Street-Fighting-Techniques.info

A good stance is every bit as important as individual attacking or defensive techniques, but many people don’t seem to realise just how important they are. A good solid stance will make it harder for an attacker to push you around or knock or throw you down, and will also influence both the range of different techniques available to you and also the power that you can put into any given technique.

Most martial arts have their own unique stances, but there are some basic principles that are common to them all which I will explain here, along with some additional considerations specific to street fighting self defense.

The most important thing that a stance must give you is stability. The most stable ‘general’ stance, for dealing with any eventuality, is a ’square stance’. This means that the distance sideways between your right and left foot is the same as the distance in the other direction between your front and back foot. Basically you should imagie that you are standing on a square, with (for example) your left foot on the front left corner, and your other foot on the back right corner. This gives you maximum stability in every direction.

Whatever stance you use you should alwats keep your knees slightly bent and in most stances you should make sure that your toes are pointing towards your opponent. Generally a defensive stance has the arms crossed in an X to provide maximum coverage, an attacking stance has uncrossed arms, and a median stance has the arms slightly crossed over.

If you want to do a little training to increase the strength of your stance there is a great exercise used in kung fu called the horse stance, which develops the specific kind of strength needed for a powerful, immovable stance. To do this just place your feet about one and a half to two times your shouder width apart and then bend your knees until your thighs are almost parallel to the ground, and then hold that position for as long as you can, making sure that you keep your back straight and dont lean forwards. If you can hold it for one minute then you have pretty strong legs, and if you can hold it for 5 minutes you will have developed a very strong stance.

In street fighting the ‘ready stance’ that you adopt in anticipation of violence can also be used to influence your opponent psychologically and gain the element of surprise. Holding your arms out with the hands open and palms facing your opponent is an unaggressive appeasing gesture, but it is also an effective fighting stance which easily allows both strikes and grabs. If you are trying to talk your way out of a situation then this kind of body language can help in talking someone down, but if they do attack then you can really catch them by surprise because they will often assume that you just aren’t prepared for a fight (because it’s not an obvious fighting stance), whereas in actual fact you are in the perfect stance to defend and counter attack.

I’ll write more about specific stances (such as for fighting mutiple opponents) and stance training in a later post.

Finger strikes can be amongst the most devastatingly effective dirty fighting techniques, suitable to use only for the most dangerous street fighting situations, but you need to know what your doing or you will only end up hurting yourself more than them.

To perform a finger strike you should hold your hand flat with the fingers pressed tightly together. The classic technique that everyone would think of is a jab to the eye. It is worth stating again that this should only be used in real emergencies. If someone is just pushing you around and intimidating you and hasn’t got really violent, and you react out of fear with a technique like this and end up blinding them, you could seriously regret it. With martial arts knowledge comes a greater responsibility for your actions than might otherwise be expected of you. This jab to the eye is fairly simple to do but you should remember two things - firstly if you miss the eye and strike the forehead or cheek bone you won’t hurt them at all and could well break your fingers, and secondly it doesn’t require much force to do a greeat deal of damage. For these reasons it is best not to jab out quickly, but to reach out in a very controlled manner and only speed it up and add power at the last moment, when your fingers are already just in front of the target.

Another good target is the juggular notch, which is the small indentation at the base of the throut, underneath the adam’s apple and between the two sides of the collar bone. Again accuracy is very important and unless yo are highly trained with this kind of technique it is actually best to place the middle finger into this notch and then push hard with as much of an explosive movement as you can. rather than actually striking. This is one of the best techniques to use if your attacker is very close and you need to push them away to get the space to escape or to stop them from doing something (like if they are strangling you, for example).

A lesser known but equally effective finger strike is the the armpit. You do have to be sure that it is accessible because using it against an opponent with a thick heavy coat or something on would be ineffective, but a quick jab to the lymph glands and soft flesh of the armpit, with all the force focussed into the small area of a finger tip, can be excruciatingly painful, will temporarily reduce the effective strength and range of movement of the arm, and if done well is quite capable of stunning an opponent into complete innaction for a couple of seconds. Although it is less likely with this technique that you will miss and strike against a bone or other solid area it is still important to recognise that if your fingers are bent back violently in doing this then you will get hurt. Most people are capable of an effective strike without much danger of hurting themselves simply because you a strike doesn’t need to be full strength to be effective, but you should be aware that a full strength strike would be quite likely to at least strain a tendon or ligament in the finger, which can be very painful. If you are willing to put in a little bit of training them finger tip press ups can quite easily build strength in both the tendons and ligaments so that you can perform more powerful finger strikes. If you can build it up so that you can do 50 finger-tip push ups in one go, then you will have the finnger strength to be able to strike against anything other than the solid bone of somewhere like the forehead without worrying about hurting yourself. If you are in reasonably good shape then 3 training sessions per week for a few months should be enough to build up to this level.

