Ste’s self-defense blog

Today I’m going to have a look at knives in general. All of the subjects I touch can be elaborated in much more depth, I will only touch the surface of them.

A knife is a very dangerous weapon because of the following reasons:

• It is easy to carry around (because it is small)
• the threshold to carry a knife is much lower than to carry a gun
• it is cheap
• it can create devastating wounds (cuts or stabs)
• it can be used silently
• it can be easily hidden before and after an attack
• it is difficult to defend against a knife attack
• knives are available in many places (kitchen, steak restaurants,…)

In the following I will try to light some aspects of knives and how you can learn how to defend yourself against a knife attack.

what types of knifes exist

Knives can come in many different forms. Some are designed as tools but others are only designed to be used as a weapon. Regardless of the original intent, most knives can be used as a weapon. Knives can be characterized by at least the following criteria:

• length of the knife
• number of sharp edges (zero, one, two, three,…)
• number of blades
• form of the blade (straight, curved, pointy)
• material of the blade (steel, ceramics, plastics,…)
• form of the handle (retention ring,…)
• fix or movable blade
• material of the handle
• added dangerous parts (spikes, knuckles,…)
• and many more…

These characteristics influence how the knife can be used. A very long knife can not be carried in your pocket, whereas a knife with a curved blade is not very practical for cutting bread.

Whatever the knife looks like, in all cases it can be used against you (unless it is in a bullet-proof showcase) and therefore has to be considered a possible threat. Only training against one type of knife is a good way not to  be prepared for what can really happen to you. Did you ever consider training against scissors? (they give rather nasty wounds…)

Many things can be used as improvised knives or modified to be used as knives. Anything that is pointy or sharp or can be made so can also be used to attack you. Consider glass shards, sharpened bicycle spokes, syringes or knitting needles that can be used as knives.

For a more detailed treatise of different knife types have a look at the wikipedia article about knive types.

how a knife can be used

Each type of knife can be used for different attack styles. Regardless of what someone tells you about what attack styles are used by “someone who knows how to use a knife”, any of the possible attack styles can be used against you. First, not everyone is a trained knife fighter and second, there are so many different styles of knife fighting that most of the possible ways to use a knife are covered.

An attack style can be characterized by how you hold the knife, what movements you make with the knife and how you move yourself. The skill of the attacker has a big influence on how the knife is used. A furious drugged grandma will attack completely different than a trained knife fighter.

Most people think that a knife can only be used for slashing and stabbing and nothing more. It can also be used for example to do the following:

• the knife handle can be used as a blunt weapon
• the dull sides of a knife can be used to amplify locks
• different parts of a knife can be used to block attacks

knives are omnipresent

Go ask your local cop how many knives he and his colleagues confiscate every weekend and how many of those are illegal in your country. This shows how many knives are around and can potentially be used against someone else. There are many more knives around than you probably imagine.

Another interesting way to find out how many knives are used for crimes. Search for a website that publishes police reports for your region (here are two for Switzerland) and see how many crimes are committed using some kind of knife.

From the numbers you find this way you can easily deduce that you have to train how to defend against them. If your martial art does not include knife defenses, go and search someone to teach you.

you will get cut

This sentence is often heard in knife training. Unfortunately the real implications of this are mostly not communicated correctly in a training. A cut from a knife can have a severe impact on your ability to defend yourself. Depending on the type of the knife and the place where you get cut you can notice nothing (mostly because of adrenaline) or be stopped or killed immediately.

If you are cut, your ability to fight can quickly decrease due to blood loss and shock. As you do not notice a cut in every case, it is very important to finish any knife fight as quickly as possible (even more than when attacked from an unarmed attacker).

When you are attacked by an unskilled knife fighter you will get cut, when you are attacked by a skilled knife fighter you will get killed.

what and how to train

As usual, the most important technique for knife defense I can advise you to train (yes, train it!) is to run away. It is by far the most successful technique that is around. Train on how to detect that someone is pulling a knife or could be ready to attack you with one and then RUN. Please note that running away is probably the false term, you should be running somewhere safe(r). After having decided to run, immediately decide on where to run to.

There are hundreds of different opinions what a working knife defense is. Each system seems to teach the only way to handle a knife attack. Some of these systems have a background that permits to say “my system works” but certainly not “my system is the only one”. Unless you have to handle knife attacks on a regular basis, it will be difficult for you to judge if something works or not. I recommend therefore that you do as I did and have a wide look around and identify the common things, the problems a system has and then decide for yourself what techniques work.

The following points describe some aspects of a knife defense that have to be there for a system to work:

• block or deviate the initial attack while moving out of the way
• hit early in the defense where it really hurts and stops the attack (e.g. the throat or the eyes)
• continue hitting to get the focus of the attacker away from his knife
• don’t try to grab an attacking arm (it’s very hard if the attacker pulls back)
• don’t use throws before the knife is under control/disarmed (no control over the knife whatsoever)

Some techniques do things that I just advised against (e.g. grabbing a knife arm). They can work but certainly are rather dangerous to execute.

