What is Self-Defense Masterclass?

Imagine soaring through the skies, untethered and free, with the skill to handle pretty much whatever the inaccurate weather forecast throws at you. That’s what the Self-Defense Masterclass is all about—equipping you with the skills to help you survive and thrive in the unpredictable air. This isn’t about chasing competition records or selecting fancy gear. It’s about investing in You—Your mind, Your body, and Your ability to stay effective in the air when you have to fight for your life. You train so you don’t panic.

Your Biggest Risk

In Germany, acrobatics is banned, but in Switzerland acrobatics is allowed. I think the Swiss perspective is deep and wise, and it forms our foundation to fly safely. I find it counter-productive to ban advanced wing control skills “for safety” reasons. Basic acrobatics form your foundation of how to better stay in control at the edge of chaos and return to control in turbulence. You do not need to do infinity tumbling skills, but to stay in control in turbulence, wingovers, spins, and stall training are essential. This is similar to learning basics in martial arts, so you can defend yourself, escape most common attacks. Also, by learning martial arts, you can de-escalate situations and usually avoid getting into brutal fights in the first place.

I think the biggest risk is wishful thinking and passivity, hoping the inevitable unpredictable situations miraculously never happen to you. One bad crash can bury your flying dreams forever. With the right experience, you can fly with confidence, knowing you’re prepared for most situations you will encounter in your life, with a little bit of luck, of course.

Many modern wings buy you comfort and confidence because that’s what most customers want. I think manufacturers should produce those wings most effective to survive rather than for comfort.

I believe confidence must be a by-product of having gone through difficult training and experiences, then knowing you have the ability to deal with the situation. Confidence without ability is dangerous. DO NOT upgrade your wing or harness until you have fully stalled your wings at least 100 times. If you haven’t done that, your confidence is not real.

Being comfortable with deep stalls and spins is probably the best investment you can make. My coaching isn’t about winning cross-country races or doing SIV courses. Ask someone else for that. Here, it is about survival—learning to identify and handle hostile situations, so you can hopefully avoid them. “A warrior’s blade must be sharp, fast, and dangerous if not respected; One’s blade is an extension of one’s soul. A dull blade betrays the lazy, impotent warrior. A sharp blade honors the disciplined, effective warrior. Who will be better able to cut through adversity?”

“A warrior’s blade must be sharp, fast, and dangerous if not respected; One’s blade is an extension of one’s soul. A dull blade betrays the lazy impotent warrior. A sharp blade honors the disciplined effective warrior. Who will be better able to cut through adversity?”

The Self-Defense Masterclass: Your Journey to Mastery

This program is designed to build your skills step by step, ensuring you’re ready for the real world of paragliding—where the weatherman is often wrong, and luck may not be enough.

Level 1 - Solo certification (You need this)

Level 2 - SIV/SIKU (Recommended)

Level 3 - Self-Defense Masterclass <—This Course

Level 4 - XC Adventure Coaching (Ask Someone else)

My coaching is about self-defense and surviving hostile conditions from my personal experience. I’m not here to coach you on what everyone else is doing, like SIV or XC. Because, you know, you only need to crash badly once before you will probably stop ever flying, so you need to survive in an imperfect, unpredictable real world. Even 10 SIV courses are not enough. Have you completed at least 100 full stalls before buying a new wing or harness? It’s so simple but difficult. If you do just that, you are probably safer than 95% of the pilots around you. I hope you are the kind of person who will avoid any serious injury that could end your flying career or suspend your progress. Do you want to be able to fly your whole life or talk about how you used to be a star in competitions before you stopped flying? Why not fly how you want and have more fun flying because you have awesome control? The weatherman is guaranteed to be wrong, so practice how to survive before your luck runs out!

Become comfortable in Hell

Many people are confident and successful at work because they have great people skills. But that confidence cannot be transferred to flying.

Most modern wings emphasize too much comfort, lulling pilots into a false sense of security. Modern wings are so often deceptively easy to handle under normal conditions, but the more solid they seem, the more violently they collapse when they do collapse in strong turbulence. Often, comfort leads to passivity, and passivity leads to fatality. Instead, why not stay playful and keep on learning lifelong? There is a level of optimal stress where you are having a lot of fun, where you are learning at a very good rate. Seriousness tends to get rigid, inflexible, dogmatic, but playfulness is fluid and fun, and never gets boring. Keep your play safe. That means, don’t be doing big wingovers close to the ground!

