L.O.C.K.U.P: A Self-Protection System Based on Simplicity

This past Saturday, I went to a training seminar put on by Lt. Kevin Dillon and Sergeant Geoffrey Anderson (shown here) of L.O.C.K.U.P (Law Officers Combat Kinetics for Ultimate Protection), an organization that teaches the most practical manoeuvres for law enforcement officers. Because of the simplicity of their system, the moves are equally useful for people who only have a limited amount of time to put into self-defense training. I'd like to impart some of what I learned.

Like in my style of Jiu-jitsu, this system focuses on protective manoeuveres that use only gross motor skills. Skills that require fine motor skills take much longer to learn, sometimes years, in order to be proficient enough at them for them to be useful in a high stress combat situation. That's fine for people who want to devote lots of time to martial arts training, but for people who only get so many hours to learn usable skills, simplicity is key.

The L.O.C.K.U.P system draws from a wide variety of martial arts, taking the most efficient, gross motor skill reliant techniques. One of the moves that was shown comes from Aikido. Because of its simplicity and dynamic nature, it can be used in a variety of situations. In the video below, I demonstrate its use against several shirt grabs that we practiced at the seminar.




One of the main principles of the L.O.C.K.U.P system is to react to the aggressor before they get their hold on as you can see in the video (unless they manage to surprise you from behind). As our instructors emphasized, it's easier to defend against a hold before the hold is fully applied. I wholeheartedly agree.

There was so much more imparted at the seminar about their training concepts that I can't cover it all in a simple blog post, but I can say that my students quite enjoyed the new material. I highly recommend the L.O.C.K.U.P. training courses to any martial arts groups and law enforcement organizations. I also bought their DVDs which I will watch soon and review here on my website.