Street-Fighting-Techniques.info

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.

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.

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.

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.