Did a fair amount of talking about being alert, avoiding potentially dangerous situations, and running away. Worked on Escape-To-Gain-Safety (Eyes/Throat/Groin/Shin) to distract and give opportunity to flee, with a human “dummy” wearing headgear and a Baby Huey. Did ground work as well.
My reason for thinking it of limited practical use is that, while it is worthwhile to give people a “taste” of what is involved, unless you train it often enough to keep up your skill/reflex level, you might have a false idea of your abilities.
It is easy to say “rotate towards the thumb” to break a grasp. And a basic concept. But even better to practice it regularly against an uncooperative training partner.
I am a woman, and I’m very good with knives. And I’d never take one out in a confrontation.
1 escalation seems like a bad idea
2 the other guy might take it from me
3 I’m dubious I’d be willing, even under duress, to attack with a knife. When it comes right down to it, i really really really don’t want to kill anyone. Ever.
Learning to break holds seems like a good idea. Screaming and running strike me as the strategies most likely to actually protect me. Sadly, I’m not great at running. But that would be my go-to reaction.
You only pull a knife if you intend to use it immediately and in doing so intend to seriously injure/kil the other party. Carrying a knife for self defense not only means knowing how to wield it but also how to draw it quickly. A closed knife in your zipped purse is of little use.
Effective self defense is REALLY ugly and violent. Any rational person wishes to avoid it whenever possible.
Right. That’s why I’d never pull a knife in a self-defense situation. The problem isn’t my knife skills, which are very good. The problem is that even in extreme self defense, I’d be reluctant to seriously injure or kill my assailant. I think i might prefer to die than to live with having intentionally killed another human being.
The research that @Measure_for_Measure discusses above sounds like the same stuff the fellow who designed the course I taught based his philosophy on. In the specific case of rape attacks, Research shows that any kind of defense significantly reduced the rate of success of the attacker. One paper broke it down into the three strategies of fight, scream or run. They found that using any one strategy allowed the person to escape about 50% of the time. Combining two out of the three raised that to 80%. So we figured, do all three right off the bat.
And we had at least some success with this. We had more that one student come back later and tell us that what they learned helped them out.
A lot of women are taught all their lives to “be nice”, and that sets them up as victims. The most important thing we ever taught was that they were allowed to not be nice. Completely aside from any particular techniques you might teach, the most important thing is to get them to believe that they are allowed to act. Just about anything they’d do after that point would be better than nothing.
And that’s the biggest benefit of any “martial arts” training: the willingness to act. Even if you’re not perfect, it’s better than nothing.
Unlike on tv, not everyone has had fight training. Like most physical activity, it’s a pretty small percentage of the population. Someone with fight training has learned to deliver hits, and even more importantly, take hits and continue fight. Every fight I lost as a kid was a one hit takedown - I was too focused on the fact I’d been hit to do anything. It’s why I started boxing lessons.
Most encounters, your assailant is relying on being larger, having friends along, or having a weapon they often barely know how to use. As a young, skinny guy, I was in two fights with a total of five people after I’d learned to fight. One good hit per person pretty much ended things for my assailants, even when they got some licks in. No one ducked, blocked, or rode a punch. No one dragged themselves to their feet, struck a pose, and made a “come on” gesture. They lay there groaning, maybe bleeding, hearing a receding pitter-patter sound because while I started boxing lessons at 12, I started running track at 11.
Later, I hit the weights and got bigger, and haven’t gotten close to getting in a fight since. It’s the thing I find most hilarious about Reacher. No group of skinny 20-something townies is going to brace a guy that size, even with a few beers in them.
Athletic training of any type will help in defense. Strength, stamina, coordination are all assets. Training in actual fighting that includes receiving punches, kicks, and take downs is more important than learning how to perform those actions if you want a chance to fight back. Actual fighting is the best experience. For pure defensive technique running is the best training. You don’t have to beat your assailant, you only have to outrun him.
I have very little knowledge of martial arts; in fact probably everything I have seen about them is fiction or hearsay.
Then apart from the ‘formal’ martial arts, there is also the longstanding meme that certain members of armed forces are taught ‘real’ unarmed fighting techniques which seriously work? Then again, I have never been in the military, so I have no idea if there is any truth to that?
See, i don’t think of a knife as a weapon at all. I plan to spend an hour with a could of sharp knives butterflying a leg of lamb and then removing all the fat, connective tissue, and most of the fascia from the meat.
I would bet a significant part of martial arts training for actual soldiers is getting them comfortable with exercising an intent to severely injure or kill their opponent.
On what do you base this claim? I have never considered using a knife as a weapon, let alone practiced to do so?
Even at the cost of your life or someone you love?
Well, that’s an ethical choice, I suppose.
As far as I’m concerned, if a person (or any other animal) clearly intends to kill or harm me or any of my loved ones, that entity has forfeited its right to consideration.
If avoidance or flight is not an option, I would have no moral qualms about using any available force, up to and including lethal, to stop it.
It’s not necessarily a choice, ethical or not. Lots of people have great difficulty when it comes down to “kill or be killed”. Humans in general are usually reluctant to engage in such levels of violence. This is why military training is so important, and a big part of what makes the military much better at fighting than civilian groups. Aside from the weapons, and the training in the mechanics of how to use them, developing an attitude in which you will use them makes a huge difference.
And even after that training, some percentage of trained soldiers still freeze up in combat, and can’t do the job. Among untrained civilians, that percentage will be higher still.