Be careful when choosing the training knives you use to train with. The more realistic they look and feel, the better you can train to perceive them and learn how to handle them. For example, plastic knives may be a safe option but they have too many disadvantages. They look fake, they don’t have the right weight, many disarming techniques don’t work with them due to their flexibility and so fort. Best is to use trainer knives that correspond to some real knife but just have blunt blades.

Another point worth mentioning that is trained over and over again is the use of the knife after you have disarmed your attacker. Slitting someone’s throat is NOT self-defense, it is murder and will be judged accordingly. There certainly are situation where you can and should use a knife you just obtained (e.g. multiple attackers, the attacker has another weapon,…), but killing a person that no longer has a weapon does not belong to these. As soon as you have the knife, you are the one in the attacking position and if you use this position, your former attacker becomes the defender.

When you know what techniques to use, you have to try to increase the level of realism. This can be done in many different ways. Some ideas are the following:

• put color on your training knives to see where you get cut
• use a knife that gives you an electric shot when “cut”
• do sparring (with proper protective gear)
• use oil/theater blood on your hands to simulate a cut (makes disarming a challenge)
• add stress through noise, other surroundings, unknown attacker
• simulate a cut (tie an arm to your back)
• do scenarios to learn how a knife is used against you

None of these methods can completely simulate reality but by using them (and others) you can increase your feeling for how it is being attacked with a knife.

how to treat knife wounds

On a side note, it is always good to know how to handle a wound caused by an attack. For knives have a look at one of these two links to learn what to do. As usual, get proper training and do not rely on anything written on the internet.

When the question in the title comes up, the question “which martial art should I learn?” is most of the time not far behind. To answer these questions one needs to analyze what the real motivation and goals are.

what do you really mean by defend yourself

Defending oneself can mean many very different things. What self-defense means for you depends of the motivation you really have.

• you are or soon will be in a great danger due to who you are or where you live
• you work in a job with a high risk (bouncer, policeman,…)
• you want to learn to defend yourself because it is a subject that interests you
• you want to do something for your health and learn to defend yourself as a byproduct
• you experienced some sort of attack to you or someone close to you

Each of these motivations can lead to another decision on what to train. Someone who just wants to exercise has a completely different idea what self-defense is than a police officer who needs these skills for his daily job. As there are different needs, there are different options what you can train.

how to choose where to train

If you want to move yourself for health reasons and learn to defend yourself as a byproduct, the choice is rather simple. Just go and visit many different places where they teach martial arts or self-defense. Participate in some trainings and decide yourself for the one you like best. Judge the organization by the stuff you learn, the quality of the training hall, the people that train there, the price and the distance to your home/work. To keep you interested, a sport for health-benefits has to correspond to your likings. With such a decision you can have a fun hobby for a long time.

If you or someone close to you experienced an attack in the past and you want to cope with it, you are well advised to search for an organization which is specialized in the concrete situation you experienced. There are special organization for rape, family violence or workplace violence. Some of them offer mental and physical training, others work together with other organizations that handle the physical part. If you don’t need special counseling then you can choose from the other methods mentioned in this section.

If you start in a job that has a high risk, the best place to get training is from your employer or an organization that works with your employer. They simply just know best for what kind of situations you have to be trained. If such a training is not available or you want additional training, have a look at the next paragraphs.

If you have a concrete need for self-defense, you have to find an organization that can fill your need. Unfortunately it is not as easy as saying “Martial Art XY is exactly right for you”. The way a martial art is trained is often more important than what it is. As with training for hobby purposes, you will have to visit the different organizations to see whether they can offer you a proper training. Aspects you should consider are the following:

• are physical scenarios trained (wrist grabs, chokes,…)
• are real scenarios trained (mugging, domestic violence,…)
• are awareness, avoidance, de-escalation trained
• are all fighting distances covered (long distance, short distance, clinch, ground fighting)
• are weapon defenses trained
• are there opportunities to try out your technique (sparring, protective-suit trainings,…)
• are techniques trained to immobilize and control an aggressor (if applicable, for bouncers or similar)

You will certainly not have seen all these things after one or two trainings so you have to ask whether these things are trained. Don’t ask simple Yes/No questions as many trainers just tend to say yes, even though the aspect is only trained once every two years. Better ask how an aspect is trained or even better demand a list of things that are included in the training. If the instructor does not mention something it will certainly not be part of a regular training

Be wary of answers like “We do not train X because our system will prevent this from happening”. A good example for X is ground fighting which does not exist in many systems, it is impossible to guarantee that you never land on the floor (e.g. someone shoves you from behind). The same applies for the other aspects.

