“Looks like every man and his dog are 'reality based' these days… I don't ‘base’ my stuff on reality – it is reality, for guys like me anyway! I'm going out to use my stuff everyday, any day, on a job and I'm not just facing drunks unarmed either!”
– Mick Coup, Founder of C2: Core Combatives
It all started with an email from Geoff Thompson. Mick Coup, one of the British Combat Association’s earliest senior instructors had returned to the fold, keen to share his life experiences with the rest of us. Geoff had forwarded me the man’s considerable resume with the recommendation: “this guy will be a good experience for you.” But, I had to ask myself, what more could anyone add to the already saturated market of self-protection instruction? According to Mick, that is completely the wrong question. Extras and quantity are not the issue. Mick believes in strictly “boiling down” the bare essentials of martial arts. What residue is left in the proverbial pan is what he teaches. This is the philosophy of what he calls Core Combatives or C2. It is an attitude born out of dealing with, receiving and delivering violence at its most extreme – violence he has experienced in both civilian and military conditions. From head-doorman to commanding eight-man infantry patrols during internal security operations, from work as a bodyguard and mercenary to corporate consultant, Mick certainly appears to have done it all.
“What has helped me is having a very objective approach and being in an often extremely violent profession. For close combat I tried to build a model from the base up. Fighting is simply problem solving after all and this all begins with understanding the problem, which, with a bit of experience, leads you to certain and undeniably usable and realistic answers.”
Mick’s pedigree in real-life conflict situations is considerable. Growing up in Bradford, he, like just about every interviewee I meet when writing for Martial Arts Illustrated, was influenced by the Bruce Lee and Kung Fu TV series phenomenon. He began in Shotokan Karate and then, seeking the tangibility of more resistance-based training, moved onto Full-Contact Freestyle Karate and Kickboxing, gaining instructor certificates along the way in both styles as well as with Takeuchi Ryu Ju-Jutsu and White Cloud Kung Fu. However, despite his love of the martial arts, Mick found that just about all he was being taught in formal lessons was very often superfluous to his requirements when it came to the reality of violence. Above all else he values the lessons he has learnt from his time spent outside of the training hall.
At age seventeen he began his twelve-year military career, a vocation where he would see action for four years in Northern Ireland and travel extensively, working in some of the most dangerous countries. He worked in Intelligence with the British Army and served in the Royal Air Force Regiment. During this time he moonlighted consistently as a doorman in West Yorkshire, East Anglia, Essex and many other locations at different times. He worked for a prominent national company as its area manager for multiple venues in England and was regularly involved in serious conflict situations that even included a full scale battle with a team of pickaxe-handle wielding travellers.
In the military, Mick took on a range of roles involved with specialist security. Being experienced in conflict from all angles – “I have been ambushed and I have ambushed, and I know which one I prefer” – gives Mick a specific insight into the nature of violence. He has the viewpoint of both the “victim” and the predator. Taking this as his premise, he argues that there is no theory left in C2. Everything has been and is still tested and proven under extreme pressure. He first taught his methods to the military and advised other groups such as the Metropolitan Police, founding and heading a close-combat training team relatively early in his career. Later he would write a detailed instruction manual based on these methods – a manual he would eventually disregard for being too bulky in content:
“These days I keep my stuff extremely simple – to the point that as soon as I finish explaining something everyone becomes 'practise proficient' and then actually 'combat proficient' in a very short space of time. I've found that if this isn't the case then it's just too complex to be actually used and I refuse to teach it.”
Standing at over 190cm and weighing in at over 100kg lean-mass, Mick certainly strikes an imposing sight and it would be fair comment to say that whatever he does physically against the average human being is going to have a reasonably high level of success. However, he argues that this is his very point:
“I've got a private student who is 60-odd years old (in very good shape though) who is having his third lesson this week and I would rate his survival of a real incident as dramatically increased, all because of the simple, direct and no BS approach. A few simple tools with the right attitude goes a long way, I might even pay him to demo on seminars! I always try to use the audience to demonstrate techniques and tactics, with minimal instruction and guidance from me, rather than demo them myself, just to emphasise how simple everything is.
“I find that if I show stuff personally, like heavy impact for example, people are distracted by the fact that I'm built like a brick wall – but I want the principles and the tactics to show through and impress them, not me, and if a brand new guy is hitting another brand new guy like a train after only a few moments of instruction obviously something is working fine! Plus the guy holding the pads is giving a truthful account of the progressively increasing impact – so there can be no doubt.”
With the current trend for “Reality-Based Self-Defence” reaching new heights in popularity, and as our society becomes more fearful of personal assault, Mick has become increasingly more frustrated with the way that some lessons and courses are apparently being taught. As previously stated, he believes that rather than keeping to core principles of combat present at the root of all martial disciplines, even some of the most respected Reality-Based Self-Defence instructors are teaching unessential techniques:
“It seems that people are still desperate to 'add' to what works – they just can't help themselves – to the point where it stops working! This is because they don't get the chance to use it and have too much time on their hands to play around with it! A great deal of what I'm putting out is basically scaled down military tactics, reduced to a personal level. It fits perfectly and really has been pressure tested! As soon as you stop having to rely on your training, when the stakes are high, it drifts toward being academic.”
Today Mick is still regularly booked on independent personal security assignments in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in the UK and Europe. He works for a variety of clients, from businessmen to celebrities, and has also been involved in witness relocation programmes and dealt with personal rescue missions, such as removing an abused woman from the thick of a notorious travelling community. The level of this type of “pressure-testing”, he argues, has prevented him from teaching anything other than what is exactly needed.
“If it didn’t work, I wouldn’t be here. It’s as simple as that!”
So that was the basic background and credentials of Mick Coup, a man now set to take the martial arts seminar circuit by storm with his refreshing (yet very primal) approach to fundamental self-protection. Knowing the above served as a good premise to my first training experience with the man. Now, I said to myself as I approached Glen Smith’s Red Corner Gym in Coventry, how easy would these principles be for a student to pick up? How would his drills improve upon my own training methods in Clubb Chimera Martial Arts? It was time for the talking to stop and the reality of the C2: Core Combatives training methods to be experienced.
Next Issue: My Training Experiences with Mick Coup Part II: “The Big Three”
For more information on Mick Coup’s regular training classes, private tuition and seminars please contact Mick directly on 07989553532 or email [email protected]
Jamie Clubb will be promoting a series of seminars and courses in connection with Mick Coup and other revolutionary real self-protection instructors for further information please email [email protected] or check out his website for updates www.clubbchimera.com
