Street-Fighting-Techniques.info

I recently signed up to a website called HubPages that lets you create your own pages on any subject you like and I have been getting quite into it, so here are a couple of the pages that I created which I though readers of this blog might be interested to take a look at: How To win A Fight Againnst Multiple Opponents and Pressure Point Fighting

Although I would definitely advise against carrying a knife around with you just in case you need it to defend yourself there are nevertheless times when you are in a very dangerous situation and need a weapon to defend yourself, and often at these times a knife is the best choice.

If you do pick up a blade then there are two things which need to be at the forefront of your mind. Firstly you should remember that once a weapon is brought into a situation you are in danger from it as well as anyone else. Many, many people end up getting seriously hurt by their own weapon. Secondly, once you decide to arm yourself you are taking on a greater responsibility for what happens. If you a scared and lash out with a knife and end up killing someone who was perhaps just pushing you around a bit and hadn’t tried to seriously hurt you then you could easily find yourself in prison for manslaughter.

My best tip for combating both of these problems is to use a reverse grip. This basically means that instead of holding it with the blade poining upwards or outwards, you hold it so that the blade runs down the outside of your forearm, pointing towards your elbow. This makes it very difficult for anyone to grab hold of either the knife itself or your wrist, which obviously makes it much harder for them to wrestle the knife off you and use it against you. With this reverse grip it is also easier for you to use the handle of the knife to strike with what is almost an ordinary punch. This is more damaging and painful than an ordinary punch and may well be enough to show an attacker that you mean business and stop them in their tracks, but stops short of causing a potentially lethal injury.

For more advanced techniques check out my earlier post on special forces knife training

The first two principles which I went over in my last post are all about the way you use your own body and how to maximize the power that it generates. The next two more advanced principles are all about how you interact with an opponent. Was going to put them both in this post, but I just finnished number 3 and it’s a bit longer than I anticipated, so I’ll put the fourth one in a later post.

I’m sorry if this sounds like a science lesson in places, but it can’t be helped, and I’l try to explain it clearly. So anyway, here they are:

3) You can nullify your opponents strength, and make it impossible for them to resist your own force, if you direct your actions so that they run perpendicular to your opponents momentum.
Basically this means that you move at a right angle to the direction that you opponent is moving, and it should be clear if give you an example: If someone tries to hit you in the face you do not block it (if you have any sense at all) by putting your hand in front of the punch to catch it, because to do this you would have to be much, much stronger than them. Instead what you do to block is to hit he side of their forearm to puch their arm sideways so that it misses. As long as they are putting all their effort and power into throwing their fist out towards you they will be almost completely unable to resist any pressure pushing in a perpendicular plane of motion, i.e pushing their arm sideways. The same principle that is used is a block here can be used for counter-attacks and even attacks which feel effortless to perform because there is no resistance. My favourite technique using this principle is a counter to an MMA style charging takedown, which is quite common in street fighting. Your opponent charges into you, putting their shoulder into your mid-section to knock you down. The conventional response is to resist them by pushing back in the opposite direction to keep yourself upright. The most effective method, however, is to exert sideways pressure, which in this case takes the form of a twisting movement. All you need to do is to get one hand under their shoulder (preferably in their armpit) as they charge you, and the other on top of their other shoulder. Then you can allow them to push you backwards, but with relatively little strength you can twist them round by puling up on one shoulder and pushing down on the other so that it is them that lands on their back and not you. By doing this you are not only making sure that they can’t resist you, but you are also using their own strength against them, as they are effectively throwing themselves to the floor.

The fourth principle, which I will come back to in the next week or two, is progression from this one, so that as well as taking advantage of the power that they put into their attacks and using it against them, you can actually manipulate them into generating power for you to perform your techniques.

Power and strength will always be important in fighting and self-defense. If you are skillful then you can beat someone who is much stronger than yourself, but you need to know hat you are doing and you also need for them to not know what they are doing. But going to the gym, lifting weights and getting built like a body builder is not the only way to increase the power of your martial arts techniques. Following afew basic principles can dramatically increase the your power and effective strength instantly. In this article I will look at the 2 basic principles, and then in another post next week will go over a couple of more advanced principles.
1) Stay relaxed. People often feel that they are stronger when they tense their muscles, but actually the opposite is true. If your muscles are tensed even a bit before you move then this creates disharmony, meaning that some of them wil be pulling in different directions, cancelling each other out. It can also create knots which interupt the flow of movement and reduce your power. It is much easier said than done in a real life situation, but if you find yourself in a violent confrontation you should always try to keep your body as loose and relaxed as possible until the moment that you strike, even if your mind is as far from being relaxed as it can get!
2) Use your entire body. Again its easier said than done, but you can dramatically increase the power of any technique by moving the whole body together and in harmony, and by putting the weight of the body as well as the strength of the muscles behind your strikes. To give you an idea of how you can learn to do this here is a video showing a training technique that can be used to teach a student the mechanics and the ‘feel’ of how to put all of their strength and weight into a punch:

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.