Street-Fighting-Techniques.info

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.