SUDDEN HOSTILE INTENT NEUTRALIZATION & OFF BALANCING INTERCEPTS
Right off the bat I want to get this out of the way.S.H.I.N.O.B.I. is an acronym for Sudden Hostile Intent Neutralization& Off Balancing Intercepts. This is a modern tactical fighting system. It has nothing to do with classical ninjutsu or any other type of ninjutsu system for that matter. The legitimacy of this system is based on the quality held within it. So what exactly is the system and where did it come from? Well let's answer those questions first.
History and Development
It all started back in 2001 when I had stopped competing in sport martial arts due to a shoulder injury and I began to get disenfranchised with it. I saw instructors teaching sport techniques for street applications where I knew for a fact they did not apply. You see I spent the better part of my 20's as a bouncer and a bodyguard. Sports was alot of fun for me but it wasn't real street fighting. I began to look at self defense programs and frankly none of them made sense. It just looked like people were bending reality to fit some preconceived idea about what they thought about real violence. It was obvious some of them had never even seen real violence. I had been a martial artist since the age of 4 way back in 1977 when I started in Wado-Ryu and had a instructor rank in Jujutsu as I was also serving as technical director for the American Budo Society. So I had a wealth of knowledge. It just seemed nobody understood the problem. I saw programs where they had these big guys showing techniques that required alot of strength. The instructors didn't seem to understand that it didn't really matter if they could do their own technique because it wasn't about them. It was about the students. A woman 5'1 can't do a technique the same way a man 6'1 can do so all this macho stuff was just crap because it didn't work for everyone. Then I myself had the to question the fact that martial arts had a different block for every punch that could be thrown. I questioned this because without alot of training you aren't going to know what type of punch it was until after you've been hit with it. Sure you could develop the skill to pull it off down the road but what if you got jumped tonight? Are you going to tell the attacker to come back in 5 years? Marc Macyoung once said,"If it takes you 5 years to learn a technique then that technique isn't very good, but if I can show you something in 5 minutes that works right now think of how good you'll be at it in 5 years."
I'd go to seminars to look at new things and I'd see the instructor get up there and do some fancy technique after he told his assistant to throw a certain punch. I couldn't help but ask myself did that technique work because it's a good technique or did it work because the guy just stood there and told the other guy what to throw. Anyone can block something if they know exactly what's being thrown ahead of time. As a Jujutsu guy I'm more comfortable as an inside fighter. Staying on the outside if the guy threw 50 punches I knew I wouldn't be able to block them all, hell no one could. If they came in with an attack that aggressive it would force me to stay defensive without mounting an offense. Eventually the attacker would break through if all I knew was to parry. So that was out. Well then there was this other stuff where instead of blocking you diverted the attack and did a trap. The problem is that stuff took alot of time to develop. Then even after you developed it if the attacker had good footwork and wasn't pressing then the defense didn't work anyway. To work it requires energy to divert the attack and without them giving you energy to divert you couldn't do it so that was out. Then you had what used to be called zoning. Zoning was where you stuck your arms straight out at the attack and kinda moved in on it like the mummy or something. Well I had a boxing background as well and one off the things you learn in boxing is keep your arms in. The further your arms are away from your body during an altercation the easier you are to knock out because pretty much everything is open to a counter puncher. Much less a good grappler even if you palmed his face with it could still use that and change levels and dump you right on your head. I'd seen off duty cops get in fights in bars and use that technique and get the piss beaten out of them alot because of it.
In 2003 I was up in Virginia testing for a shodan in Ninjutsu. The instructor during one of the classes was teaching a modified muay thai block to defend against hooks. The arm basically came up the hand slid through the hair and grabbed the back of the neck. The hand had to come back further due to the lack of a glove on the street. With this block the entire jawline was protected. The ear was protected. The temple and ocular cavity was also protected. All that protected with one block which was basically a shield. I knew there was something there and started to test it out when I got home. It still worked against hooks but I still had to parry straight punches and so forth. Then I found out if I torqued my hips moving my elbow to the centerline I could block those straight punches and they would either wedge off to one side or I would have a destruction. Now if you just stand there eventually anyone can just punch through any guard so you can't do that. But you can use your footwork and use that shield to wedge in and inside on them. So we tested it and tested it getting great results. After years of tests for this entry we settled on the name S.H.I.N.O.B.I. for the entry.