A good instructor will inform you what is part of the training and what not. He can explain why the aspect is not trained (e.g. he doesn’t know enough about it) and give you advice where to get it (e.g. take some additional BJJ lessons to learn groundfighting).

Not every organization can and does handle all the aspects mentioned above. If you do not find one that does everything, you have to choose one that suits best your needs and then get the missing parts from somewhere else (see the next section).

how to train

After you have decided what to train, start it! To learn in a reasonable rate it is important to train enough. 2-3 training sessions per week is an absolute minimum to quickly advance.

The training itself will probably not be able to cover all your needs. The things you can not get from your regular training, you have to get somewhere else. Seminars, books or Videos are a good source for alternate views or new techniques. After you have learned something new from such a source, try to include it in your daily training or at least repeat it some more times in special training sessions.

Not every technique you will learn works for you, maybe it is just not “right” for your body or your character. Have a look at everything and take the ones you like. Things you like are often much easier to learn and to memorize and can therefore be used much more quickly and efficiently.

Depending on how intensive your training is, you should consider doing some additional exercise for strength and stamina. Either you visit a fitness center where you can exercise both or you can do many things like jogging or body weight exercises without having to pay for it.

Copyright 2008 by Stefan Aeschbacher

As I already noted in my post “what is self-defense“, awareness is an important skill to prevent violence from happening.

what is awareness

Awareness is a skill that helps you to better see and understand what happens around you. When mastered this is a subconscious skill which rarely involves active thinking. You probably already have developed awareness for certain contexts in your life. For example if you are driving a car on a regular basis you have learned how to see and understand the situation on the roads and the behavior of the other road users. Let me give you some examples:

• you just know who has the right of way deduced from the situation and signs around you
• you notice a pedestrian who looks as if he would walk out on the street without looking
• you automatically look to the left and right when crossing a street

These are things that you had to actively learn when starting to move in the traffic but have become second nature to you over the years. If something is not as it should be, you become aware of it and can then start to think about it (”I should brake just in case this pedestrian steps out on the street.”).

As you can be aware of traffic situations, you can be aware of your surroundings and learn who could pose a threat and how you could evade it. You can learn to identify the following things:

• how do the people around you behave
• how is your environment structured
• what weapons are around

In the suit I will elaborate these points.

people around you

Crimes are committed by persons, so it is important for you to see who is around you and what his or their intentions are. Sure, you can not read the mind of someone to find out his intentions (if yes, please teach me) but the body language of a person or a group of persons can tell you much about their intentions.

Every person has some intention when moving around and interacting with it’s surrounding. Most of these intentions are “good” and do not affect you. You can easily recognize a man who is running an errand or a girl waiting for someone on a street corner. Some people can not be categorized that easily and these you have to watch a little closer. Most of them have nothing dangerous in mind.

By learning to see (and hear) what the people around you are doing, you can increase your chances to detect someone whose intentions are malign. A group of shabbily clad juveniles in a byroad that just seem to linger around should awake your interest. If you notice them early enough, you can for example take action to prevent them from surrounding you by changing the side of the road you are walking on or, if you deem it necessary even take another road.

Someone who is talking to you can do this for many different reasons. If someone asks you for the time he probably just forgot his watch at home but he can also just be interviewing you to distract you from the upcoming attack. Awareness also involves to not blindly trust someone but to start thinking and looking whether he has good or bad intentions (is he carrying a weapon, is he preparing himself for an attack?).

If you do not meet people with bad intentions often (which I hope you don’t), you can not easily train yourself to detect their behavior. What you can do is to learn to see normal (good) behavior and things that do not fit in these patterns. When you detect such a thing, you can direct your attention towards it and see if something bad happens. Most of the time nothing of that sort will happen but in the one case where it will, you will be prepared.

structure of your environment

The structure of a place has a big influence on the risk for an attack to happen and your chances to defend yourself in such a case.

One kind of potentially dangerous areas are fringe zones (see here for more details). These are areas that are close to highly frequented places to give the criminal a supply of possible victims. The fringe areas themselves are deserted and used by most people only for a short time. Some examples are toilets, staircases, small parks or byroads (the big dark forest is not such a zone, there are just not enough possible victims around).

Additionally to fringe areas, every place can be used by an attacker. Your office, a car, a shop, your home. The probabilities and the kind of attack are just different. By looking at them you can find out, what could happen in such a place and by whom.

Another aspect of the structure of your environment is where and how you can move within during an attack. Some points that can influence your decision on where to move are:

• possible escape paths
• safer (e.g. more crowded) places than the current one nearby
• possibilities for hiding or taking cover
• possible hiding places for an ambush

If you learn to identify these aspects automatically, you will be able to decide very quickly where to go in case of an attack.

weapons around you

There are two general kinds of weapons. Those that are intended and carried to be used as weapons and those that are not. For both types of weapons it is useful to know if they are around. They can be used against you and you can use some of them to defend yourself.

