Are
Most Fighting Strategies Too Complicated For Street Self
Defense?
Are the fighting strategies that being
taught today too complex to be effective on the street?
Over the years of my training we taught
most of the traditional self defense technques to our students.
Coming from a background in Okinawan karate we didn't have too much
fancy stuff. On the other hand I thought our techniques and fighting
strategies were fairly simple and direct. I had always considered
the stress of a real attack and realized it is quite different than
practicing in the dojo.
It wasn't until I attended a F.A.S.T.
Defense training (adrenal stress conditioning) class that I realized
that even what I considered simple fighting strategies were still
in some cases way too complex for an adrenaline filled street confrontation.
A good example is the roundhouse or
sucker punch. I have seen more different fighting strategies for
this one attack that I care to remember. Let me give you a little
evolution of my own shift in fighting strategies dealing with this
defense over the years.
Way back my fighting strategy was
to strike, throw and strike again. It worked great in the dojo and
looked really cool too! There are some major flaws to this strategy.
First, people react differently to strikes. In the dojo the guy
just stands there but on the street his reaction may be to fall
backward or to either side. This flaws the follow up throw if your
basic technique was a one arm hip throw.
Perhaps a judo expert might be able
to pull that off because he could adapt his fighting strategy to
quickly change his throw.
Later on in my training we would make
the block and then follow up with an assortment of counter attacks.
This sounds reasonable and it may be, depending on your fighting
strategy. What I found out later on was that under an "adrenal dump",
those multiple counter attacks might not be available (mentally)
because of the loss of cognitive thinking under those conditions.
That is one of the reasons we developed
Street
Self Defense 101. The blocks are all simple and the follow ups
from most attacks are very similar, if not the same. Using these
fighting strategies, the chances of a successful defense against
an all out street attack are significantly higher.
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