Passive Safety vs Active Safety

Passive Safety: Wings designed for comfort can lull pilots into a false sense of security, fostering complacency and leaving them blind to potential dangers. They inspire confidence—until they suddenly fail. While passive safety is essential for beginners, these wings encourage passivity, lack playfulness, and do little to promote situational awareness. In critical moments, inexperienced pilots over-react instead of anticipating trouble and taking action, since the wing is “supposed” to sort everything by itself.

Active Safety: Twitchy, responsive wings require constant inputs to stay in control, forcing pilots' awareness of the air around them. A responsive wing that scares you early might actually be safer than one that builds over-confidence. Pilots must learn to be patient, stay calm, and act, and the wing has a bigger range of speed and performance, giving the pilot greater escape velocity and greater landing site options.

Confidence Can Betray You

As a beginner, you will start with a low EnB or an EnA wing because you do not have the experience to control a twitchy EnC or EnD wing in turbulence. Eventually, you will want to journey further and discover greater distances.

The unfortunate trend is that manufacturers make most modern wings deceptively easy to handle under normal conditions, therefore instilling a sense of confidence in unskilled pilots before they’ve truly developed competence. Comfortable wings usually have a stronger self-pitch stable profile (reflex) and are easier to fly. For example, on some highly pitch-stable wings, a 10-20% applied brake changes the wing profile to what is outside the certification range, and some wings can violently shoot forward and even go below you, collapsing hugely with very little feedback. In other words, a wing that behaves docilely as an EnB can suddenly behave like an EnD when pushed beyond certification test situations.

Less self-pitch stable wings require your active inputs constantly, keeping you constantly on the alert, forcing you to be aware of the quality of the air around you. This can be terrifying for many pilots and energizing to a few pilots. For my temperament, I think a wing that warns me is safer than a wing that gives you over-confidence then collapses without warning.

Why training Far Beyond SIV/SIKU Matters

SIV can be highly beneficial for most people to start to gain confidence to do collapses and stalls. But it should never end there. It is unrealistic to respond in a real situation correctly unless you have muscle memory of situations that are as close as possible to the actual emergencies. Perhaps if you are very rich and can afford dozens of SIV courses, but even then, it’s hard to reach 100s of stalls with SIV courses. Like martial arts, paragliding also takes a decade of hardcore, disciplined practice, with 1000+ stalls to learn how to control the wing in a non-flying configuration, much like acro pilots. You need to rehearse worst-case scenarios until they are second nature. You need muscle memory, as things happen so quickly. And when you reach this level of competence, you are safer than 99% of the pilots and safer than many world-class XC competition pilots when the air gets spicy.

Fortunately, one can speed it up significantly by learning basic safety skills before stepping up to a high-performance XC wing. It would be to practice basic acro. I would have a minimum of a sit-up harness with a protector, 2 reserves (e.g., 1 steerable front, 1 inside the harness), and plenty of altitude over the surface, even for wingovers. Don’t get over-confident and take baby steps. In real emergencies, I can tell you from experience that the front reserve or Rogallo style (Beamer) is much more versatile and fast-opening. However, the disturbing trend is that manufacturers sell harnesses that have reserves under the seat, and students don’t know that the front is far easier to deploy. Yet, most schools don’t recommend front nor steerable reserves for their students. I believe, at worst, the steerable will open faster and go straight down like a normal reserve. If you don’t grab the handles and the reserve risers to make it steer, it sinks like a regular reserve.

Under-the-seat reserves result in slower deployment and more difficult deployment under strong G-forces. If you are in a spiral, the reserve becomes multiple times heavier and resists pulling even more with friction, and then you need to pull exactly in the direction that the reserve can slide out from under the seat. Sometimes handles rip off as pilots panic and pull it in an incorrect way. If you are falling toward the ground, these details can make the difference between life or death, yet most reserves are under the seat, and manufacturers continue this trend as well. These trends do not prioritize self-defense from my perspective.

In paragliding, you must think on your own about your competence level and strength when you take an expert’s advice. A site that is safe for one pilot can be deadly for another. Always do your own research! You are responsible for your own safety.

To fly safely XC over challenging terrain where the turbulence is unpredictable, possibly extreme, you need to know what to do precisely, quickly, without being overwhelmed. You need to have rehearsed it many, many times so you have muscle memory. Otherwise, you are just being lucky so far, doing XC in the Swiss Alps. Learning air self-defense is unavoidably risky, but my opinion is that it will be safer in the long run for pilots who fly a lot.

