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June 11, 2016

Training for Restraint:: Things to avoid doing #1

This image was first published in an article about the types of physical restraint practices being carried out on children in schools in the USA.   There are a large number of things in this 'procedure' which are likely to fail during a "floor restraint" intervention and for that reason it is worth drawing out the points for training purposes:
  1. Try not to restrain people on your own.  If you are going to make it work, then you will need to use a lot more force than you would in a team, and you are likely to use more force, or more risky types of force, than you would in a team scenario.
  2. Protect the integrity of your posture as much as possible.  You need to keep your spine in as neutral a position as you can, so that when unpredicted forces act on it during the chaotic physical geometry of a physical intervention, it has some range of motion left to absorb that movement or pressure.   Twisting your back as part of a procedure is bad practice, terrible design.
  3. When you do floor restraint, you've got to keep your weight off them.  There is a huge issue out there in the world called 'restraint positional asphyxia' or 'compressional asphyxia' which causes restraint-related sudden death in the people being restrained.   One of the key issues is when people lie on top of the person being restrained.
We're not saying that the floor restraint technique won't work, but the chances of an injury while trying this floor restraint technique are probably unacceptably high.   Responsible training providers would steer well clear of it. More of these posts are in the pipeline - comment on our Facebook page if you have something to say! All the best for now, Gerard O'Dea Director of Training, Dynamis www.dynamis.training
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Gerard O'Dea

Gerard O'Dea is the Director of Training for Dynamis. Training Advisor, Speaker, Author and Expert Witness on Personal Safety, Conflict Management and Physical Interventions, he is the European Advisor for Vistelar Conflict Management, a global programme focussing on the spectrum of human conflict.

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