Most self-defence classes begin with the moment someone puts a hand on you. The part that decides the outcome usually happened two minutes earlier, in a car park or a corridor or a stairwell, when something felt slightly wrong and you weren’t sure whether you were allowed to act on it. That gap between noticing and acting is where self-defence for women is usually won or lost.
That earlier part is where we start. Dynamis has taught personal safety, breakaway and physical intervention for over thirty years, mostly to people whose jobs put them in front of other people’s distress: NHS staff, teachers, housing officers, lone workers. Women come to us through their employers, and women come to us on their own. The skills are the same. The confidence is what changes.
Two books to read before we meet
We ask women who train with us to read two books first. It sounds like homework. It is the most useful hour of preparation you can do.
Beauty Bites Beast by Ellen Snortland looks at why women are so often taught to be polite rather than safe, and what changes when a woman discovers she is capable of defending herself. The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker is about the signal you already have: the instinct that tells you a lift, a doorway or a conversation is wrong before you can explain why.
Both books argue the same thing from different directions. The decision to act comes before the technique, and hesitation is the thing worth training out.
This isn’t a slogan we invented. When the HuffPost contributor and self-defence author behind Beauty Bites Beast wrote about men who teach this work well, she named two. One was Gavin de Becker. The other was our training director, Gerard O’Dea:
“There are men around the world who ‘get it,’ although they are still too rare. Author Gavin de Becker is one of them. Another is Ger O’Dea in the UK, who has prospective female students read Beauty Bites Beast and Gavin’s The Gift of Fear before they begin work together.”
Ellen Snortland has since taught at our own trainer programme, speaking to the instructors we were qualifying that year about training women and girls in self-defence. We have written about that day before.
Self-defence is a sequence, not a move
A single technique is the last twenty seconds of a much longer process. We teach the whole sequence, because the earlier parts are where most situations are settled.
Awareness
Reading a room and a street. Knowing what normal looks like in a place, so that the abnormal stands out. This is learnable, and it is not the same as being afraid.
Readiness
Deciding in advance what you will do, so the decision isn’t made while your hands are shaking. Boundaries, distance, voice, and when to leave.
Protection
The physical skills: breaking a grip, creating space, disengaging, and getting away. Simple, repeatable, and practised until they work without thinking.
Resilience
What happens afterwards, whether the incident was a nuisance or an assault. How you recover, and how you keep working.
What a session is actually like
Sessions are practical and conversational in roughly equal measure, and nothing happens without warning. A typical session moves through four stages.
First, a short discussion of what real incidents look like. Not horror stories, the ordinary ones: the man who won’t move out of the doorway, the colleague who doesn’t take no, the stranger who is too helpful.
Then scenario work, walking through situations at talking pace before anything physical happens.
Then the physical skills, practised on pads and with partners: boundaries and voice, breaking free of a grip, escaping a hold, moving to a safe exit. Repetition follows under mild pressure, because a skill you have used twice is not yet a skill.
You don’t need to be fit, flexible or young, and nobody is expected to fight anyone. If you have an injury, a disability or a history that makes some of this difficult, we adapt the session. Tell us beforehand and we will plan around it.
Where these skills get used
Women book this training for reasons that are usually more specific than “self-defence”.
Lone working is the common one: visiting a house you don’t know, in an area you don’t know, with no one waiting outside. Front-line public work follows close behind, at reception desks, housing offices, clinics and classrooms, where the person in front of you is distressed and the exit is behind them. Others come for the walk from the station, the empty carriage, or the taxi that isn’t the one they ordered. Some arrive having handled a situation badly and wanting to know what they would do differently next time.
And some come for confidence, plainly. Learning that your voice carries, and that your body is not a liability, changes how you walk into a room.
What we don’t promise
Self-defence training does not make anyone invincible, and we won’t tell you it does. There is always residual risk. The honest aim is to reduce it, not remove it.
What we can promise is that the skills are taught by people who use them in professional settings, that the scenarios come from real incidents rather than films, and that you will leave able to do something specific rather than simply feeling better about the subject.
We also don’t do fear. You won’t be shown footage of attacks to motivate you into booking. The case for learning this is competence, not catastrophe.
Questions women ask us
Do I need to be physically fit? No. The skills are designed for people who are smaller and less strong than the person in front of them. That is what they are built for.
I’ve experienced an assault. Is this suitable? Many of our clients have. Tell us when you book and we will agree what the session covers, what it avoids, and how to step out if you need to.
Is this the same as a martial arts class? No. Martial arts are sports with rules and years of practice. This is a short, practical course about avoiding and escaping violence, and about the decisions either side of it.
Can you deliver this in our workplace? Yes. We run it for teams in health, education, social care, housing and local government, and we can shape it around the risks your staff actually face.
Talk to us
If you are booking for yourself, or for a group of women in your organisation, tell us roughly what you are worried about and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people to help.