To survive in the air is not about your IQ but more about your mental stability and already knowing what you need to survive. You will be too stressed to use your IQ. So you need to train for mental stability. To stay calm in strong turbulence, it’s essential to practice difficult scenarios through breath-work, icy cold showers, and basic acro training. If you don’t practice encounters with a good level of discomfort regularly, your tolerance to discomfort will gradually evaporate.

Pushing Your Own Boundaries so You Can Learn to Control Your Emotions

You may be talented. But you don’t get much further without a disciplined mind. Even once you’ve mastered a maneuver, while you are healthy and young, you should continue pushing your boundaries in small, manageable steps to build stress tolerance, skill, and confidence to conquer hellish situations. As you get weaker and older, your reactions will slow, and you should slowly downgrade your equipment to compensate, so if you are flying a CCC, you can go to D, then C, then to a B over many golden years.

"You must be the teacher and the pupil; you have to learn from yourself, not from an authority that tells you what to do, what to think. There is no guide, no teacher, no authority. There is only you—your relationship with others and with the world—there is nothing else."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti

Be and Artist, Not a Scorekeeper

This is what I’ve observed. Every martial art has a risk of becoming ineffective in real combat. When Japanese Jiujitsu joined to become an Olympic sport, it was castrated. It was rebranded as Judo, and the most effective and efficient war skills were removed from the practice, and step by step, the art of self-defense became a sport of scoring points, rather than battle and survival skills in life-and-death situations. Fortunately, a Japanese master who immigrated to Brazil taught his Brazilian friends this original artform, and the Jiujitsu remained not only deadly but further improved and returned to Japan as Brazilian Jiujitsu (BJJ). There are moves in Jiujitsu which are not allowed for competition, but they are still taught for self-defense in BJJ.

Paragliding was invented by pioneers who risked their lives for you, and it is good that over the years, tech advancements made the wings safer, more performant, and lighter. From my perspective, today’s paraglider customers are steering the manufacturers toward comfort and user-friendliness, sacrificing feedback and survivability in the rare but very dangerous situations.

Similarly, many of the competition-level pilots from around the world, if they had to fly alone over the unfamiliar rocky Swiss Alps, without the race organizers, weather planning staff, and racing gaggle, probably can’t fly safely on their own. But there are many genius pilots who are regularly flying high in unforgiving terrain, in super difficult takeoff conditions, turbulent air, facing plenty of inaccurate weather forecasts, unknown, and flying until a ripe old age, like the Sherpas in the Himalaya. There is a huge difference between Sports vs Arts. When money flows in, the trend pushes the herd toward a sports competition mentality, everyone believing and doing the same thing. From my perspective, this is a very dangerous trend because we are moving away from the nature of reality. We fly outdoors in nature, not in an Olympic stadium with a referee that stops the bad weather.

There are many really good pilots out there, but partly because the new wings feel so stable to fly, the majority of the new pilots are oblivious about the wing’s multiple personalities. Most are flying too difficult a wing that they cannot handle as soon as conditions change, and the glider goes out of the EN certified test range, the hidden personality shows. Certification collapses happen in non-turbulent air with no brake inputs with a precise certified collapse angle, which is not how real collapses happen. But this is the best we have today. And I know from experience, some uncertified wings fly safer than certified wings. So you need to find out by yourself, know how to handle your specific wing, and know how and when the wing changes personality at the edge of chaos.

Take Control of Your Flying Future

Don’t let the sport’s flashy equipment and competition mentality blind you to see the reality. Make wise decisions. Build a mental model of your wing’s physics that’s grounded in experience, not just certifications. Watch many, many paraglider crash videos, analyze/visualize the mistakes, and train to avoid them.

Your most dangerous years are the first 2-4 years after you get your license, and the bad habits and beliefs learned in the first 5 years typically stay forever. The reality is most certified pilots stop flying regularly shortly after getting their license. Learn to focus 100% on preparation and flying. Keep out other thoughts about arguments you had with your partner, boss, etc. After years of not flying, it is also good to refresh your skills and start again with an easier wing and choose the right weather. Always have plenty of altitude and have double reserves whenever you train.

