I wrote a post a while back titled “The Importance of Explosiveness” and discussed the psychological and physical importance and how-to’s of being explosive in our defenses and combatives. If explosiveness is the violence of the action itself, aggression is the precursor, the intent to be violent in order to protect oneself. It is also what will sustain us in the fight long after explosiveness has been sapped by exhaustion and/or injury.
Explosiveness is a physical attribute. Aggression is a mindset. You can take an untrained person and make them physically powerful with just a bit of training, as I outlined in the explosiveness post. What is much harder is to train a non-aggressive person to “unleash the beast”, but it is possible with the right drills, the right coaching, and the willingness of the student to go there. It’s amazing to see it happen for the first time.
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