Acceleration - Move it or Lose it

I cannot emphasise enough the importance of acceleration in defence against multiple attackers. Whenever I refer to ‘acceleration’ I am talking about the acceleration of your entire system, to generate something called the mass effect. Acceleration is at the core of every concept that makes up the Energy World – a framework designed to give people advanced skills in dealing with multiple attackers.

Acceleration, in combination with other skills provides you with a whole lot of advantages:

It wrecks your opponent’s ability to measure your trajectory and it dismantles their timing of your actions. Acceleration enables you to get to the source of an opponent’s attack before they expect you would be able to, and this helps prevent them from being able to use their weaponry on you.

Acceleration helps prevent attackers from grabbing you and taking you to ground. When your progression is slowed then this allows more than one attacker to get to you at the one time. Just as you don’t want an attacker to grab you, neither do you want to grab an attacker as it has the same negative result on your acceleration.

When you slow down, you are more vulnerable to the group because group members can track you and measure you more easily. They can also grab you or tackle you or strike you more easily. Acceleration is a key part of your safety in defence against multiple attackers. It will enable you to outpace the surrounding attacks and by moving through attackers, you also leave them in your wake as human debris that helps prevent other attackers getting you from behind.

Acceleration when used in conjunction with reduction enables you to create a path through the opponent’s resistance. This enables you to maintain your acceleration as you move through each opponent, otherwise you would be slowed down too much by each attacker, giving the group a better chance of taking you down. It should be noted that most people cannot perform the skill of reduction to any great degree because they cannot hold their body together under acceleration and through contact with the opponent's resistance.

By accelerating through an opponent you become ‘invisible’ for that moment to the rest of the group. To their eyes you merge for a moment with one of their fellow attacker’s and this makes it more difficult for them to either measure your speed, track you, or anticipate your progression, especially with the limited time spent per opponent and the acceleration of your progression. Their focus on you as a target is decreased and this disrupts the group’s cohesion.

E-theory basically describes how you can learn to hold your body together under acceleration. When you encounter resistance and lose ‘your shape’ then you lose acceleration and therefore mass effect. It is your mass effect that will dismantle the group’s intentions, not your kicks or your strikes, or your techniques. The greater your mass effect, the more the group is shredded.

Acceleration enables you to enter real time where for a moment the brain naturally limits the input from your vision and other senses, which enables you to shut off the distractions of your thoughts and this lets the body’s reflex systems operate at their optimum levels.

With acceleration you can move through the members of the attacking group in a line of progression to an exit and this will enable you to reduce the time taken for the whole encounter, which adds to your safety. It will also enable you to deal with high functioning groups. Without acceleration your options are to back away from the group or try to keep to the outside of the group, and both of these leave you more vulnerable to higher functioning groups (these groups consist of attackers that can act in a coordinated manner to quickly round-up their victim, immobilise them and allow many attackers to gang up on the individual at the same time).

As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor