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05/01/2014: "How quickly can you learn this stuff?"

It's generally accepted that you need to train in a discipline (not just martial arts) for 10,000 hours before you have truly mastered it.

Think a bad guy is gonna wait for that long? Nuh-uh. So... just how quickly can you assimilate the defenses we teach?

As noted in one of our FAQs:
The curriculum at the basic level is based on fairly simple, straightforward responses to common attacks - responses which are easily learned and quickly assimilated into your muscle memory. Even the more advanced responses are fairly straightforward, because your goal is to get free of your attacker and leave, not to get involved in a complicated, time-consuming actions which will give him openings to respond and his friends time to arrive and help him.

In April-May 2014, one of our instructors is teaching a six-week, 12-session self defense course at the fitness center of a local government facility. Seven one-hour classes had so far been held, with the sixth having been a review session of the first five classes. Each class is designed to overlap some defenses with the previous class, then introduce new ones - sometimes related, sometimes not.

One of the male students is is probably about 6' 6" tall. One of the female students is about a foot shorter, and very slightly built. While practicing a gun defense in the eighth class, she realized that what had initially been shown as a defense either didn't quite work for her, or she ended up in a different relation to his attack (after having gotten out of the line of fire). She used a body mechanic she had seen in a previous class - for one attack, and in a completely different context. And it worked.

Legos. We've blogged about them a number of times - do a search in the archives here. How quickly can you learn this stuff? Basically as quickly as you can learn a Lego and then recognize where it fits.

Even if you have no prior experience and have had only a handful of classes.