Self Defense

[terryl965]

What do you consider to be the one set of Self Defense movement that a student young or old needs to train on a daily basis and what is your reasoning behind it.

I know there are alot of movement for Sd but we all train one more than the others and that is what I'm talking about.

 

[TKDmel]

Rather than training one favorite SD, I train consistantly on just breaking the grabs from any direction. After that the rest just happens.

 

[terryl965]

Rather than training one favorite SD, I train consistantly on just breaking the grabs from any direction. After that the rest just happens.

What types of break are you using most of the time to release yourself from one grab?

 

[TKDmel]

Terry, if grabbed at the wrist, upper arm, shoulder or front of clothing, I break the hold turning their hand/wrist, using various joint locks depending on where the grab is. I train so that the reaction to grabs becomes second nature. Don't know if this is what you wanted to know.

 

[terryl965]

Terry, if grabbed at the wrist, upper arm, shoulder or front of clothing, I break the hold turning their hand/wrist, using various joint locks depending on where the grab is. I train so that the reaction to grabs becomes second nature. Don't know if this is what you wanted to know.

Yes it is and when you do turn the arm, is it usually done from a inside to outside or outside in to keep the person close to you.

 

[TKDmel]

Yes it is and when you do turn the arm, is it usually done from a inside to outside or outside in to keep the person close to you.

I'm a very short guy, and so I find that most often to keep them closer, I use out to in. I try to visualize such a situation and how I would prefer to lock the joint bringing their head down towards my knee. For me its a quicker and more powerful manuever.

 

[tellner]

In a word, none.

First, what a child needs is different than an adolescent, an adult or an elderly person, for a man or woman, for someone who is large versus small and tall as opposed to short.

Second, if self defense is a series of memorized techniques that's the wrong answer. Only one fight in my life went exactly as planned. That's because I knew what was going to happen months in advance. Technique is something that you learn in the beginning to give you a handle on what you're learning. If your practice goes well you will get to the point where the technique invents itself as needed on the spot. You will internalized your training to the point where you will use it spontaneously under pressure.

 

[TKDmel]

In a word, none.

First, what a child needs is different than an adolescent, an adult or an elderly person, for a man or woman, for someone who is large versus small and tall as opposed to short.

Second, if self defense is a series of memorized techniques that's the wrong answer. Only one fight in my life went exactly as planned. That's because I knew what was going to happen months in advance. Technique is something that you learn in the beginning to give you a handle on what you're learning. If your practice goes well you will get to the point where the technique invents itself as needed on the spot. You will internalized your training to the point where you will use it spontaneously under pressure.

Ah, but tellner, your key word was practice! I constantly practice breaking grabs so that it is spontaneous. But I do agree that after breaking the grab the rest is on the spot do it!

 

[Drac]

What do you consider to be the one set of Self Defense movement that a student young or old needs to train on a daily basis and what is your reasoning behind it.

Wrist grabs..remember the little girl abducted in Fla..The surveillance video showed that the perp just walked up and grabbed her by the wrist..I feel that any break from a wrist grab is a mandatory technique for women, teens and children taking SD........

 

[exile]

My mantra is, get outside the strike, secure the bastard (usually by getting counterpinning his wrist), turn away to lock him in and slam your outerforearm down on on his attacking arm to pin his elbow and force him DOWN. This is the message that O/J/K/CMAs are telling you constantly: when he grabs you, or throws a punch at you, he's making a limb vulnerable. Take him up on his kind offer, pin the bloody wrist, turn, project your weight into the strike to his elbow, and once he's forced down, you can deliver...

(i) an elbow strike to the face (`chamber to the down block') followed by a hammer fist to the throat (aka `down block')... and there you have the very first two moves of Kicho 1 and 2;

(ii) proceed from the elbow strike (`chamber to the outward block') to a hair or ear grab, then pulling the attacker's head down with his arm still trapped (`outward block')...

... and any damned thing you want to do further, most typically

(iii) stepping forward while he's still reeling and delivering a palm-heel strike to his jaw under his ear, if you're feeling charitable, or his larynx, if you're not, or something similar.

Muchimi plays a bit role in this and that's something else I work on. The smooth and automatic transition from striking limb to gripping limb is very effective but not automatic. I'm still getting the hang of it after four years.

The main thing I train is controlling the aggressive limb—whether it takes the form of a grap, a punch or whatever. If it's a grab, it's easy. If it's a punch, it's trickier, but if you've used a proper `Fence'-type defensive setup, deflection of the striking fist into a trap on that arm is largely a matter of practice. It lets you deflect to the outside, but if you can deflect to the inside, then you can get outside and then things are as in the first scenario. There are many variants, but basically, the attacking situation requires him to project one of his limbs close to you. My main SD practice consists of reflexive incapacitation, ideally by control, of that limb. Once I've got it, the SOB is anchored and locks, pins, and other controlling moves can be applied that will culminate in something very nasty happening to his larynx or carotid sinus, ideally, using the non-controlling hand.

