SOLO TRAINING TO PREPARE FOR THE 2025 PTI SUMMER CAMP

by Tuhon Bill McGrath July 01, 2025

OVERVIEW AND PURPOSE:

This essay has two purposes:

1. Help PTI students prepare for the 2025 Summer Training Camp; especially those who can't work with a training partner as often as they would like to, but do have access to a heavy bag, tire stack, Bob Bag, or other training target.
2. To give PTI instructors some ideas on how to make their teaching more effective and efficient for modern, adult students with limited time to train.

VIDEO 1: Introduction to the problem and a guide to a solution.

Over the last decade or so, I’ve noticed a real difference between those who learned the system through weekly classes or even monthly seminars and those who had learned only at a yearly seminar or camp. There was a tendency with the latter to take what was intended to be a warm up or temporary “Training Wheels” phase of training and make it their main way to do the material.

Instead of learning how to make smart decisions in a fight, I saw people getting far too comfortable practicing fixed patterns that were fine for a warm up, or to help beginners learn basic body mechanics, but kept them stuck in one place, with no practice of the things they need to survive a real fight.

For the last several years I’ve been working on ways to combat this problem; trying to inject the advanced principles as early as possible into the first day of a student’s training. In doing this, I’ve combined teaching methods used when teaching Law Enforcement Officers with classic Pekiti-Tirsia techniques.

First some background. 2025 marks my 50th year in the Pekiti-Tirsia system. For several years in the early 1980s I was an assistant instructor, doing followup seminars for my teacher (Grand Tuhon Leo Gaje) whenever he was overbooked. I was sent to teach my first solo travel seminar in 1979 at the age of 19, flying from New York to San Jose, CA. The following year, I was back in California, this time in Los Angeles, teaching at Balisong, inc (later Pacific Cutlery and now Benchmade) and taught my first seminar at the Inosanto Academy, when Leo was unable to do so.

I was a NY State Court Officer for 30 years and served as a Defensive Tactics instructor for my department for 20 of those years. Before I got there, the court academy had no DT manual (I authored the baton section of that first NYS Court academy DT manual in 1987).

I quickly found that I could not spend the same amount of time having officers practicing a technique as I had in my Pekiti-Tirsia classes. When I was training, Leo often had us practice a single technique for one or two hours and we met three days per week. Meanwhile in my DT classes, my officers had one class per year, in which we had to teach/re-qualify officers on baton, OC spray, handcuffing and empty hand techniques: all in a single four hour session!

One of the best ways to accomplish this compressed teaching schedule required in a law enforcement class was to teach a principles based program: It has four steps.
1. Tell them the principle. (For example: “Keep your weapon and ammo in the same areas of your belt both on and off duty”)
2. Give a real world example of why this was important. (An officer who got into a gun fight off-duty had dug into his pocket for his speed loaders, instead of his belt and ended up trying to load his car keys into his revolver. He lost his life because of this.)
3. Have them practice several techniques that used that same principle with different tools.
4. Repeat the principle. (“Keep your weapon and ammo in the same areas of your belt both on and off duty”).

Here are more teaching techniques I use in my Pekiti-Tirsia seminars these days that are taken from LEO or military training.
1. It’s been found that if you give an officer a decision to make during training (“If things go bad, is my escape route to my right or left?”) and have them practice this at the correct time in a training scenario, then they will likely remember the techniques you give them far better than if you teach them via fixed rules: without making any decisions on their own, based on the situation they are facing. Therefore; I try and include a decision in each training sequence I give my seminar students. This may be as simple as "take one step in the direction of the exit" but that can be enough to break their mental inertia in an emergency.
2. If an officer has seen a situation, even once in training, he will often have better reaction time in a real fight then an officer who has never been exposed to it. (Recognizing potential dangers early on, can make for faster decision making in your OODA loop.) Therefore, I try to include some background element of a real world criminal attack in each training sequence I give my seminar students.
3. The first thing taught is often the first thing that will come out under stress. Therefore, begin your training with the first thing they need to do in a fight. Therefore, I have cut out the “training wheels” phase of techniques as much as possible in each training sequence I give my seminar students.
4. “The Perfect is the enemy of the Good.” You don’t have time to make it perfect. I was speaking to a Navy Seal about their training, and compared classic martial arts training to that of groups like LEOs and the military. He told me “Our passing grade on the range is 80 percent. That’s about as good as it gets under real world stress anyway. Get them to 80 percent and then move on.” Therefore, I move on to the next technique once I get 80 percent of my students to get it 80 percent right at my seminars.

As you watch each of these videos, please keep these teaching techniques and principles in mind and think about ways you can incorporate them into your own classes and training.

Train Hard, but Train Smart,
Tuhon Bill McGrath

To register for the 2025 PTI Summer Camp, visit: https://pekiti.com/collections/seminars/products/2025-pekiti-tirsia-international-summer-training-camp

NOTE: The Early Bird Discount price for this camp ends at Midnight, July 4th.

VIDEOS:

WARM UP, BASIC FOOTWORK AND CHECKING FOR PROBLEMS:

STRIKING/CUTTING DRILLS:

TWO MAN DRILL VERSION: