They are not the end all be all to every situation. I know it hurts and us crippling to get kicked in the groin but let's be honest, what areas of the body do you protect the most?
I guarantee your groin is one of them. Most people expect it and therefore are ready for it.
I know many of you know this already but I been seeing some new people here lately always saying things like "then hit the groin" as if it is some magic remedy to every problem.
OK, first of all, 'restomp the groin' is an ongoing meme. It refers to a comic web series by 'Master Ken' which is intended to be taken as humor. You might see people using that term in that sense. It's a joke.
The groin is, as you said, a painful place to get hit for most men. It can hurt women too, although I suspect it's a different kind of pain for them.
In the USA, there has always been a notion of 'fair play' when it comes to fighting, which involves unwritten 'rules' about what not to do during a fight. For men, no scratching, no biting, no hair-pulling, no kicks to the groin, no eye-gouging, no weapons.
However, this applies to schoolyard fisticuffs, not self-defense among adults. If you are attacked, the rule is that there are no rules. Pick up a stick and beat them with it, pull hair, bite, kick 'em in the groin, whatever it takes. No one will accuse you of not fighting fair when someone is trying to murder you.
Our school teaches the groin kick, but we may be unlike many in that we don't expect a simple kick to the testicles to be effective. It might be, and in normal circumstances, it probably is. But as others have noted, it is unlikely to be effective on those who are high, drunk, enraged, etc. They just keep on coming at you. They may collapse in pain later, but it doesn't always stop them when you kick them.
Instead, our school teaches that the groin kick is meant to enter into the body and penetrate. The ideal is to break the pelvic bone, and that's what we are visualizing when we apply the kick; speed, power, penetration. I have been advised by a medical doctor here on MT that they have never heard of someone's pelvic bones being broken with a karate kick. Be that as it may, that's what we are trying for. There's a lot of soft tissue there, and if we kick to the groin, we want to damage ALL of it, not just slap the testicles with a shoe. So I guess that's the point of our training; we bury that kick up and in, full power.
However, the groin kick is also dangerous to apply in that it can be caught if it is slow to apply or to retract. Then you have a real problem. So it's not ideal, and like many types of attack, it has its disadvantages too.
If you want a devastating shot that is more likely to stop someone than the kick to the groin, I advise working on the liver shot. It's located on the right side of the body, so you have to develop your left hook or uppercut and left roundhouse kick to deliver it. You have to figure out precisely where the liver is located, and you have to put so much power there that it stops them in their tracks. You can knock someone out with a good liver shot. The pain is like nothing else on earth. You can lacerate a liver and put someone into the hospital for a long time, presuming you don't kill them.
What Makes the Liver Shot so Devastating? - SciFighting
