[Jeff White]

Not a lot of martial arts concepts are really applicable to the type of training that ISS conducted and was the subject of the article. It seems to me that the class was more of a Train the Trainer type school where the desired outcome was to allow the students to return to their agencies and incorporate new concepts and techniques into their own programs.

Any type of team (collective) training must be broken down into individual tasks (those that each person must be able to perform) and collective tasks (those that the group must be able to do together). This is very difficult to be successful at when you only have a short period of time and you have a student population of unknown and diverse individual skills. The PT and stressful team exercises were more geared toward quickly developing somewhat cohesive teams from groups of people who were strangers to each other before the class.

For training to be successful it must be progressive. Think crawl, walk, run . In the crawl phase you learn the basic task. Perform it by the numbers and practice by repetition. In the walk phase you will practice the task at normal speed, against a canned scenario if it's force on force. In the run phase, you let the exercise become more of a freeplay scenario. You must conduct an evaluation after every phase and you can't be afraid to go back to the crawl phase if necessary. And don't make the mistake of going to the next phase before you are ready. I would bet that every iteration of this same ISS course is different based on how the students progress. I took "There are no losers" as positive reinforcement for those who were unused to that level of physical and mental stress. People sometimes need that to keep them in the game. Especially when your student population is composed of police officers who may be coming from a sedentary job asignment and private citizens who may be wondering what they bought themselves into.

Jeff