The warrior who trusts his path doesn’t need to prove the other is wrong.
Paulo Coelho
Introduction
The A.E.S is a school which would like to present itself as different, if compared to other self-defense academies, born because of two main objectives of the founders. First of all, the desire to maintain a martial approach, even in teaching civil defense of street. Secondly, the A.E.S. was also created because of the dissatisfaction felt during the formative years of certain courses, which don’t reflect the perspective of an actual fighting.
The school will mainly focus on the combat aspect of the art (fact and effectiveness), without forgetting the traditional part of the art itself, still necessary to acquire certain techniques and attitudes. On the street is not allowed, nor possible, any kind of choreography, so it is essential to understand the difference between a technical training conducted in a gym, even if it can quite well simulate reality, and an actual fighting on the street, in which the psychophysical conditions and all that implies, make impossible to practice several technical gestures, which may result not very functional and suitable to that particular situation and in certain cases, they can even be in complete contrast with natural or instinctive movements of our body.
Characteristics
What does ‘’Martial approach’’ mean?
Martial in the moral aspect, by adopting and maintaining principles such as: respect, discipline in behaviour and integrity in general.
Martial in the spiritual aspect, which today is being often abandoned from the very same martial arts, by focusing on the control of our mind and body, typical of oriental philosophies, onwhich are based martial arts.
Martial in the technical and physical aspect, which implies continuous, constant and incessant repetition of basic techniques, the fundamentals and rationalisation of the tactics. Those conditions are necessary to achieve high and effective levels (Bruce Lee used to say: ‘’I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the manwho has practiced one kick 10,000 times’’).
Study of the psychological aspect of fighting, technical semplicity (taking into consideration the different variations), logical schematization, development of instinctivity and athletic preparation in order to combat will be the fundamental characteristics of this new system.
On the street, our mind is clouded by several and contrasting emotions (our self-preservation instinct leads us to run away from dangerous situations, the will and the necessity to fight back, feeling anger and/or fear are all elements that slow down our reaction and reduce our technical
ability). Our mind plays a fundamental role in those situations and so it must be controlled and trained.
The technical background must be simple and effective to locate at a mental level. Infact, a single hit from the adversary may have different dynamics and variants which may cause problems to our stationary acquired self-defense technique and consequently our prompt reaction capacity. A well and dinamic traning of powerful and easy skills will be a good way to avoid those risks.
A good athletic preparation will be fundamental too, which is already essential for any martial art or combat sport, so why shouldn’t it be important for the real and actual fighting too? An inadequate physical condition involves a restricted mental reactive capacity, scarce lucidity,
remarkable difficulty to implement the acquired techniques in a stressing situations, not only mental but also physical, and limits significantly the effectiveness of certain tactics.
The ultimate objetive is therefore to do not sell a product but to transmit an acquired knowledge from decades of practice, arising from innate passion for combat, in all its form, as well as from a careful, long-term and honest analysis of actual situations of fighting. We would like to offer a non-crystallized system, but an ever-changing teaching, which is being continuously studied and also a continually updated progress thanks to the collaboration of those that will join the team during our journey. The trainees will always be stimulated to acquire theri own critical view of
fighting and the ability to find the best solution based on their attitudes and knowledge learned through the study of our system.
No one has the final and ultimate solution, as each of us should find his/her own path.