The first group contains all sticks, knives, guns and other stuff that people carry on them with the intention to use them in one or the other situation. Many of them can be carried in a way that they can not easily be seen. In most normal situations, you simply can not detect concealed weapons as they are just too hard to spot.

The second group contains all the things around you, that can be used as improvised weapons. Everything that can cause distraction or hurt someone can be used as an improvised weapon. This can be the steak knife on your table, a hair brush, a laptop, a cane, hot tea and many more things.

Identifying weapons is something you will probably not do all the time when entering a room. The important aspect is to be able to identify them when the situation starts to become dangerous. When you just “know” that a chair can be put to good use as an obstacle when someone pursues you, you will be much faster when it comes to deciding what to do next.

but i don’t want to be paranoid all time

Awareness is not about being paranoid, it’s about knowing what happens around you. It is completely wrong to try and see a possible attacker in every person or a death-trap in every narrow lane. By learning how to be aware, you become more attentive about your surroundings. Apart from giving you clues about a possible attack, you will perceive many more details of your surrounding (which is also a good thing).

By training for awareness you learn how to notice things you see anyway all day long. Knowing where the exits in a restaurant are has nothing to do with paranoia, it is just information that can help you.

how to train for awareness

As you have seen so far, there are many aspects you have to be aware of. Most of them are hard to train in your regular training hall. There are things you can train alone when you move around and things you can train with a group of persons.

One thing you can practice for yourself is to learn to “see” your environment (use all your senses). When you are walking about, have a look at the people you see and try to guess their intentions. The longer you do this, the more will you notice, that you do not have to think about it, you will just know. You can also analyze your environment for it’s structure and improvised weapons. Don’t try to see everything at once, it will just be too much. Decide on what you are looking for on this trip and have a look at it, maybe stay with one aspect for some days or even week until you feel confident about it.

Another thing is mental training. Check your newspaper for reports on crimes and try to see how they happened, read scenarios in martial arts books (or maybe one time on this blog) and imagine how dangerous situations can happen. You can also try to put yourself in the position of an attacker and try to imagine what his motivations are and how he would proceed to reach his goal.

If a group of people wants to train for awareness, you can act the scenarios you learned so far. Try out how a gang has to move to surround someone and how this looks, try to see someone who pursues you or try out how it looks if someone tries to act inconspicuously. For such trainings, it is important to get into the state of mind of an attacker. This needs concentration, the will and certainly some time. It will not work if you change the evil person every 5 minutes or if he is just not in it and laughs out loud when trying to act inconspicuously. For a more realistic training of this kind, you can even consider hiring actors for the parts of the malign persons.

conclusion

Awareness is a very important aspect of self-defense. If you are able to detect a potentially dangerous situation early on, you can react properly and try to avoid the attack or at least move yourself in a position in which you can defend yourself as good as possible. A possible attacker who notices that you are aware of your surrounding and that you maybe even just noticed him is much less likely to attack you than when you walk by completely unaware of what is happening around you.

It takes some time to develop awareness, specially for people who do not work in a business where violence happens often. Investing this time can help you to stay out of dangerous situations which is a very worthwhile goal.

A question that is often asked is: “Does this technique work?” or even worse: “Does this Martial Art work?”. These questions can just not be answered because they make no sense. In the suit I will start the discussion with techniques and then go on to entire martial arts.

Why does this question not make any sense? Because it neglects many very important factors. Let me illustrate with an extreme (or even absurd) example. The technique I want to study is catching a knife with the throat. Most people will immediately agree that such a technique does not work. This is not true, there are certain situations where this technique will work when properly executed (N.B. the words situation and properly executed).

How so, you might ask? Imagine a murderer wanting to kill your nephew which happens to be a child prodigy in medicine who will find a cure for cancer when he is a little older. The murderer wants to kill him by throwing a knife. The only way you can reach the knife is by the famous throat knife catching technique. Does it work? In this context it does!

It is possible to find a context for every technique where it works. You will agree with me that this does not make much sense. So let’s try another question: “Is this technique worth training for?”  That is the question you want to ask instead of the does-it-work question. How does one judge whether a technique is worth the effort?

This question can be answered by analyzing (at least) the following points:

1. How long do I have to train to be able to execute this technique with a very high probability of doing it right?
2. How difficult is the technique to executed when in a very stressful situation?
3. What risk am I taking when (properly) executing the technique?
4. What risk do I face if the technique fails (positive or negative, can I unwillingly kill someone if I fail?)
5. What preconditions have to be met that this technique can be applied?
6. What conditions have to be met that this technique will succeed?
7. How high is the probability that I use the technique in the wrong context?

