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the gun, you actually have less moving to do than he does. It will take you less time to interfere with him than it would take him to do harm.

    Photo by Lee Celano/ WireImage.com
    Co-author Tom Taylor on protective assignments with hands pre-positioned.

    Photo by Lee Celano/ WireImage.com
    Note: Gavin de Becker & Associates does not disclose the identity of clients. The public figure in these photos has been named and identified as a client in financial disclosure reports made public by the political campaign as required by law. Subsequently, the information appeared in other public reports.
    Experienced protectors often pre-position arms and hands while working a crowd on a protective assignment because at arm's reach with hands pre-positioned, you've actually started the race before he has. A suspect who sees he is within arm's reach of an attentive protector whose hands are pre-positioned at the ready, will likely be deterred from attacking. And he is almost certainly prevented from success if he does try an attack. Deterrence persuades a person not to act, but prevention does much more: It works on the mind and the body.
    An important note about training: Because it is critical that the experience of prevailing over an attacker is imprinted more often than the experience of failing, we run more rounds with each trainee at 7 feet and at arm's reach than we do at 15 feet.
    Overlaying TAD concepts onto real attacks, the success rate for protectors would be even higher than in the exercises. That's not just because TAD attackers are more capable than most actual attackers, but also because TAD grants them some benefits few real attackers get:
     
They have the ability to practice -- a lot.
They are firing at an unobstructed target that cannot move.
They know the precise location and attention level of protectors.
In stark contrast to an actual attack, our attackers have relatively little stress because the stakes for them are fairly low.
    Given the many conditions that favor the TAD attacker, it's all the more impressive that protectors can win the race some of the time from 15 feet, about half the time from 7 feet, and virtually all the time when within arm's reach.
    In TAD, it's reasonable to consider lower-body hits as a partial success because almost all lower body hits occur when the gun is being pushed down by the protector, not when it is on its way up for the initial shot. In other words, protector intervention is responsible for turning potentially lethal upper-body hits into quite survivable lower-body hits.

Protector and Attacker Heart-Rates
    We've placed heart-rate monitors on TAD students to observe the points at which heart rates spike. With protectors, the big spike occurs at the moment they task their bodies to move very quickly toward the attacker, having seen the attacker draw the gun. No surprises there.

     
    Attackers don't really have to move much at all, so their heart rates remain normal and stable prior to the attack. The heart rates increase as the protector bears down on them, and immediately before the collision. Because it all happens in a second or less, it isn't possible to break down precisely which aspect of the event is causing the attacker's stress and increased heart rate. The main insight gained from monitoring is that attackers are calm pre-attack, and their heart rates do not staircase (climb steadily upward) prior to the attack. Based on interviews with TAD attackers, we glean that the heart rate spike has little to do with their physical actions in the attack (drawing and firing); rather, the spike is associated with muscular tensing, girding the body to resist being pushed over, thoughts of failing, and the general stress caused by time running out as the protector bears down on them. While actual attackers surely have more stress than TAD attackers, what's clear in either instance is this: Having a protector charging toward you has a destabilizing effect on your ability to perform.