Armed Margins Self-Defense Academy

Transform Your Ability To Defend

Grounded In Data From Real World Violence

Be prepared for the threats you’re most likely to face

Scaled Interventions

From verbal de-escolation to armed defense

Performance Under Pressure

test skills and understand your capabilities

Self Defense Academy

Three Hours | Once A Week | Three Months

Imagine a drunk family member becoming belligerent and threatening a loved one, or perhaps an aggressive patron verbally abusing you, taking an aggressive posture, and closing the distance. Do you know what you will do in those instances? How will your body react? Does your imagined response line up with your real world capabilities? Do you know how much resistance is legally justified? These are all questions that our Self Defense Academy is designed to answer. Everyone has their own individual response in threatening situations. Our twelve week course is all about magnifying strengths, identifying weaknesses, and increasing your capabilities through deep knowledge building and dynamic pressure testing. We do this through the following four driving principles:

Moral & Legal Grounding

These two banks form the river through which our self defense flows. Having a clear understanding of your personal morality and the legal thresholds for using force of any degree is fundamental to good self defense.

Psychological Understanding

Fight, Flight, or Freeze is part of it, but we aim for a much deeper understanding and work on overcoming maladaptive fear responses that keep us in danger. We also focus on the aggressor – what is their brain doing and how to interrupt it with our actions.

Safe Simulated Stress

Overcoming haphazard psychological responses takes visioning, setting clear triggers, and practice. We use safe force of force drills and simulator technology (that’s usually reserved for the military or law enforcement) to develop effective interventions, identify weaknesses, and overcome deficits.

Increasing Judgement & Adaptability

Professional fighters train, easily deploy technical skills, and implement a strategy during a match to beat their opponent. Great fighters have the ability to judge the effectiveness of their technique, assess their opponent, and adapt their methods. It’s called fight IQ. We aim to increase your fight IQ for real life scenarios that can escalate to a lethal threat on a dime.