Let us answer these questions for the knife catching technique:

1. will take some time but doable
2. difficult
3. the risk of dying from this technique is very high
4. the knife will reach its target, I could fall to the floor
5. the attacker has to throw a knife, you have to be close enough to execute the technique, you have to be willing to take the great risk involved with this technique
6. the attacker does not have a second knife, he flees after the attack
7. not so high, as the prerequisites are rather harsh

So when we have a look at these answers, we see that it’s not a very easy technique (but learnable), the
probability that a situation will arise where it can be used is very low, the risk taken is very high and
the probability of success is very low. I would venture to say that you should forget about this technique
and learn something else.

How does one find the answer to these questions? There are different ways, you could try the technique out in real life and see how the aspect you are analyzing performs. Bad luck if you fail completely. Another approach is to ask different people (who have much experience in the subject) how they analyze the technique.

That’s where a martial art comes into play, they try to help you answer these questions. For each technique included in a system, someone did think something. Hopefully for the system the thinking was done by experienced people along the lines I proposed so far. To judge the entire system the same question for context has to be asked. It will mostly be answered by the techniques within the system. Unfortunately, for some martial arts, the thinking was done in another context than yours and with some more restrictions that did not come from self-defense. Aspects like “how nice does it look”, “how good can it be used in a competition” or similar can creep in a system and reduce it’s value for self-defense.

If someone is willing to invest much time in points 1 and 2 (from the list above) he can get to a point where he can use a complicated, risky, sports-oriented or beautiful technique in a self-defense situation with a good probability of success. The same goal can be reached much faster if other simpler less risky techniques are trained.

A point that I did not mention so far is the way how such techniques are trained, the methodology has a huge influence on how well one can apply a technique in a real situation. I will treat this subject at a later point in time (read, in another post).

Conclusion

The question whether a technique or a system works or not makes no sense. Judgment can only be done within a concrete context. People that say sentences like “My system is the only one that works!” prove that they have not understood the full aspect of “working”. They should open up and have a good look around what other systems have to offer and start to think about the context that techniques can be used in. There are other good (and bad) things around that do not belong in their system.

Analyzing a technique is a hard thing to do but one can never start early enough with it. When beginning one has to beleive what the teacher is saying. But remember, there are many teachers out there which can shed light on a context or a technique from a completely different angle. Seeing all these different angles will help you to understand techniques and contexts. Based on these information you can find out what techniques you want to train.

The difference between training for self-defense in your Dojo/Training hall (I use dojo for the rest of the post but only because it is shorter) and the real self-defense situation on the street is quite big, bigger than most people realize. I try to give some points on how the training in a dojo is different from a real self-defense situation (please note, I will not treat training methodologies in this post). Maybe some of the points I mention below are not applicable to your dojo, good for you.

Rules

You often hear, there are no rules on the street. This is just not true. One set of rules that applies everywhere, even on the street are the laws of the country you live in. When you defend yourself, you have to stay within the boundaries of the law. The law gives you the right to defend yourself, but as an example, you have to react proportionate to the attack. If you do not do this you can be held accountable for this. Sure, you could try to hide, blame someone else or just lie in court but most law abiding persons are not willing to do such a thing.

Apart from the law, there are indeed much less rules in a self-defense situation than in your dojo. The most “constraining” rule is, that you do not try to hurt each other. Most dojos have much more explicit and implicit rules. Examples can be found on the wall of your dojo (the dojo rules) or in the manner how the training is reglemented (e.g. being polite, not kicking in ones back, ….).

All these rules move the training away from a real self-defense situation and make it harder to do the right thing when under attack. If you have trained for 10 years not to kick someone in the back, you will not kick him in the back when in a self-defense situation even when it could safe your life.

People

In a dojo you are surrounded by people you know. You have some clear form of group organization, you know where you belong. In real live you can find yourself in a group of complete strangers. Whom to trust is a difficult decision to make. To react correctly in a completely different social surrounding can be a rather difficult thing.

Stress/Adrenaline

In your dojo regardless of how you train, you can not reach the level of stress and adrenaline in your blood that you will face on the street when under attack. This state of yours can limit what you are able to do (if you do anything at all).

Location

A dojo is a very “nice” place to be compared with the world outside. The floor is even, there are maybe mats on the floor, there is even lighting, the temperature is always in a comfortable range,… All these factors are different from the places where you will have to defend yourself. In real live you will have stairs, stones or broken bottles on the floor, rain, ice, chairs, tables and many different factors you will not find in the training area of your dojo.

Time

When you go for a training session, you precisely know when it is going to happen. You can mentally prepare yourself that you will do a training. You can warm yourself up before the “real” training and so forth. In reality you can not choose the time when you have to use your skills. You have a very short time to switch from what you were doing to self-defense mode (and forget the warm up).

Clothes

In most dojos it is reglemented what clothtes are worn. You don’t have to wear a Gi to wear something special. If you regularly train in sweatpants and a t-shirt, you will just not know how it feels to kick in a skirt. The clothes can greatly influence the techniques you can use. If you “know” that your attacker will wear a (gi-)jacket, you can train to use it but you will have a problem if he wears a t-shirt.

