The_Stranger: Yes, Nunchaku is a bit exotic to learn the lessons I’m talking about. The sai, tonfa and kama are all good weapons to learn to improve emptyhanded technique. I should have been more specific. My apologies, my brain automatically thinks kobudo (sai, tonfa, kama, nunchaku & bo) when I say weapons but that of course isn’t helpful for people who don’t have telepathy or aren’t me. 
I remembered hearing the bull story, so I went home and looked it up again. Masutatsu Oyama, founder of Kyokushin Karate, was indeed famous for killing bulls and chopping off their horns. You really trained with him, Glitch? Pretty dern impressive!
It’s also called an Asshole Break and the three to six weeks healing time sounds like some wishful thinking. Even if we discount the two-week misstep for my broken hand, it will be close to five months before I can go back on the mat, if the doctor is to be believed. This is with no complications and a clean break.
I have to express skepticism that one can really condition one’s hands. Apart from toughening the skin, what are you going to do to strengthen the bone? Surely repeated pounding can’t be good on the structure fo the bone, can it?
Anywho, breaking your hand is a major hassle. Let me restate that: Breaking your hand is a major motherfuckinggoddamn pain in the ass. If you can train for palm-heel strikes, then do it.
Bones constantly adapt to pressures, if you do it slow enough and long enough, the bone in the most stressed areas will become denser. This is a key aspect of weight training as well as martial arts training (specifically kickboxers and training their shins).
pravnik: Not sure if that question rhetorically or not, but yes I did.
regarding legal issues, IANAL, but i heard a lawyer at a self-defense seminar give advice along these lines: when the cops show up, be cooperative and follow their instructions, but when they ask you what happened, be vague. say, “he attacked me” or “he jumped me” or “he tried to kill me” to establish who the bad guy is, but when they ask for details say things like “it all happened so fast” and “i think i might need a doctor” and “i feel like i might be in shock.” those are not dishonest remarks. it probably did happen fast, and you might be hurt. the point is that you don’t want to say anything that can bite you down the road. the more specific you are at the scene–even if you are confused or mistaken–the more you create a record that will make you look like a liar if you try to be more accurate later. if you say, in confusion, “i think we were fighting for at least two minutes” and the witnesses say it was over in 10 seconds, it will raise questions about everything else you say. at least saying something about being in shock wil help establish why you might have been confused at the time. be especially careful about sounding angry or vindictive. if you blurt out something like, “i sure showed that bastard!” you’re sunk, no matter who did what.
Not to be a jerk, but I’m going to have to ask for a cite on that. I just got the pins pulled from my hand yesterday, and while I was there I asked my orthopedic surgeon about it. He said that if that was true, he’d be out of business. You can strengthen the muscles for support and try taking more calcium, but your bone is what it is and you’re pretty much stuck. By way of reference, his office handles the Red Wings training camp, so I’d imagine that he isn’t a total hack.
(This jibes w/ a documentary I saw that said that the shin is strong enough to break a baseball bat, the conditioning is to make it so that you can tolerate the pain. However, after that Extreme Martial Arts debacle, the discovery channel has lost all credibility w/ me.)
Glitch- Nunchaku *are[/a] indeed a bit exotic, (and a bit useless, as it’s next to impossible to get a carry permit for them), but I already have so many years put into them I keep up on my practice.
What’s the straight dope on the Russian art of “Systema”?
anyone have experience with this system?
Ahem. A bit off the current track, but . . .
I’m a “professional” Quarterstaff fighter (I fight at Ren Faires against other QSs and occasionally swords [sword vs staff is funny to watch unless the swordfighter is a LOT better than the QSer. Evual skill usually equals QSer winning]).
How much, if any, of this training would carry over into self-defense. I’m obviously not walking around with a 6’ pole. I’ve finally broken out of that “I’m a girl so I can’t hit people” mentality, but other than that, I don’t know if anything would carry over.
