Street-Fighting-Techniques.info

In part two of this series of three posts I finnished off by describing the principles relating to how you use your opponents own power against them. That is fine in certain situations, but this third and final post is about going one step further than this to manipulate your opponent into providing the force that you require.

Actually the basic principle is deceptively simple: All you have to do is to try and force them to do the opposite the thing you actually want them to do, and then le go quickly. So if you want your opponent to move to the right, then try to push them to the left. when you do this they will resist by pushing back to the right, and if you stop pushing suddenly they will fall to the right before they can react to the abscence of resistance.

As with most things the best way to explain how this principle can actually be applied to street fighting is to describe an actual technique in which it is used:

Imagine that there are two men, one on either side of you, and they have grabbed hold of your arms. Perhaps they are trying to drag you off somewhere, or maybe they are holding you so that a third person can give you a beating. This is a dangerous situation, and unless you are much, much larger and stronger than them it will be virtually impossible to throw them off and escape. In any kind of scenario like this, in which you are likely to have at least a couple of seconds to think things through, your first thought should be to identify their weak points. With your arms restrained you can only attack with your legs, so the obvious weak point is the knees of your attackers inside legs. But just kicking their legs won’t do you much good. What you need is for them both to have all of their weight on their inside legs, so that a swift kick to he back of the knees will knock them both down to the ground. But again, unless you are some kind of hercules and they are 8 stone weaklings you will find it very difficult to pull two people around like this. So what do you do? The answer is simple. Rather than pull them into you, start off by trying to push them away from you. They respond by pushing back towards you. You then make a sudden switch to pull your arms inwards, they will add their strength to your puling them ont their inside legs, and you push your knee into the back of the knee of one attacker (effectively kneeling down on the back of their leg) whilst kicking the same area on the other attacker. Both of them will go down from this, and you can ten break their grip and get away with a simple backwards roll.

There are, of course, other specific techniques for using this principle in street fighting situations, and I may describe some of them in later posts, but then best fighters will use the general principle and adapt it to whatever situation they find themselves in, rather than sticking purely to preset techniques.