Only one try

During Training you can repeat a technique as many times as you want. When you fail to properly execute a technique, nothing really bad will happen. Maybe your trainer will bitch at you or you have to do 50 pushups. Nothing of this can be called a severe consequence. When you have to defend yourself, this is completely different. If you fail to deviate the knive as you trained for, you will be severely hurt or even dead. In a self-defense situation you have to succeed on your first try or you will have a problem.

Conclusion

The dojo offers a good safe place where you can train for a self-defense situation. Unfortunately many things how the training happens there do not correspond to reality. The points I listed are clearly in your way to be able to cope with a real attack. To reduce these factors, it is best to sometimes (or even always) go out of your dojo and see if you can apply your knowledge in another surrounding. You will not be able to train completely for real (or if you do, you will do something illegal in one way or the other) but you can reduce the gap between training and reality.

A subject that often comes up is the question of “fancy” kicks in self-defense. What do I mean by fancy kick? Generally speaking every kick that is above stomach level or involves some kind of turning your back to the attacker. In the suit I will show why fancy kick are not a very good thing to learn for self-defense.

they are hard

Learning to do a fancy kick is very hard compared to many other techniques. You have to train hard to get the necessary flexibility, stability, strength and coordination to do such a kick. If you invest the same amount of time in learning how to punch and how to react in certain situations you gain much more. Even if you can do such a trick, the probability of failure is still higher than with simpler techniques.

they are not stable

A major disadvantage is the instability you get when you are standing on one leg and your other leg is very high (this lifts your center of gravity) and in motion (flying kicks have a problem of stability when landing). The risk of stumbling or falling to the ground is greatly increased in such an unstable situation. In many sport martial arts, the fighters do not get punished when they fall to the ground. In a self-defense situation this is something you want to avoid at all cost. When you are lying on the floor, you face many very high risks like being kicked in the head (but from a stable position), stomped on and so forth. Even if the kick succeeds and the attacker is knocked down, there is a high risk of falling (specially for flying kicks). The attacker himself won’t be able to abuse your situation, but his friends will certainly do so.

Furthermore it is much easier to remove the support of a standing person if it consists of only one leg. The whole time of the kick execution gives the attacker a possibility to kick at your standing leg, which doesn’t even have your full weight on it as you have to remove some weight to be able to turn on it.

they can be grabbed

Many fancy kicks can be grabbed quite easily. From having grabbed one leg to lying on the floor is a rather short way. For why this is a bad idea see under stability.

they don’t work in confined space

Even many non-fancy kicks don’t work in confined spaces. There are some people that can do a roundhouse kick in an elevator, but can you? If you want to be able to use fancy kicks in confined spaces, the difficulty (see above) becomes even bigger. If you can’t use them, you add a significant parameter for your decision on what technique to use in a given environment and you train a technique that has a very limited usefulness in our society (with its many walls and objects in the way of your kick).

they are not fast

A kick is not as fast as a punch in two ways. First, in a kick you need to move a big mass (your leg) over a big distance. There is a big potential that your opponent sees your leg coming and takes a counter measure.

Second, you can not repeat a kick very fast compared to a punch (see this more or less random youtube video). Every time you throw an attack (kick or punch or whatever) you have a certain chance of success. In self-defense your chance of success is all that counts. Sure, giving more power also increases your chance of success, but not as much as repeating a technique multiple times (for kicks and punches this is).

they need “special” clothes

Kicks that need a wide angle between the legs require some special flexibility. Many nice fashionable trousers will severely limit your ability to lift your leg. If you are not aware that you are wearing such clothes and try to do such a kick you face the risk of looking kinda funny (and be not efficient at all).

they may make you turn too far

When using some kicks (e.g. roundhouse kicks) and you do not hit your opponent, there is a certain risk that you turn to far and land with your back towards your opponent. In many sport martial arts hitting the back is not allowed but on the street your back, neck or knee pits are nice targets for an attacker in such a situation.

illustration

As an illustration of some of my points have a look at the following video. It shows many scenes from the taekwondo fights at the olympic games in athens 2004. You will see man very nice kicks (as olympic taekwondo fighters they are certainly among the best kickers in the world)  and knock-outs. You will also see many cases of turning too far, falling on the floor and some few cases of grabbed legs (doesn’t seem to be allowed).

