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At IFV Solutions we don’t teach "Self Defence", we teach Personal Safety. We don’t like the 3-times-a-week-12-years-of-your-life-karate-lesson connotations of the term "Self Defence". We teach Personal Safety. How to stay as safe as you can. Instead of teaching you how to punch a punch bag for 4 hours, we’ll teach you how to avoid the bad guy, if that fails we’ll teach you how to disengage from the bad guy, and if that fails we’ll teach you the tools to drop the bad guy under a variety of circumstances. All in the same 4 hours. “Violence is the first option and the last choice of the competent”. We’ll show you how to be good at violence, but teach you the tools so that you don’t have to be.

For a lot of people it’s difficult to imagine anything else but violence for self defence. Television and some martial arts classes have perpetuated this myth. What they’re not thinking about is that you want to avoid violence at all costs. When violence occurs, just about anything can happen. For example, a Canadian training study using experienced police officers found that 85 % of the officers involved did NOT see the knife in the bad guy’s hand. Some didn’t believe there was a knife until they saw the footage. When violence happens you cannot control the bad guy’s mind and make him not pull a knife. Examples like these are why we prefer that you avoid as much violence as possible.

What we teach is two-fold:

We teach you violence. We teach the basic tools that can be used in many ways, and we don’t limit you to specific situations. We won’t show you 17 ways to escape a front stranglehold and 17 different ways for escaping a rear stranglehold and tell you that you must decide which will work best while you’re being strangled. We’ll teach you 3 tools that can be used in either circumstance and in other as well.

Second, we teach avoidance. This is what makes us different. We cover awareness; avoidance; disengagement; legalities of defending yourself or others; and just plain running away.

A wise man has said: The fight is going to be what the fight is going to be.

It could be anything: It could be a surprise attack; it could give you the chance to avoid; it could give you the opportunity to run away...

There are many problems with what most people consider to be self defence lessons. Chief amongst them is lack of options. All they teach is violence, and often not very useable violence at that. If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If you are confronted with a potential attacker, and all you know how to do is violence (possibly ineffective), guess what the situation will develop into. What if the fight gave you the opportunity to prevent violence from happening? If all you’ve learned is violence, odds are you missed all the opportunities to: identify the potential bad guys in the area; recognise that you were selected for a crime; avoid the criminal; disengage from the bad guy; de-escalate the situation or run away. All of those things can mean the crime and the violence doesn’t happen. But if you don’t know any of these things, then you won’t be able o avoid the Bad Guy. This is why we teach, preach, and stress avoidance.

The majority of self defence classes available today ignore one of the most important facts about violence:

95 % of crime can be avoided, prevented, de-escalated or mitigated.

Violence is only needed 5 % of the time. So most self defence classes that teach you all those fancy moves are focusing on 5% of self defence, and ignoring the 95%. In fact, if all you learn is violence, you’re more likely to end up in a violent situation. As we said earlier: if a hammer is the only tool you have, every problem looks like a nail. Violence is a tool that is worth learning, absolutely, but every bit as important is having the other tools: Awareness; Avoidance; De-escalation. These are especially important in South Africa today, where it is easy to end up on the wrong side of the law when violence is concerned.

Another major problem with most self defence classes is the lack of actuality and context in their training. How many self defence classes don’t have you standing in front of your partner taking turns to strangle each other and practise your escapes? In that situation you know what to expect, you know how to respond and when to respond. You do not experience any uncertainty or fear at all. This is not how the Bad Guy works. He’s not going to put his hands gently around your throat and wait there very co-operatively while you do something fancy and painful to him.

(Which photo looks fancy and which looks like the confusion of real life?)

IFV Solutions was created to help people learn to deal with the criminal paradigm. The way crime is likely to happen in YOUR life. We are not the latest Ultimate Fighting System - we will, however, help you learn how to prevent 95% of violence by non-violent means. We also throw in dealing with the other 5%, just to cover you.

IFV Solutions is not some martial arts school for bodybuilders and tough guys, we are here for: little old ladies; young children; average, run-of-the-mill people who just want to keep safe so that they can go home to their families every night. We are here to help you learn how to prevent violence, and deal with it should it happen. We are here to make you the kind of person who the bad guy will leave alone, not because you look buff, but because you look alert in all the ways a criminal thinks could end up getting him caught.

Our focus is to be useful. We don’t want to tell you a bunch of way-out-there esoteric stuff about trying to use your sixth sense to judge whether a person is a Bad Guy or not. We at IFV Solutions are here to show you concrete ideas that are practical and useable. We want to show you actual steps you can take, things that are useful in your life, things that you can actually use. We want to show you

- just where in a car park the bad guys will likely position themselves (there are places where they will and won’t stand);

- how the bad guys will stand when setting you up; how they will approach you on the street;

- how to make them leave you alone 95 times out of 100.

And for those 5 that won’t leave you alone, we offer help learning how to deal with them as well.

In short, we at IFV Solutions offer you the knowledge of how the bad guy operates, how he thinks, his strengths and weaknesses, his mindset. Then we show you how to overcome all of it and use it against him.

Check out our Courses page to see if any of our courses appeal to you.