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The continuous attack strategy can be a very effective way to overwhelm an opponent in a fight, but you have to know how and when to apply it - I have seen people use it in MMA fights with disasterous results.

The basic principles is that when you attack and your opponent either gets hit or has to dodge out of the way, that is the time when you have the greatest advantage because you have control of what is happening, your opponent is just reacting to you rather than acting in the way that they would like, they are more likely to be off balance or in an awkard position because of your attack and therefore will less able to unleash an effective attack against you straight away. So the idea is to capitalise on this advantage with a relentless stream of continuous attacks. I once trained in a Ninjutsu school that based their training entirely on this method so when we trained punches and kicks you would always be told to step forwards after rather than going back to your starting position. We were told that you should attack with 100% commitment and not stop until the fight is over. You do have to train this strategy before using it to learn how to string together long combinations, and you should be prepared to strike with any and every part of your body.

The most important thing you need to get right using the continuous attack strategy is knowing when to start an attack, and when you have to stop. In the fight I mentioned before the ninjutsu fighter, having decided to use this strategy, just charged at his (much larger) opponent right from the beginning and basically just ran onto his opponents fist and got knocked out in the first few seconds. The point is that you should not attack at all until you see a decent opening in your opponents defences. Don’t just attack fromm the beginning, don’t punch or kick just for the sake of it or out of anger or to hurt your opponent but not beat them. Use the beginning of a fight solely to find that 1 chance for a decent strike - and then once you have begun your attack just keep going relentlessly. If you land a good punch with your first attack then this strategy will win you the fight 90% of the time, and even if you miss with your first attack it can be very effective.  As long as you are either striking or causing your opponent to break their usual stance to avoid your attacks then you are maintaining your advantage, but if they are backing away or to the side to avoid you without having to lean or duck then your advantage is lost, you are wearing yourself out for nothing, and you should stop. Get these 2 things right - when to start an attack and when to end it - the continuous attack strategy is more effective than any single technique.

Take a look at this article published on hubpages going through the basic principles of How To Punch, and how to generate power and speed in your punches.

Reading my post on knife fighting and knife defense will hopefully help to give you some of the basics, along with a few of what I think are the best techniques, but if you want to go further than that and gain some real skill then you will need to start a proper martial arts training programme. Kali is one of the best, if not the best system for this, and the DVD below by Baryy Cuda offers an excellent introduction to flow drills - on of the most important parts of training in knife fighting, along with a wide range of advanced and highly effective techniques. I reckon it’s the best product to get if you want to develop your skills in knife fighting and defense against knife attack.

If you haven’t already done so you might also like to take a look at his earlier post on special forces knife training

I was always taught that one of the most important things in a fight is to keep the body relaxed. Your natural tendency in such a high stress situation is to tense up, but this is not helpful at all. The first reason you need to be relaxed is because you can strike harder from a relaxed posture than a tense one, but the other reason is so that you can ‘roll with the punches’. To put it simply, when you get hit the force of the strike can do two things - it can move you or it can hurt you. Think of it like this, if you crash a car into a brick wall it will do more damage (to the wall and the car) than if you hit an unsecured barrier which will fly away. Now, there are situations in which you don’t want a strike to move you, most notably if you tak a punch to the chin you don’t want your head to get whipped to the side as that could lead to you losing consciousness (see: how to not get knocked out), but generally if you can go with the flow rather than against it you are better off. To do this you need to keep the body relaxed and just move yourself, or the part of yourself that is being hit, in the direction that the strike is knocking you. Being relaxed and not going rigid when you are hit also means that your body is more flexible and ‘elastic’. The reason children can take all sorts of knocks and falls without serious injury but an old man will break bones in a minor fall is because as you get older your body is less flexibile and responsive, and more rigid and brittle. Staying relaxed therefore reduces the likelihood of injury from a given attack.

I once spent some time training at a club where one of the basic fighting techniques which all students learned was how to roll with the punches and be responsive. The main training technique which they used was this: One student would take a bo staff (a long fighting staff weapon) and with one end then would put it against their training partner’s body in different positions and push them. The second person would then try to go with the motion of the push and incorporate it into a counter strike technique. So for example if someone pushes (or in an actual fight punches) your left hip or stomach, then your natural reaction is to double up and as your left lower torso goes back your right upper torso goes forward; so you would try to incorporate the movement imposed on you into a strike forwards with your right fist, avoiding getting hurt from the attack whilst also using it to direct more power into a counter attack. It does take a lot of training in this kind of thing to be able to use it in real street fighting situations, but the general principle of rolling with the punches is one that anyone can use without any training at all.

In addition to writing posts for this blog I also write articles that are published on other website on topics related to street self defense and martial arts in general. This helps me to promote the Street Fiughting Techniques blog as well as to earn a bit of extra income. One of the websites which I have been publishing a quite a lot of content on recently is hubpages, and I thought visitors to this site might be interested in a coupleof the articles which I have published there: Martial Arts Agility Training and Martial Arts Strength Training.

I do also write articles on other topics, so just in case you are interested here is what I think are a couple of my best ones:  How To Make Your Own iPhone Apps and Best Gift Baskets for Men. Hope you like them.