The Tiger Within: Practical Self Defense In A Modern World: How To Bring Out Your Inner Tiger When You Need It Most Paperback – July 15, 2008

A good synthesis of knowledge.

The book is a great start of learning self defense either for advance martial art practitioners or beginners. The psychology part is as important as the physical strength. Many times you would find advance practitioners would stop improving after years of practicing. Why? Because they already have a mind set of which level they are at. If they have heard they are going against someone bigger or better.....they have fear in their eyes and muscles tense up and thinking they are ready to fight. But are they ready to fight to win? The book points out that you need to be like a cat -relaxed yet ready to move. Prepared but take it as it comes. If you are tensed and worried, you are not going to have a good result. As for beginners, it starts off explaining the mind set and how you can practice scenarios the book provided and run through it many times to prepare yourself. Noticing your surroundings is very important either at home or out. You never know WHERE and WHEN the danger can come. Of course after building up the mind set, physical practices are still needed. The book provides some illustrations of simple but great ways to self defend. I myself have tried some of them, and they are very smart and easy.To sum up, this is a book not to be missed either for beginners or advancers.

As a guy who has dabbled a bit in martial arts, and as a kid who has had to defend himself and others a fair bit I was interested in this book from the word go. Especially when I realised it covered what I consider to be a very neglected aspect of self-defense, how to prepare the mind.It will teach you how to use your surroundings, how to control your fear, even how you can potentially make your would be attacker afraid! Then it teaches very simple, no nonsense techniques that anyone can use to defend themselves. If you know someone that practises or teaches a martial art, this would be a great gift for them. Or if you are looking for ways to improve your ability to defend youself, then get this book.This book is unique. You won't find anything else like this. It's simple to read, and the exercises insideare very simple to carry out.[...]