The average person spends very little time in their life reviewing self-defense or martial arts programs. You may buy in to a program that has no basis in real world self-defense because you don't know what you don't know.
Here are 3 red flags that a program may not be reality based:
1. They do pre-rehearsed self-defense demos. For instance, they'll have a woman being attacked and as she kicks and punches the attackers, they drop like flies all around her. COBRA Self-Defense never does pre-rehearsed demos. We will pull someone from the audience who we may have never met to help illustrate the reality of the point we're trying to make.
2. They demonstrate a child kicking and punching an adult male until he drops, defeated. This will never happen.
Kids can't fight their way out of the grasp of a determined adult criminal the way most people think.
3.  The demonstrating attacker holds his or her punch out and stands still while the defense is being executed. In the martial arts, this is called "one-step sparring" and it is often passed off as self-defense. It is not.