When I'm inside, it's a little different. But not that much. Deflect with the Fence, turn and hard elbow to face, grip and low sidekick to the side of his knee with sincere intent to rupture his knee joint. And knifehand to the throat, again. There are many variants but there's a common thread there...

Not very elegant, I know, but Kwan-era TKD wasn't elegant at all... :EG:

 

[tellner]

TKDMel, you shouldn't spend an inordinate amount of time practicing stuff that isn't going to be useful. Enough to keep it rust-free and up to scratch, but the things that you spend the most time practicing should probably be the ones that are the most useful either as training aids, respositories for what you know or for the sort of fight you envision yourself getting into.

If your honest opinion is that you're going to be grabbed a lot it's probably good to spend a lot of time on that. But it's not a set of techniques that is right for everyone to practice every day.

Just as an example, when my wife and I tested for guru muda certification in Bukti Negara back in the day we had to improvise some self defense techniques. We didn't know in advance what we were going to do. The testing board said "Use the first and third movements from djuru four". They had the attackers punch, kick and shoot. So I did. They told Tiel to cross her wrists and then told another student "Grab her wrists." She said (and I quote) "Oh ****, not a ****ing wrist grab," and immediately improvised an entry, elbow, headbutt and kinjit (a body throw), finishing up by putting the boot into him on the ground.

We hadn't done anything explicitly about wrist grabs since, oh, years back when I did Kajukenbo. If we'd been practicing self defense technique all that time we would have been lost. Dig through dozens of techniques and the formal curriculum for the answer and take the chance that the few specific ones we learned would be the correct ones for the particular attack? That would be organized despair. We were studying a martial art, not a short-term self defense class. The answers needed to come from our internalized understanding of the root movements, basic elements and principles from training.

If you're relying on a short term self defense course you will probably have a minimal set of techniques. It's good to practice all of them, because they will be pretty limited, and you won't have depth to fall back on.

 

[Kacey]

What do you consider to be the one set of Self Defense movement that a student young or old needs to train on a daily basis and what is your reasoning behind it.

I know there are alot of movement for Sd but we all train one more than the others and that is what I'm talking about.

Awareness, of what is going on around you, ways out, routes to avoid, places to go, potential situations to react to. Drac mentioned the girl abducted in Florida - and yes, knowing how to get out of a wrist grab would have helped - but knowing why to avoid the route she took would have prevented the situation in the first place.

 

[tellner]

So what are some of these magical awareness techniques and training methods? Lots of people talk about them, but what are they? How do you teach them? What are the training exercises, drills, teaching progressions and out of class work that effectively teach them?

I hear this advice all the time, but almost nobody has any idea of how to do it and how to bring along a student to develop those skills and attributes. A handout of common things that criminals do might be a start. But if it's what you're recommending as the keystone of self defense training there needs to be a lot more, and it needs to be a lot more sophisticated than that.

Now, I do know some people who teach awareness very well. Every one of them also teaches really viciously effective physical methods. In fact, some of those are vital parts of the awareness training.

Some people walk around in a Condition White haze. It's amazing they don't crash into telephone poles and buildings. Most don't. Is the best advice really to tell them to practice what they already know? They come to class to learn what they don't know.

 

[Brian R. VanCise]

Well I think you need to have multiple options because every situation will be differant. However, I agree with Kacey on the importance of awareness and also on that one needs to be able to feel when something is not right so that they can avoid it.

Tellner could you elaborate on how you teach awareness or how your instructor does so? Maybe then we can get an impression on what you do. Thanks.

 

[Brian R. VanCise]

Regarding how you teach awareness we can take it to this thread: Awareness.. How do you teach it?

 

[tellner]

It's not something that's taught separately or even explicitly. I only noticed the change when I had to use it.

We spend a lot of pretty in depth work on distance and timing these days. Besides the obvious - going when it's time to go, baiting, working the edges of his range and yours, stealing an inch here or there, perception of time and seeing expectation - there is a lot of psychological gaming that I didn't realize we were learning. Unfortunately, I'm not good enough to tell you how it's working, just that getting hit when you misread it reinforces the lessons wonderfully. The guru says "That's right. You're learning to read intention. Don't worry about how right now." The basic method was simple. Read it wrong and you get hit. Unfortunately most of the learning is going on beneath the conscious level.

Body sensitivity also helps. Much of what we do is based on being up close and feeling. If you learn to read the tension in someone's body you become more aware of what he is going to do. The body isn't very good at lying. Once again, most of the learning is in ways I can't identify or separate out from the other things that are going on. It isn't useful as a separate thing in the shorter term.

