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.

On the face of it the game of chess might not seem to have very much in common with self-defense and street fighting. But don’t forget that the game was actually invented to help military commanders hone their strategy. And there is one particular aspect of chess that is highly relevant to a person ability to defend themselves against an attack in the street.

When you play chess you have to think at least a few moves ahead - its the only way you stand a chance of winning. In a fight it is slightly different, because you can’t (and shouldn’t try to) intellectually think through the possibilities in the way a chess player would, but still thinking ahead and holding possibities in mind is vitally important.

When it comes to actually defense -blocking, dodging and so on - anyone who has been in a real street fight will tell you that the hardest thing is not getting the techniques right, but being able to react quickly enough to use them at all. The single most effective way by far to increase your reaction time (and therefore increase your chances of winning a fight and of walking away unhurt) is to condition yourself to react automatically to your oppononets moves, so you are not wasting time thinking about what to do before you actually do it. That is why many martial arts classes devote so much time on repetative drills, designed to condition automatic responses.

A similar effect can also be created in the moment of an actual encounter, using a simple technique that anyone can useto good effect, but which requires a certain mental flexibility to fully master (sparring is a great way to develop this mastery). As you might of guessed from the first paragraph, it involved thinking one move ahead of your opponent.

Although there are hundreds of ways a person can attack you, and thousands of branching possibilities for how a fight can unfold, at any given moment in time during a confrontation there are usually only 2 or 3 main avenues of attack open (unless of course they have studied a martial art that specializes in unusual or deceptive attacks, but it is generally safe to discount such unlikely possiblities). As you both move around the possible attacks will constantly change, but they will always stsy at around this level (except at close range, where this techniue often breaks down). If you can hold these in mind, along with an appropriate response from each, then the instant they make a move you will be in a position to respond automatically without having to make a decision.

As I said, anyone can make use of this at the simplest level - thinking it they charge at me I’ll do X, if they start swinging punches I’ll do Y- to gain an advantage. But the real skill comes from observation. The more you can practice doing this the more you will be able to whittle down the number of possible attacks. Watching the shifting weight distribution on their feet, for example, can show you which side they can strike from without shifting slightly first, and whether they are capable of unleashing a kick at any given moment.

With a little practice, and a little flexibility of mind, this techniue can have a dramatic impact on the outcome of a fight.

For a mixed martial arts training drill designed to help improve your reaction speed click here

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Street Self Defense Secrets

I’ve been racking my brains over the past few days to think of a single technique that I would describe as being a classic street fighting move, as opposed to something from traditional martial arts or modern combat sports. It had to be something which couldn’t or wouldn’t be used in an MMA competition, and which you would be unlikely to see in a traditional class of something like karate or kung fu.

What I settled on in the end ticks all these boxes and highlights an important difference between real life self-defense situations and fighting with gloves in a ring or cage.

You might think, quite naturally really, that getting hit in the face is always a bad thing that you want to avoid. But once you are in a violent confrontation this might not always be the case. Here’s the basic principle: Knuckles are relatively small and intricate joints, which are more delicate than larger more solid bones, and include ligaments and tendons that can be damaged. Your forehead, on the other hand, is a large plate of solid bone whose sole purpose is to protect your body’s most vital organ - the brain. It’s just simple common sense that in any collision between a fist and a forehead the fist will always come off worst. More often than not a strong punch which hits the forehead will lead to a broken hand and only the mildest of bruises on the person being hit.

As anyone who has been in a sparring match or full contact confrontation will know, moving quickly enough to dodge or block a strike is much easier said than done. And this leads to what I think is the classic street fighting technique - headbutting a fist. It sounds crazy but it is actually one of the single most effective techniques around. If someone swings a punch towards your face it only takes a small movement to tuck your chin in and put your forehead down onto the oncoming fist, so if you have the balls to try it, it isn’t difficult to do. When it connects they will be hurt much worse than you will be, by moving forwards into their attack you gain the initiative and momentum and set yourself up for a counter-attack, and you will definitely get a 10 out of 10 for the surprise and intimidation factors.

The only refinement of this ‘kiss the fist’ technique is to make the headbutt diagonal so that rather than just stopping the fist with your head you make it glance off to the side. Very simple, very reliable, very effective and pure street fighter.

The sport of mixed martial arts, or MMA for short, has really exploded in popularity over recent years. This explosion has begun to transform the way people see martial arts, and as more and more people train in dedicated MMA gyms it has also started to transform the way in which people learn martial arts; modern MMA training and techniques are even finding their way into the syllabus of traditional kung fu and karate schools.  But alongside this phenomenal growth a kind of urban myth has also grown up. It goes something like this: martial arts styles and traditions which succeed in MMA competitions have proved themselves, and must therefore be the most effective. Because MMA is (supposedly though not actually) ‘no holds barred’ fighting it is realistic, and martial arts traditions and styles which don’t have success in the cage or ring mus be inferior. But I’m here to tell you that this is emphatically not the case.

MMA is still a combat sport and is not like real street fighting, and what works best in the cage does not necessarily work best in the street. There are quite a number of things which are irrelevant in MMA, and can therefore be left out of training, which are absolutely essential if you want to be able to defend yourself effectively in a real life encounter.

The most obvious point to make is that you are not allowed to use weapons in a sports fight. If you spend 100% of your training time focused on hand to hand combat then you are obviously going to perform better in that kind of situation than someone who spends 70% of their time on this, and the other 30% on training involving weapons; but if someone pulls a knife on you in the street you will be in basically the same situation as someone who has had no martial arts training at all.

And beyond simple omissions like these the style of fighting used in mixed martial arts can actually endanger your life if you use it in a real life situation. As anyone who has watched the UFC will know, MMA is heavy on grappling. Most fights end up going to the ground, and you will often see fighters engaged in tight wrestling like ground games, trying to gain a dominant position for getting a submission hold, for several minutes at a time. This kind of fighting would be virtual suicide in most street fights. For a start what are you going to do after you get a submission hold? There’s no referee to say you’ve won, and your going to have to let go at some point, and then unless you’ve actually broken a limb or joint you will be pretty much back to square one. Even worse is the fact that one-on-one fights, with no weapons, are not the only, or perhaps even the most likely scenario that you need to be preared for. If you get caught up on the ground with someone on one of these ‘chess game’ grappling contests then it is easy for one of their friends to come along and kick you in the head, or stomp on you, and you would have no chance to get away or defend yourself. If they have a concealed weapon it would also be easy for them to deliver a fatal blow before you even noticed they were doing anything at this close range.

The general rule for self-defense is to ’stick and move’, always keeping as many options open as possible and always keeping as much seperation and freedom of movement as possible. Grappling should only be used with a specific goal in mind - such as disarming someone, or intimidating a lone attacker into giving up.

Striking is different if you are not wearing gloves as well. Firstly you need to be aware of the chanced of breaking your own hand with a punch, and secondly there are some very effective strikes which just don’t work through the padding of a glove (watch this space for more on these!).

So if you are looking for a club to join you should really think about what this that you want to get out of you training - sport or self defense - and don’t be overly influenced by your favourite MMA star.