Key Principles to Teach Yourself:

• Work on your mental stability under stress/anxiety (strengthen your parasympathetic nervous system). Wim Hof suggests ice-cold baths/showers with breathing exercises.

• Upgrade your skills before upgrading your wings. Max out your training on an easy wing and sit-up harness before going into a pod harness and/or to a higher performance wing. Even EN-A wings can shoot past the horizon and go underneath you when tested beyond EN certification maneuvers. A pod harness makes progression unnecessarily risky.

• First, find out what you should NOT do. Stop bad habits before they become dangerous.

• Secondly, find out what you should DO. One positive habit enhances another positive habit. They will accelerate your learning.

• When you upgrade to a faster wing, learn everything first on a sit-up harness.

• Know your own limits. Become competent first, before getting confident. Focus practice on what you are weak in.

• Know the glider’s limits. Know exactly how much max braking you can do before you stall at what airspeed, for example.

• Don’t party and rest properly the night before if you plan to fly. Even a slower reaction speed of even 0.1s can sometimes make a difference between life or death.

• Be grateful, keep a generosity of mind. This is the one virtue that will save you from getting arrogant!

• Immediately look at the wing with an anomaly, ball up, respond quickly, precisely, and stop any riser twist with your body and hands.

• Develop 3D spatial awareness. Always know where other pilots are, their direction. Always be aware of your compass heading away from obstacles.

• Fly defensively, always yield to be safe, rather than to assert your right of way, when in potential danger.

• Not planning for Plan B is planning to crash. Keep an eye on safe emergency landing spots. Try to predict the vortex/rotor by looking at the terrain, sun, and wind.

• Remember small mistakes. Fix them so you may avoid big ones.

Some Tips

• Breathwork techniques

• Synchronize breath with movement

• Work on your calmness and sensitivity so you can feel your wing and imagine what the air is doing

• Wing Energy Management

• Full brakes until just before stall

• Stall point -> Stop before stall

• Spin point -> Stop before spin

• Spin -> Exit Spin (Be precise on the exit to avoid riser twists.)

• Wingovers -> Loop

• Very Big Ears and recovery from cravat

• Full stall > Flyback > Deep stall (Advanced) > Helicopter control (Very Advanced)

• Pendulum control

• Pitch, Roll, Yaw

• How to select: Harnesses, Steerable Front Reserves, Quickout Carabiners, hook knife, GPS Vario with airspace for XC, Compass, Smart Watch, GPS tracker, etc. Can you go from 0% to 100% brake range in less than 0.2s? For that, even the type of brake handle makes a big difference.

• Learn to inspect your equipment regularly. If you see tiny holes, tape them quickly before they get bigger. Order new lines if they start to fray.

• Avoiding Cascades, Preventing Horseshoe, and Riser-Twists, Nose-down spiral, etc. If you fall into the canopy, start swimming.

• Control in strong Turbulence, Precipitation, and Strong wind

• Aviate, Navigate, Escape, or Land

• Learn Spin, 2-stage Stall, Stable Flyback, and Deep Stall, Clearing a cravat without using Stabilo most of the time

• Efficient use of Speed-bar and Back-risers

• Get extremely comfortable to use 100% brake range

• Avoiding losing your mind to Group Think

• The bigger the group, the more likely they will be wrong

• Gain skills and confidence to decide for yourself

• Reading the Mountain Air

• Interpret Sky. Read Terrain and Air currents

• Understanding Weather Forecasts even better

• Use Weather Alerts on mobile phone. Link them to smartwatch or earbuds.

• Master Rapid Descent

• Spiral with Big Ear

• B-Stall

• FlyBack

• Big ears with speedbar

• Wingover

• Looping

• Reserve deployment and Emergency Landing Techniques

• Strategically down-plane to pick your landing spot

• How to Land in an Emergency

• Show respect and gratitude to Farmers

• How to Land safer

• Leave it better than you found it. Leave no trace and pick up other people’s trash if you can carry it.

• Learning from other people’s mistakes whenever possible

• Be open-minded, see from multiple perspectives, keep your ego in check, and follow your heart! Always remember that the road to hell is paved with good intentions! Superior paragliding pilots use their superior judgment to avoid situations where they will need to use their superior skills. If you really want to fly a lifetime, get serious about your self-defense skills first! Your big XC dreams can wait ;)

Contact me today to join the Self-Defense Masterclass. Let’s build the skills, confidence, and mindset to keep you flying for a lifetime!