Where do bodyguards come from?

Training bodyguards gives us the chance to work with very different teams all over the world.

Some recruit their close protection from sport, some from the police, the army or special units. And in some cases the criterion is personal loyalty. Most often, of course, it is a mix. Every approach has its advantages, its drawbacks and its consequences, but the result you need to arrive at is always the same:

Experience is subjective (David Chalmers).
When a team is built from ex-military, the client’s reasoning seems sound: if a man went through all that and came back alive, keeping me safe is no problem for him. Logical, isn’t it? Except that combat experience firmly sets a completely different set of skills. Protecting a client is not war: the intensity of fire contact, the available arsenal, the environment and the civilian context, the legal one included, are all worlds apart. And the human brain will carry over into this hybrid environment the very skills that worked flawlessly back there, where black was usually black and white was almost always white.

Still, building a team out of people with a combat or operational past has an undeniable advantage: they know what a unit is (there is no “I” in “team”), they usually handle weapons properly, and they are trained and willing to work together on one task.

Another example is a protection team built from individual sportsmen: wrestlers, shooters, boxers and so on.
Yes, you rarely have to explain to them what a strike or a shot is, but the first job will be welding people with that kind of individual mindset into a team. On top of the natural lack of team habits, there are ingrained sporting skills that shine in the ring, on the mat or at the range and can be fatal in real life: a boxer meeting a knife attack, a wrestler facing a firearm. Not long ago we had a case where, under stress (training stress, during an audit), a special-unit soldier holding a rifle started moving in a boxer’s shuffle. Stress does that.

When we speak about krav maga for bodyguards, remember that the human brain is lazy: it will not rewire itself “just because”, and under stress everything goes back to the old tracks, and out comes whatever used to work.

So what do you do?
In our experience, and not only ours — many specialists agree here — the most productive candidates for close protection are ready-made teams from team sports.

The body is ready: good physique, coordination, stamina, an excellent habit of scanning all around (360).
The head is fresh: no wrong skills set in stone.
Team spirit and cohesion are already there, in bulk.

Not brutal enough in appearance? That is not required everywhere, and even where it used to be, the trend is shifting towards protection that looks professional and tidy.

People like that can be turned into true security professionals faster, though as always much depends on the context: the risks, the problems and the windows of opportunity, time included, that the client has defined for himself.

Most often, of course, a team is put together from different people, covering each other’s weaknesses and reinforcing each other’s strengths. To find out what those are, we invite you to a protection team audit.

And in general: stay healthy, play hockey.