On the face of it the game of chess might not seem to have very much in common with self-defense and street fighting. But don’t forget that the game was actually invented to help military commanders hone their strategy. And there is one particular aspect of chess that is highly relevant to a person ability to defend themselves against an attack in the street.

When you play chess you have to think at least a few moves ahead - its the only way you stand a chance of winning. In a fight it is slightly different, because you can’t (and shouldn’t try to) intellectually think through the possibilities in the way a chess player would, but still thinking ahead and holding possibities in mind is vitally important.

When it comes to actually defense -blocking, dodging and so on - anyone who has been in a real street fight will tell you that the hardest thing is not getting the techniques right, but being able to react quickly enough to use them at all. The single most effective way by far to increase your reaction time (and therefore increase your chances of winning a fight and of walking away unhurt) is to condition yourself to react automatically to your oppononets moves, so you are not wasting time thinking about what to do before you actually do it. That is why many martial arts classes devote so much time on repetative drills, designed to condition automatic responses.

A similar effect can also be created in the moment of an actual encounter, using a simple technique that anyone can useto good effect, but which requires a certain mental flexibility to fully master (sparring is a great way to develop this mastery). As you might of guessed from the first paragraph, it involved thinking one move ahead of your opponent.

Although there are hundreds of ways a person can attack you, and thousands of branching possibilities for how a fight can unfold, at any given moment in time during a confrontation there are usually only 2 or 3 main avenues of attack open (unless of course they have studied a martial art that specializes in unusual or deceptive attacks, but it is generally safe to discount such unlikely possiblities). As you both move around the possible attacks will constantly change, but they will always stsy at around this level (except at close range, where this techniue often breaks down). If you can hold these in mind, along with an appropriate response from each, then the instant they make a move you will be in a position to respond automatically without having to make a decision.

As I said, anyone can make use of this at the simplest level - thinking it they charge at me I’ll do X, if they start swinging punches I’ll do Y- to gain an advantage. But the real skill comes from observation. The more you can practice doing this the more you will be able to whittle down the number of possible attacks. Watching the shifting weight distribution on their feet, for example, can show you which side they can strike from without shifting slightly first, and whether they are capable of unleashing a kick at any given moment.

With a little practice, and a little flexibility of mind, this techniue can have a dramatic impact on the outcome of a fight.

For a mixed martial arts training drill designed to help improve your reaction speed click here

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Street Self Defense Secrets

I’ve been racking my brains over the past few days to think of a single technique that I would describe as being a classic street fighting move, as opposed to something from traditional martial arts or modern combat sports. It had to be something which couldn’t or wouldn’t be used in an MMA competition, and which you would be unlikely to see in a traditional class of something like karate or kung fu.

What I settled on in the end ticks all these boxes and highlights an important difference between real life self-defense situations and fighting with gloves in a ring or cage.

You might think, quite naturally really, that getting hit in the face is always a bad thing that you want to avoid. But once you are in a violent confrontation this might not always be the case. Here’s the basic principle: Knuckles are relatively small and intricate joints, which are more delicate than larger more solid bones, and include ligaments and tendons that can be damaged. Your forehead, on the other hand, is a large plate of solid bone whose sole purpose is to protect your body’s most vital organ - the brain. It’s just simple common sense that in any collision between a fist and a forehead the fist will always come off worst. More often than not a strong punch which hits the forehead will lead to a broken hand and only the mildest of bruises on the person being hit.

As anyone who has been in a sparring match or full contact confrontation will know, moving quickly enough to dodge or block a strike is much easier said than done. And this leads to what I think is the classic street fighting technique - headbutting a fist. It sounds crazy but it is actually one of the single most effective techniques around. If someone swings a punch towards your face it only takes a small movement to tuck your chin in and put your forehead down onto the oncoming fist, so if you have the balls to try it, it isn’t difficult to do. When it connects they will be hurt much worse than you will be, by moving forwards into their attack you gain the initiative and momentum and set yourself up for a counter-attack, and you will definitely get a 10 out of 10 for the surprise and intimidation factors.

The only refinement of this ‘kiss the fist’ technique is to make the headbutt diagonal so that rather than just stopping the fist with your head you make it glance off to the side. Very simple, very reliable, very effective and pure street fighter.