Street-Fighting-Techniques.info

I decided to start a new series of posts today, giving you my pick of all of the deadliest street fighting techniques I can find from any martial art.

I am kicking things of with something very simple, but very deadly - the stomp. Stamping on the head of a person who is on the ground causes serious damage and can often actually be fatal, so it is something you should never do except in the most desperate possible circumstances (like if you are being attacked by more than one person who you know wants to do you serious harm, and you need to make sure that if you knock someone down they won’t just get straight back up and come at you again).

So here is the technique for performing a powerful stomp. Raise your knee up as high and as close to your body as you can without losing your balance - it doesn’t matter how high your foot is lifted from the ground, it is the height of the knee that will determine how much power you can put into the technique. As you raise your knee you should also raise both hands in front of your body and cross them over. As you stomp down simultaneously throw your arms down and uncross them with as much force as you can. This arm movement serves 2 functions. Firstly it helps you to put all of the weight of your body into the stomp, and it also generates extra momentum from the muscles of the upper body an focusses it downwards into the stomp.

More of the deadly martial arts fighting techniques coming soon!

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.

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.

In ‘groin strikes part one’ I described the most efective kind of strike to use in close quarters combat; in this second part I want to look at a medium / long range technique. This technique is a combined block and counter-strike which I learned years ago as a teenager when I was studying Ninjutsu, and which has the beautifully poetic name of ‘monkey steals the peach’.

There are two main scenarios in which this technique is highly effective: 1) If you are in a long range (further than arms reach) stand-off and your opponent charges forwards with a punch. The reason yI’m being so specific with this in specifying long range is because a punch from medium or short range will reach you too quickly for most block and counter strike techniques, including this one. (see Classic Street Fighter: Kiss the Fist for an effective short range defense). 2) If your attacker steps forwards to grab hold of you, either by the shirt or the throut.

The following description assumes that you are right-handed, and should be simply reversed if you are left-handed. As soon as your attacker moves towards you step forwards with your left foot, bending your right leg so that you drop down onto your right knee. At the same time bring your left arm upwards with your forearm parallel to the ground. You should be aiming to knock the attack upwards over your head using your forearm at the same time as dropping down underneath it as you go down on one knee. At exactly the same time your right arm should swing out and then up into your atacker’s groin. You are aiming to make contact for this strike with the palm of your hand, specifically the ‘heel’ of the hand at the base of your thumb. Immediately as you make contact with the strike close your hand into a fist, grabbing and squeezing the testicles as hard as you can, and then rise up again, bringing your left foot back in line with your right foot and yanking your grabing hand back towards you.

This grabbing and yanking movement makes this a much more devastating technique than a simple strike, and is guaranteed to finish any fight if you get it right. A sharp and powerful yank can actually tear the scrotum (hence the name ‘monkey steals the peach’), so it should only be used if you are in serious danger and need to end a confrontation immediately at all costs.

When looking at the practical realities of street fighting one of the things that it is vital to recognise is that sometimes you have to fight dirty. This is emphatically not the case with modern sports oriented martial arts, and even many traditional martial arts have centuries old honour codes which forbid certain things. But if you are potentially fighting for your life in a street encounter you have to be ready to do anything, and likewise if you are an average build women trying to defend yourself against a larger man who is trying to rape you, then you should have absolutely no qualms about doing whatever it takes to incapacitate them, and often your only chance (other than knowledge and training) is to simply be more viscious than your attacker is prepared for.

One of the most effective ‘dirty fighting’ techniques, at least against a man, is the groin strike. This is so obvious that it is what most people would go for instinctively, but very few people know the best way to go about it. The classic example of a groin strike is, of course, to kick someone in the testicals, but this is actually one of the least effective attacks. There are two reasons for this: firstly it is very easy to miss in the chaos of a real fight (most kicks like this will end up banging into the inner thigh, or coming straight up and striking the perineum behind the testicals), and secondly, although a kick is likely to be very powerful, unless you are wearing steel toe-capped boots the striking surface of the foot will be softer and less damaging than a strike with the hand. So what I am going to do, over a couple of blog posts, is to look at a couple of different groin strikes, for use in different hand-to-hand fighting scenarios.

The first technique I will describe in this post is for use in very close range fighting. This means when you are basically ‘toe to toe’ with your opponent, within a few inches of one another. Perhaps they have grabbed hold of you, by the throut or by the front of your top, or perhaps you have fallen into each other during a messy scuffle. It can also work is you are on the floor and your attacker is on top of you. This strike is called (at least in some systems) a reverse hammer punch. Clenching your hand into an ordinary fist you should aim to make contact with the side of your hand, and the area running from the knuckle where your thumb joins your palm to the very base of your thumb bone where it meets your wrist. This area is small enough to concentrate the force of the strike, but large enough that you shouldn’t miss. Starting with your arm hanging down by your side, you can put extra force into the strike by generating as much of a swinging motion as you can, turning your upper body towards the opposite arm to add to this, whilst also bending your arm to lift your fist up into the groin. Although it sounds obvious it is worth mentioning that you should always look at where your aiming for, as many people neglect to do so with low strikes like this. If you have access to a heavy hanging bag then a bit of practice can really pay off with this technique in terms of power generation, but even without a great deal of power this should be enough to temporarily incapacitate your opponent.

In part two, which I’ll add at some point over the next week or so, I’ll describe a nasty little palm strike and grab starting from mid-range.