Street-Fighting-Techniques.info

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.

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.