www.ShivWorks.com

Craig Douglas has over 30 years of martial arts study in a variety of disciplines.

In the military, he was an Army Ranger and after his service, spent 21 years as a police officer, SWAT commander, and undercover narcotics agent before retiring.

It was in his undercover work that he frequently found himself on his own and in violent situations – with perps trying to rob him for the drugs or money.

He was frustrated to find that despite his extensive martial arts background, only a small percentage of the things he had learned were really helpful and worked reliably when he was in tight quarters with felons who could decide to turn a straightforward drug buy into an assault and robbery at any time.

As he tells it, the turning point for him was when, on a drug-buy sting operation, he found himself desperately grappling with one criminal who was trying to draw a gun from his waistband and shoot him dead while a second criminal was beating him on the head with a hammer.

Craig said the last thought he had before he lost consciousness was “I wonder if I'll feel the shot that kills me.”

Craig's backup got into the room and took down the perps before he could be shot, but he was pretty seriously injured, and had a lengthy recovery to think about what went wrong.

As he recovered, he spent a lot of time working on the problems of accessing a weapon when you're in contact with an opponent who's actively trying to stop you from doing so.

He also began supervising undercover agents, and watched hours and hours of video of buys that turned violent.

After repeatedly watching these incidents, he began to see some tell-tale patterns that were unfolding before each assault – “pre-assault cues” as some people call them, sort of like a “tell” when playing poker – and it was from this set of experiences that he began to create what has become his Extreme Close Quarters Combat courses.