What Is FAST Defense? Self-Defense Training Under Real Adrenaline

Where FAST Defense comes from

FAST Defense was founded by Bill Kipp, out of Colorado. I’ve trained with Bill, whose specialty is reality-based self-defense, and that training is a different animal from anything you do in a traditional dojo. My foundation is hard-style Kyokushin karate, and I’ve spent more than three decades on the mat. Kyokushin teaches you to take a hit and keep going. Bill’s work answers a different question: what happens to an ordinary person, with no fight background, when fear shows up first.

The problem FAST is built to solve

When you’re threatened, your body releases adrenaline. That rush is natural and instinctive. You can’t train it away, and you wouldn’t want to. It exists to help you.

The trouble is that most of us have never felt it in a controlled setting. So the first time it hits, it can feel like your body is betraying you. Some people freeze. Some go blank and can’t find a single word. Hands shake. The plan you made while sitting on your couch disappears. I wrote more about what that feels like in fear, freeze, and the adrenaline dump.

A lot of self-defense instruction teaches techniques to people who are relaxed, then hopes those techniques will still be there under stress. Complicated moves tend to fall apart in that state. The missing link, and the core idea of FAST, is that adrenaline can be your best friend when you’re trained correctly.

What you learn in FAST Defense training

The program is a simple, step-by-step process. Our FAST Defense Program page lists what students learn, and I think of it in the order you’d actually use it.

Awareness

You learn to detect a potential threat before it reaches you. Trouble usually gives off signals early. Someone who doesn’t fit the setting. A person closing distance for no reason. A feeling in your gut that you’re tempted to talk yourself out of because you don’t want to seem rude. Seeing it early gives you the best option there is, which is to leave.

Verbal skills

You learn how to talk to someone who is getting heated. That means calm language that lowers the temperature, and a clear, loud boundary when calm isn’t working. Most of the time this is the whole encounter, and nobody throws anything.

A physical response, as the last resort

If you’re physically attacked, you learn simple, effective strikes to vulnerable areas of the attacker’s body. Simple is the point. Then you practice them live, while you’re in the adrenal state, so your body learns it can act while it’s scared. The purpose of any physical response is to create a chance to get away.

Why practicing in the adrenal state matters

This is what separates FAST from a seminar where you pair up and walk through moves at half speed. Reading about adrenaline doesn’t prepare you for it. Feeling it in a safe room with a coach, and then acting anyway, starts to change the old pattern. The aim of the program is to recondition the fear-and-freeze response into strength and power.

I won’t pretend a class makes anyone safe. Nothing does that. What good training can do is give you more options and a body that has been there before. That is a real difference, and it’s worth having.

One more thing before you train anywhere: self-defense laws vary by state, so know what the law allows where you live. Wherever you are, getting away is the outcome you’re training for.

FAST for kids: Bully Proof

We use the same thinking with children in Bully Proof, our FAST Bully Defense for Children course. It covers name-calling and teasing, protecting personal space, boundaries against inappropriate touch, how not to start a fight, and how to break away from a would-be abductor. The homework sheet we’ve shared with families for years, Confident Kids at The Phoenix Way, makes a point I agree with completely. These same concepts work very well for adults.