Street-Fighting-Techniques.info

This technique is used regular by police officers and is a great way to pacify an attacker and gain control over them. Basically it just involves using your thumb and forefinger to grab and apply pressure to either side of the voice box. This is easier to do on men, because it is so easy to find the right place just by going either side of the adam’s apple, but it does also work on women. You can find the correct place on yourself by running your thumb one side of your voice box and your finger the other side, then gently pushing inwards and then squeezing your fingers lightly together so that the tips of your thumb and forefinger push in behind it. You really don’t need to push hard when doing this to cause pain, and more importantly to make it very clear to them that you can cause serious injury by applying more force. The psychological effect of this technique is perhaps even stronger than the physical effect, as it is a very unpleasant and scary feeling. The only weakness of this technique is that your opponent can get out of it by pulling backwards, so you need to either have a firm grip on them with your other hand, or have them backed aginst something so that they can’t back away further.

I thought it was about time I added another post in my self-defense for women section, and particularly about defense against sexual assualt, as this is the main issue specific to women and one that I have only touched on lightly before. This is a specific technique for a very specific scenario, but I will be adding more later to cover a wider range of circumstances.

So here is the situation: you are lying on your back, your attacker is between your legs, most likely with your knees raised up, you are struggling and your attacker is trying to subdue you by hitting you. It is worth noting that this position, the most common position immediately prior to a full sexual assault, is a common defensive posture used in mixed martial arts called the guard, so there are a large number of proven techniques that can be used to defend yourself in this situation (although not all MMA techniques would be appropriate).

And here is what you do: As your attacker hits you grab hold of their wrist. This shouldn’t be hard to do, as long as you can overcome the natural instinct to just try to block the strike - you may have to just let them hit you in order to concentrate on making the grab, but it is worth making this kind of sacrifice. At the same time you should twist your body to the side lifting whichever of your legs is on the same side as the arm they used to hit you and throwing it across in font of their face so that the back of your leg is against their head or neck. From here it is actually fairly easy to apply a very painful joint lock that is perfectly capable of breaking the arm at the elbow simply by straightening your body and flattening yourself against the ground by pulling their arm and pushing their head with your leg so that you end up lying on top of their arm - then just pull up on their wrist whilst using the weight of your body to keep their elbow down. You woulod be suprised how little strength you need to use when doing this to cause exreme pain and even to break the arm at he elbow joint (which is a much worse injury than a regular fracture).

For a bit of further information on using arm bars as a defense fromthis position here is a video showing how it is used in mixed martial arts fighting:

From the street to the bedroom…continuing the self-defense for women series here is a video I found with some good advice on defending yourself from an attempted sexual assualt:

Here is my pick of the best DVD’s available on women’s self-defense from both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk:

USA:

UK:

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.