S.H.I.N.
Sudden Hostile Intent Neutralization..hmm that's a mouthful isn't it? What does it mean? Well generally when an altercation gets physical there isn't alot of thought that goes into it. You generally have someone thinking I'm just gonna knock the crap out of this person. When they go to attack and that attack fails it puts them on the defensive pretty quick. We are talking about a very aggressive defense here. People have been knocked unconscious in streetfights with this entry before a counter could even be performed. An action is always faster than a reaction. When that initial attack fails with this entry you are on them so fast they don't have time to think and can sometimes just freeze up and not do anything. So basically they thought they were going to just jack someone but now they are getting jacked and pretty much doing nothing about it. That is why we say that hostile intent has been neutralized. It's a similar idea that the US Marines used to use with the L.I.N.E. (Linear Inline Neural-Override Engagement)program.
O.B.I.
Off Balancing Intercepts is the second part of this equation. The body is under constant struggle to keep its balance. The foot muscles will even adjust for your tongue moving in your mouth. As the attacker launches the attack we don't block and move in we use the shield to wedge in during the punch. This cuts down on the time the attacker has to launch a counter attack. We don't just move to the attackers body we move through it throwing a body block. So in fact we are actually using our bodies to intercept the attack. After this we attack another balance point usually the head or the legs. Because of the positioning of our arms it easily sets up overhooks, underhooks, etc. Because of the patented way the entry is designed it allows us to succeed in restraint and control situations where all others fail miserably. We actually incorporate these controls into module 2 of this system. It works so well we even developed a police course from it called The S.T.A.R. Method. Many departments in the southwest have adopted it and are using it on the streets successfully right now. To think police officers are defending themselves on the streets right now using only one application of our concepts. You see most control programs fail because they don't break the balance first. We took this idea and applied it to takedowns as well developing Stonewall Tactical Judo which has been adopted by local Judo clubs here. Once again just another application of the concepts. You can also do some nasty inside strikes as anyone who has every studied WWII Combatives will tell you. You can see some video of the entry on our police training page. You can't quite see everything but you can get an idea of it.
The concepts and care that went into developing the entry affected the flow of everything else we were doing. When we were thinking of a name for the system at first we went with American Defensor Concepts. I tossed that and wasn't happy with it because having a spanish word in there didn't make sense since I'm not spanish and can't speak a word of it. So then we thought about Stonewall Tactical Combatives. That was fine because it is combatives and Stonewall Tactical is our company but that still bugged me. Saying tactical combatives seemed to be redundant to me and I had problems with it. People seemed to really like the name of the entry and thought it was pretty cool. The entry had in fact dictated everything about what we did empty handed anyway. If the attacker wasn't pressing we could still sit back and use the elbows in the entry to do destructions. It just all flowed. Even the idea of if I have one thing that works for 5 things why do I need to learn 5 separate things. The idea that there's shouldn't be two different techniques for committed and noncommitted attacks. One could develop a tactic that could defend against both. Always questioning everything. Like most systems of it's type we also study verbal diffusions, situational self defense, groundfighting, knife, stick, gun, etc. However we don't just blindly adopt some system. We put every technique we use through the same pressure testing and care that we used to develop our entry. We teach this entry but this entry taught us how to develop an incredible system of self defense using science and logic. So it seemed only fitting in the end we name the entire system after it. We don't take anything lightly. Professionals are already using our concepts and they have been street tested through and through. We believe we have the best thing out there and we can't wait to share it with you.