The movie might give you the impression that there are many techniques that work and only few that do not. Unfortunately in real life exactly these moments will be used by your attackers to stomp on you or smash a beer bottle over your head.

positive aspects

So that you can not claim I am one sided, let me have a look at the advantages of the kicks.

reach

Legs have a significant advantage in reach compared to fists (or even grappling techniques). Specially when combined with a jump, a kick can cover a great distance. This offers the possibility to surprise an attacker who thinks he is still in a safe distance or to out-kick a fist fighter.

power

A properly executed kick has far more knock out power than a punch. By adding a spinning motion this power can be increased even more. If such a kick reaches it’s target on the head, a knock-out or at least a knock-down is quite probable.

conclusion

Kicks are hard and have a rather bad overall probability of success in a self-defense situation. The disadvantages outweigh the advantages by far. If you are very confident about your kicking and have trained it for use in self-defense situation, then maybe, you can decide to include them in your repertoire. But then, you probably have your next UFC fight next week (no, UFC is not a specially good model for self-defense, it was just a joke….). In all other cases it is probably best to forget about fancy kicks and train something useful.

Please note, the arguments given here are in this form only valid for self-defense. In competition, depending on the rules, fancy kicks may be the way to success.

Self-defense is the ability to come out of violent situations alive and if possible unhurt and with all of your possessions. For most persons, self-defense is learning how to beat someone up (or use any other suitable technique like throws, locks,…). This is the stuff you will learn in most martial-arts or self-defense classes. Unfortunately this is only a part of the whole self-defense business. In my eyes, self-defense consists at least of the following parts:

• Conflict prevention
• Conflict avoidance
• Situation analysis
• Fear control
• Deescalation
• Running away
• Use of violence
• Stopping the use of violence
• The law

In the following I will try to explain what I mean by the respective points.

Conflict prevention

The most important part of the whole self-defense business is something that is hardly self-defense at all. It is the prevention of any conflicts. Important factors in conflict prevention are education, guidance, tolerance and parents/educators attention (and maybe to a certain degree, punishment). These are measures that have to be present from the beginning and are lacking in certain cultures, regions or groups in society. If they are not there, they have to be built up step by step, until a peaceful society exists. Each individual can influence its surrounding by increasing the level of non-violence through his actions (the most extreme case for this is certainly mahatma gandhi). Other ways are the legal system, education by the parents or the education system.

Conflict avoidance

The standard sentence “don’t walk down dark alleys” tries to capture the meaning behind the conflict avoidance subject, it goes much farther than simple rules though. Avoiding a conflict can start by not going to places (the dark alleys) but for this, these places have to be identified and it has to be possible to not go there (if you work near such a place or in such a region, you just have to go there). It continues with the standard “how to behave” rules like having straight posture, looking up, walk confident and so forth. These things help to a certain extend (and good posture is anyway a good thing). The next thing and this is where it starts to become harder, is to watch your surrounding, try to identify people that don’t belong there or look suspicious and try to go out of their way if possible. This is hard as most people have much better things to do than to be suspicious all the time. You can train to be subconsciously aware of your direct surroundings (the people around you and how they behave) as you are aware of your surroundings when driving a car (how the vehicles are driving, braking and turning) .

Situation analysis

As soon as a potentially dangerous situation arises, it has to be analyzed as fast as possible to decide what actions have to be taken. The analysis includes the following:

• What is the “level” of the situation (angry glares, hefty discussion, punches flying, rage,…)
• Number of attackers and who is their leader
• Number of attacked persons
• Are weapons involved
• Are improvised weapons around
• What is the location (a forest or in the middle of a supermarket)
• Is there help available
• What are the escape paths

Each of these factors influences what you are going to do next. You have to learn how to judge these factors and take your decision as fast as possible as soon you detect a self-defense situation.

Fear control

When a self-defense situation arises it is possible and even probable, that you will be filled with fear. This is normal. You can learn to cope with this fear. This means, that you have to prepare yourself and train how to overcome this state of fear (the fear won’t go away) and still do something despite the fear. This is partly something you can try to train by simulating fear-like situations and partly something that you have to mentally prepare by visualizing situations that can create fear and what you have to do when they arise.

De-escalation

Many nasty situations can be solved by purely talking to the attacker(s). Whether this is possible largely depends on the state of the attacker(s) and how far the situation has escalated so far. The tools you can use to deescalate are to be found in subjects as rhetoric and psychology. Some means you have at your disposition are apologies, agreement (it’s harder to be angry at someone who agrees with you), avoid contradiction and so forth.

Running away

A very clever solution to many self-defense problems is removing yourself from the scene. In most cases this can be done by running away, but driving away, taking the next bus or entering a building can lead to the same result. Running away can be a solution at any point of a confrontation, before it starts, after an attacker has hit you, after you have hit him once and after you have controlled him.

Use of violence

Applying violence is the last resort you have when being attacked. You try to inflict enough damage or control to your attacker so that the fighting stops. The use of violence is the main subject that is taught in most martial arts classes. It should contain at least the following points:

• technique against unarmed and armed attackers, standing and on the floor
• development of force, stability and speed
• learn how to fight (take away the fear of hitting and being hit)
• positional judgment of the attackers
• vulnerable points of the human body
• training of situations (attackers that grab, punch, shove,…)
• simulation of the reality (as close as possible in a controlled environment)

There are many teaching methods on how to learn these things.

