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.

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.

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: