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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.

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.

The third in my series of the deadliest fighting techniques is an internal force strike to the heart. I this context an ‘internal force strike’ basically means a strike which transmits the maximum amount of force inwards to the bodies internal organs, rather than dissipating it at the point of contact as you would want to if you were trying to break someone’s nose or cause some other superficial wound.

Looking at the heart strike is a good way to learn about this kind of attack, although as with all of these deadly techniques it is not something which I would advise you to go out and use. The basic principle is the same one which is used in CPR to restart a persons heart when it has stopped, only in this case it would have the opposite effect - stopping the heart. In order to achieve this you need to cause a compression of the chest which is best achieved by pushing rather than striking. All of these kind of internal force strikes, which can be used to knock the wind out of a person or attack the kidney’s (very painful and debilitating) as well as the heart, aim to cause this kind of compression. The trick is to do it quickly with a strike.

With an ordinary strike you would want to keep your arm relaxed up until the point of impact, when you would tense your whole arm and dissipate the force of the strike into the surface of their body, and you would want to be using all of your power when you hit. For this kind of attack you want to be using very little power when you make contact, but then increase to full power as you strike, and try to keep your arm relaxed as it makes contact.

This is difficult to describe adequately, as you really need to get a feel for it yourself to understand. The best way to do this is to find something to practice on which is capable of being compressed. An old car tyre standing up is good, but anything that allows for a decent amount of compression will do the job. To start off with just hit it in the normal way (wear gloves or use your palm, or you’ll hurt your hand) and you will see that there is very little give. Then use the first part of your strike just to make contact with your target as quickly as possible, without trying to put power into it until immediately after you have made contact. You should definitely use your palm for this, as it is much more effective than a fist. See how much more give there is, and you will begin to see how to do this strike. Keep practicing then to make sure that there is no pause at the point of contact and to learn how to transmit as much internal force as you can.