Stopping the use of violence

As important as it is to recognize when to start using violence, it is to stop using violence. This can be the case in these situations:

• The attacker is no longer able to defend himself (you become the attacker)
• The attacker is fleeing
• The attacker does no longer attack (e.g. he became reasonable)
• Another solution becomes the preferred one (e.g. the attacker’s friends turn up and you should start running)
• The police arrives and starts to intervene

The law

As soon as a violent confrontation is over (and in some cases even after non-violent ones) someone (most of the times the counsel for the prosecution) will see if there is need for an accusation. If this happens, the accused person will have to defend itself on a trial. Even when you act in self-defense it can happen that you are this person. It may not be clear from the outside, that you were the one who was defending himself (the attacker or witnesses can lie), you can also have exaggerated the violence you used in the given situation (many countries have laws to cover these cases). If you land in such a situation it is certainly advisable to get yourself a good lawyer. But more importantly, if you train your self-defense, train for appropriate behaviour and actions. It is very bad to train how to smash someones larynx (a deadly technique), when he just slaps you on the cheek. If you train that way, the probability is big, that you will act the same way in a real situation.

Conclusion

Self-defense is a very complex subject and has to be treated that way. Most self-defense courses focus way too much on the violent part of the whole thing. It is very important to give the other parts a more prominent part in the teaching of self-defense. Each of the points I mentioned so far could easily fill a whole blog post (or even a whole book). So maybe I will take up on one or the other and expand on it at a later point.

One very important part in self-defense is hitting someone. Just hitting someone is not enough, it is hitting someone in the right place with the right “tool” and the right amount of force that makes it efficient. This post shows a first point, namely the nose, to aim for when in a self-defense situation. In the future I will try to expand this subject and give you information about many more targets on the human body.

The Nose

where it is

I assume that everybody is able to identify and find the nose of an attacker. Just in case, here is a link to wikipedia on the human nose.

how to hit

The nose can be hit with any blunt weapon. This can be a fist, a knee, a shoulder, the forehead or any other hard part of the body. Furthermore many improvised weapons can be used to hit the nose. Some examples are: a book, a pepper mill, a laptop or a table (ok, you hit the table with the nose and not vice versa). You can use different ways and directions for hitting the nose. If someone is just annoying, try flipping some fingers at his nose this is painful but will cause no damage. A palm strike to the nose has a significant higher stopping power and will inflict much pain in most persons and can lead to nose bleeding. The strongest way is to use something hard (fist, forehead or an improvised weapon) to hit the nose from above, this has a high potential to break the nose.

why to hit there

Hitting the nose has many interesting effects for the defender. First it creates a significant amount of pain (as you might have noticed already), second it will make the eyes of the attacker full of tears which can reduce his vision and third it can make the nose bleed (often very hard). The last part can be an advantage when the attacker gets distracted by the bleeding, but it can also be a disadvantage when it comes to a trial.

possible damage

The nose is not a very important organ, even significant damage to it will not threaten the life of the attacker. The only exception I could find is the case when the nose does not stop bleeding. A nose can be broken quite easily but this will have mostly cosmetic consequences (as you might have notices with many professional boxers). In most situations where violence is needed, this is a risk a defender can take. For more information on broken noses see here.

Some myths go around that a nose can be hit in a way that a part of it enters the brain and lead to death. I could not verify these claims. Seeing how many noses are hit from every angle every day (by footballs, glass doors or airbags), I have never heard of someone killed by such an event, I have to assume that this is at most very improbable (if not impossible).

when to use this point

The nose is a very versatile target for self defense. As I already described above, you can use different techniques to hit the nose depending on the situation. The big disadvantage is, if it starts bleeding and a witness sees this, it will be held against you. Beating someone so that he bleeds is always bad when it is used against you in a trial. So make sure to only hit the nose when the situation demands that you have to defend yourself in such a way. If someone attacks you with punches or even a weapon or if there are multiple attackers this is clearly the case, if someone just grabs your wrist, it is probably not.

Welcome to my self-defense blog. If you really want to expect something from this blog you can try the following (no guarantees given) within the area of unarmed self-defense and improvised weapons:

• techniques
• situation analysis
• examples
• other SD related stuff

I don’t know how often I want/can cough up something meaningful. Feel free to comment on the stuff I write. And until I have a propper disclaimer to put it in, note the following:

I am no professional in self-defense (even though I train for many years) so I might (and probably will) be wrong. If you want to learn to defend yourself go get a good teacher, reading about it in a blog will not empower you to do so. The stuff I write about can be dangerous, don’t try it out unless you know what you are doing. In all sane countries you are responsible for your own actions, for all other countries where this is not the case, I hereby decline any responsibility for anything you do after reading this blog.