Protection centers on modern proactive tactics requiring the taking and keeping of situational initiative, primarily using awareness, mindset, posturing, de-escalation and preemption to avoid and stop real world threats. Functionally, beginning long before physical violence and ending with disengagement or escape. Self Defense focuses on being reactive requiring the counter-offensive element to function. Excelling against unavoidable spontaneous assaults or ambushes with immediate, practical, and proportionate threat response or ‘use of force’ against violence attempting to flip the makeup of the attack especially from a position of disparity. Combatives, in contrast, strip away ritual, sport, and aesthetic based limitations to emphasize purely functional, efficient, adaptable, and often brutal tactics and skills for neutralizing subjects who seek extreme violence under equal or greater pressure using unarmed or preferably armed force for survival when used justifiably. This pairs especially well with meaningful psychological preparation and its utility is best fueled by righteous indignation causing the situational makeup to be asymmetrical in nature in favor of the user. Together, they form a Martial Umbrella covering character development and artistic expression, athletic performance and sport competition, proactive and reactive threat response, psychology and extreme survival methods. Each respecting execution of similar principles and very valuable in their own context when properly understood, trained, and utilized.

There are many fusion schools and styles that blend these elements. Knowing where your desires or needs sit under the umbrella is crucial when choosing an academy for your martial journey. Each one of these branches can be found fun, therapeutic, or used for first and third party protection or in “combat”, but some obviously massively excel over others for certain situations, professions, and lifestyles. They each also have their own methods of pressure testing which should be focused on for best training results. Much like any specific endeavor, optimal performance and preparedness is found when training accurately simulates the event that one is seeking to be prepared for as much as possible without compromising too much safety. One of the biggest common factors, paramount for success in any combat situation is fitness. Always be ready to move explosively and prime yourself to live long with the mental benefits from exercise as well. Visible physical discipline and what it does for posture, mindset, and confidence is also one of the oldest forms of “target hardening” and this alone will make you much less likely to be picked by an unfortunate individual. My teaching optimizes early prevention and understanding everyone’s inherent rights to self protection. Training at my academy offers a very unique well rounded approach.

Here at GCA, we focus on the overall pursuit and character development from Martial Arts, the athletic performance and challenge facing attitude from Combat Sports, the proactive strategies and confident mindset from Self Protection, the reactive response training and dramatic recoveries from Self Defense, and the proven extreme situation survival methods and modern psychology from Combatives. We do all this from our well controlled environment, using pressure testing methods including realistic simulation training to keep skills functional and humility optimal. For more clarification, we do not offer sport competition in the typical sense. What we instill in students will prepare them to thrive in a world that is sometimes very unfriendly.”

- Zane Forrest