Street-Fighting-Techniques.info

Here is my pick of the best DVD’s available on women’s self-defense from both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk:

USA:

UK:

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.

Generally martial arts techniques and training are the same for men or women, but sometimes it can be useful to differentiate. And because most of the people who join clubs and go to classes (as well as the people who run them) tend to be men, female self defense can sometimes get less attention.

The main reason why it can be good to look at training specifically geared towards women is not what you probably imagine - it is not anything to do with size or strength. There are small men around, just as there are big strong women, and no matter how big and strong you are it is always useful to learn how to deal with a bigger, stronger opponent. It is not even the fact that women often have less confidence in their ability when they begin, although this can come into it. In actual fact the primary reason is because the kind of self-defense situation a women is most likely to find herself in, such as an attempted rape for example, is different from the kind of situation a man is more likely to find himself in.

As a man, who has trained mostly with other men, I don’t claim to be an expert on this topic. So here is the best website I could find to recommend, which offers a free report to all visitors on self-defense for women