Self Defense with an Attitude

by Jose T. Garza III

A mar­tial arts stu­dent of five years and a black belt in Amer­i­can Taek­wondo, Jim Fiore is hand­ing down his exper­tise to women attend­ing his self defense and con­di­tion­ing classes at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland.

Fiore’s class fea­tures high inten­sity exer­cises, phi­los­o­phy and mar­tial arts com­bat­ive train­ing for self defense. The goal is to decrease the like­li­hood of being an attack vic­tim, limit the assault and increase the pos­si­bil­ity of sur­vival, said Fiore, clin­i­cal research coor­di­na­tor with the 59th Clin­i­cal Sup­port Group.

“When you watch the news, it’s not men who are get­ting attacked, it’s the women that are attacked,” said Fiore, who teaches the classes Mon­days and Wednes­days from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Chap­ar­ral Fit­ness Center.

“In today’s world, the threats are more real and attack­ers are becom­ing bolder,” he said.

Fiore said hav­ing a small class allows him to know his stu­dents and assess their strengths, weak­nesses and progress.

“They should be able to take this knowl­edge and retain it because we are always enforc­ing the basics,” he said.

The class is divided into three lev­els. Before stu­dents can advance to the next level, three require­ments must be com­pleted: spe­cific train­ing hours, com­pre­hen­sion and exe­cu­tion, and strength, power and stamina.

Level One
Threat assess­ment, strik­ing bio­me­chan­ics, strik­ing com­bat­ives, strik­ing move­ment and take-downs. It takes 24 class hours to com­plete and stu­dents receive a green stripe on their belt upon completion.

Level Two
Imple­ments knowl­edge from level one and intro­duces self defense tech­niques against grabs, chokes and holds, and learn­ing sub­mis­sion tac­tics. The class length is 32 hours and stu­dents earn a blue stripe.

Level Three
Learn­ing self defense tac­tics from attacks by knife, gun, bat, pipe and rope. Also teaches how to counter sex­ual assault attacks. The class is 40 hours and stu­dents earn a red stripe.

For every 10 hours of train­ing, stu­dents receive a black tip on their belt. Fiore sched­ules group or indi­vid­ual test­ing out­side of nor­mal class hours. Tests last a min­i­mum of two hours.

“If you train easy, the fight will be hard,” Fiore said. “We want to train hard so the fight is easy. Our con­cept is to train hard for poten­tial threats so stu­dents (can) throw punches to cause enough dam­age for them to get away.”

Class stu­dent Court­ney Baker said the rig­or­ous class requires focus to be successful.

“Train­ing is not as easy as I thought it would be,” she said. “It takes a lot of drive and deter­mi­na­tion to get through the class.”

Being fear­ful of attack is what moti­vated Natalie Incrocci to enroll in the course.

“After a few months of train­ing, I real­ized I didn’t have to be so afraid,” Incrocci said. “I can defend myself.”

Class­mate Kather­ine Sosa agreed. She said stu­dents gain con­fi­dence in their pro­tec­tion skills with the tac­tics taught each week.

“I think we now have that con­fi­dence of ‘We can kick your (bot­tom) if we have to,” Sosa said about their atti­tude in class. “It’s like, ‘Really, you’re going to start some­thing with me? I don’t think so.’”

Tags: air force martial arts taekwondo