Our History
Progressive Defence is Brisbane-based organisation focussed on providing cutting edge self defence and defensive tactics training for the general public, law enforcement, security and health care sectors. Modern, innovative and dynamic in our approach, we believe our material to be at the forefront of reality-based self defence training. Further to this, we truly believe that self defence begins with the “self.” As such, we spend considerable time on understanding our own being on a physical, emotional and sub-conscious level.
Our founder, Joe Saunders, began teaching reality-based self defence methods whilst studying Education and Psychology at the University of Queensland. To supplement his income, Joe had begun working as a crowd controller (bouncer) at a number of busy nightclubs and bars throughout Brisbane. Despite having trained in a variety of martial arts since the age of four, he quickly discovered that he was not adequately prepared for the gritty, dirty, bodily fluid-soaked realities of alcohol, drug and ego-fuelled violence. There was no concept of ‘fair’, no rules, no regard for health, no referees to step in, and of course the legal consequences of potentially using too much force either in defending oneself or evicting a patron. Feeling that his martial arts and security training had not been sufficient for the realities he now faced, Joe started on a quest to better understand violence, how to avoid it and how to defeat it.
This quest for knowledge quickly evolved from focussing solely on nightclub violence to a broad range of areas including predator psychology, occupational violence prevention, intuition training, women’s self defence and rape prevention, verbal de-escalation training, physiology and psychology of violence and child protection. Joe’s journey led him to training with the founder of Senshido and one of the early pioneers of Reality-Based Self-Defence, Richard Dimitri. Rich dramatically changed Joe’s outlook on self defence training and on life itself. After keeping in touch for a number of years, Joe was invited to join the Senshido International team and become an affiliated instructor of Senshido material. The below video is Joe explaining in his own words how and why he was drawn to Senshido:
Joe’s quest did not end there, though, as he continues to seek out the best instructors on the planet, including: Raymond Floro, John Whipp, John Will, Randy Couture, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, Erik Paulson, Dave Camarillo, Deane Lawler, Richard Norton, ISR Matrix and many more. The Progressive Defence curriculum is also heavy influenced by the literary work of Gavin DeBecker, Geoff Thompson and Dan Millman.
Joe has since provided training to government law enforcement and healthcare organisations, as well as consulted with private businesses and the security industry.
Joe also writes a popular blog on personal safety and violence prevention which can be found at Joe-Saunders.com