Street-Fighting-Techniques.info

The first two principles which I went over in my last post are all about the way you use your own body and how to maximize the power that it generates. The next two more advanced principles are all about how you interact with an opponent. Was going to put them both in this post, but I just finnished number 3 and it’s a bit longer than I anticipated, so I’ll put the fourth one in a later post.

I’m sorry if this sounds like a science lesson in places, but it can’t be helped, and I’l try to explain it clearly. So anyway, here they are:

3) You can nullify your opponents strength, and make it impossible for them to resist your own force, if you direct your actions so that they run perpendicular to your opponents momentum.
Basically this means that you move at a right angle to the direction that you opponent is moving, and it should be clear if give you an example: If someone tries to hit you in the face you do not block it (if you have any sense at all) by putting your hand in front of the punch to catch it, because to do this you would have to be much, much stronger than them. Instead what you do to block is to hit he side of their forearm to puch their arm sideways so that it misses. As long as they are putting all their effort and power into throwing their fist out towards you they will be almost completely unable to resist any pressure pushing in a perpendicular plane of motion, i.e pushing their arm sideways. The same principle that is used is a block here can be used for counter-attacks and even attacks which feel effortless to perform because there is no resistance. My favourite technique using this principle is a counter to an MMA style charging takedown, which is quite common in street fighting. Your opponent charges into you, putting their shoulder into your mid-section to knock you down. The conventional response is to resist them by pushing back in the opposite direction to keep yourself upright. The most effective method, however, is to exert sideways pressure, which in this case takes the form of a twisting movement. All you need to do is to get one hand under their shoulder (preferably in their armpit) as they charge you, and the other on top of their other shoulder. Then you can allow them to push you backwards, but with relatively little strength you can twist them round by puling up on one shoulder and pushing down on the other so that it is them that lands on their back and not you. By doing this you are not only making sure that they can’t resist you, but you are also using their own strength against them, as they are effectively throwing themselves to the floor.

The fourth principle, which I will come back to in the next week or two, is progression from this one, so that as well as taking advantage of the power that they put into their attacks and using it against them, you can actually manipulate them into generating power for you to perform your techniques.