Other systems do it, and it's obvious from the practitioners' skills that it's effective. I don't know much about their methods except for a few workshops on keeping your head during complete sensory overload and confusion. The schools are far away, and I don't belong to them.

There has been a couple situations lately where that came into play.

In one I didn't know how I knew. It was just obvious that two people hadn't quite made the decision to fight and that there was a magic window where the situation could be de-escalated by an outsider.

In another, loud threats were about to turn violent. I called the police because it was obvious that there was going to be a bad situation in a couple minutes. By the time she got to "I was only sleeping with you, and you gave me herpes. I'm gonna..." the 911 dispatcher had already finished with the call. There isn't any real reason I could point at. But there was something about posture, body language, and the dynamic of one of the people that I wouldn't have recognized otherwise.

In a third a boss who didn't like me and vice versa decided it would be fun to scare me by sneaking up with a clubbell and pulling back like he was about to hit with it. I had the knife out (but hidden) when I saw that he was angry and hostile but in a general way, not specific. So I told him to put the big piece of metal down and never do that again. How did I know? What told the Lizard to flash a fang but stay in the cave? Your guess is as good as mine, but it was a subtle distinction between that and actual immediate malice that I wouldn't have picked up on if it hadn't been for the other work.

That's why I'm interested. It's also why I'm frustrated with advice like "teach them to be aware". The platitudes are almost always completely devoid of actual methods for developing the skills. The one I'm learning is "He's learning to be subtle and play them close to the chest. If I don't figure out what he's really about to do I am going to get hit."

Everyone talks about it. Almost nobody has a method for teaching it. About the best you get is "You already know how. Just trust the little voice." Or there are specific checklists of pre-attack postures and techniques attackers use to gain psychological control, more what rather than how.

Airsoft games with obvious hostiles, hidden hostiles and friendlies are very useful. "You just shot the nun and the EMT" or "You just got shot" are good teaching tools. It's too bad that more schools don't have the facilities to do this. And many of the ones who try fall down because they don't have people who with the skills to carry it off in a believable way. Join the Green Beret's and go through Robin Sage? Join the police force and spend a year being mentored by someone with that sort of experience? Work in the penitentiary for a couple years?

Oh yes, for the benefit of the anonymous coward, there's a difference between useful advice and vague platitudes. The first is actually helpful. The second makes the speaker feel good without actually helping the person who is asking for advice.

 

[Martial Tucker]

Yes it is and when you do turn the arm, is it usually done from a inside to outside or outside in to keep the person close to you.

Terry, we stress the same defense against grabs. As for inside-out, or outside-in motion, it depends on whether it's a "same side", or "cross" grab.
Either way, the focus is on turning the attacker's body, and therefore, his other hand away from you to minimize it's danger to you. It's pretty safe to say if someone grabs you with one of their hands, their immediate intent is likely to be striking you with the other. That's why we like to use circular motion and locks that effectively keep the attacker's other hand from being able to reach you with any power, if at all. This may often also involve moving your body slightly to the outside of the attacker's "grabbing arm"
And, the preference is to keep them close to you and in your "center", where you have maximum leverage.

One more thing...It's great to practice and master the breaks, but I see so many schools teach students to just stand there and let someone grab them, then try to break the grab. I think that once a student is proficient at breaking the grabs, the next step is to train them to attack the attacker's arm as it's "inbound", before he can establish the grab.
I like to tell them that if someone that they wouldnt think of hugging and/or kissing is reaching for them, consider it a hostile action and immediately launch a counter attack. Don't passively wait to be grabbed.

 

[Independent_TKD]

Many good responses here.

Every single time I train, I drill my footwork in all directions and a strong but mobile defensive fighting stance (hands up at all times). Of all the various styles of martial arts, I feel that boxing and taekwondo have the most functional/practical and agile footwork.

It is very important that you practice defensive technique against realistic style attacks. Often, we see people practicing intensely against a compliant partner. Big deal. That is good when learning the mechanics of a technique. However, as an advanced student/instructor, you must react to attacks coming at you in a more realistic way.

I recommend watching some real fights (You can find a ton of videos on the internet). Examine these real fights and see what happens. How would you have reacted. How can you create drill that can address some problem areas for you. I started doing this a LONG time ago and this approach has been at the core of my training ever since. This approach has also forced me to build skills I did not have. For a lot of people, this is a bitter wake-up call. Good luck.

 

[dortiz]

Footwork...move! Always move. TKD shuffles are great. Angles, sides etc. I see folks working on punch defense just standing there. Move first then block. Move first their weight will shift..then turn in or out etc. Take a hit...move dont freeze.

Move!