I’m doing this for fun, not as a self-defense thing (but, hell, if you have a sword or staff coming at you, you learn how to be defensive REAL QUICK), so I was just wondering what you might think/know of this.
PS: Don’t reccomend any MA training for me. I have this wierd hatred of all Japanese things gobbled up by Americans. It’s so completely not logical, I know this. I just happen to despise MA and other suchness like Anime cartoons. No offense to anyone, justmy personal quirk, heh.
Pankration, boxing, submission wrestling, savat. 
Let me say right up that I am not a martial artist (nor do I desire to be one) but I am a woman with some self-defense background who, regretably, has had to actually use force to defend myself in real life.
I would say, based on my experience, that the single biggest obstacle to a modern woman defending herself is the social conditioning to be a “nice girl” and “not hurt anyone”. For better or worse, this didn’t take too well in my case. When called upon to defend myself physically I am completely, totally, and utterly ruthless. Like many traits, this can be a problem if taken to excess but in the realm of self-defense proper use of this mindset is a good thing.
A lot of women’s self defense concentrates on teaching women to use their strength effectively AND build self-confidence. If you don’t believe you can defend yourself, you probably can’t. Also, remember that bad guys don’t want to get hurt any more than anyone else - that’s why they travel in packs sometimes, and pick on old ladies with canes instead of 20 year old quarterbacks. It’s so much safer to beat up crippled old folks.
There is no perfect defense. But you CAN make yourself look like more trouble than the next victim. A surefooted, aggressive walk, acting like you know where you are and what you’re doing… all these “self-confidence” techniques that teach you how to stay with body language “I’m young, strong, healthy, and more trouble than it’s worth to mess with me.”
That, and some role playing and forethought in avoiding trouble will do you the most good.
I can’t recommend more than that, because women start from so many different places. All the way from a frail, thin, cringing “I could never hurt anyone” type to super-jock amazons.
Without recommending anything to anyone, let me talk about some of my real-life experiences in self-defense. For starters, I’m about 5’3" and have weighed between 140 and 150 lbs my entire adult life. I’m not terribly big or fit looking, and never have been. I’ve often been described as “cute” on first impression. I’m no six foot valkyrie.
My first and preferred strategy to trouble is to run away. Given any chance to escape I will - even after the fight has started. Particularly for women who are not big, not overly strong, and not dedicated warriors escape is always a good option.
My biggest advantage has always been surprise - the bad guys do NOT expect me to fight back. That shock alone has afforded me opportunities to escape after the initial exchange of hostilities. Which I have taken advantage of.
When I was about fourteen and in my own backyard a young man (who I actually did know) grabbed me around the neck from behind, dragged me into some bushes, and started to remove my clothing. Granted, I’m not a mind reader but these seemed to be strong indications of an iniminent rape. I’m not entirely sure what I did, and having to strike someone behind me complicated matters immensely, but I resisted, squirmed, fought, twisted, attempted to bite, hit backward, and kicked backward as hard as I could. Eventually, one of my kicks connected, he dropped me, and I ran like hell.
I later learned I had fractured his femur. Which brings up my point that even a small woman can exert a significant amount of force. Was it a lucky shot? Probably, to some degree. But I had a hand (or foot, rather) in making my own luck - if I had not fought back I never would have gotten the “lucky shot”.
I should also point out that, since I did know my attacker at least casually, I also had a better idea of what his reactions would be that if he were a total stranger.
I have been in two knife fights. In both cases, I didn’t have a knife. My attacker did. In both cases I disarmed my opponent, then beat the crap out of them. In the first case, I walked off after the person hit the ground and stayed down. In the second case, it was a matter of run like hell again. I am not a trained a knife-fighter - and neither were they. I used rather simple techniques that did not require finesse. Would they have worked on someone trained to fight? No - but as I said, that’s not what I was facing either time.
My recommendation for a self defense course for women is as follows:
- Find a course that breaks the “nice girl” mindset and builds confidence
- Find a course that uses role-playing
- Find a course that teaches simple moves and lets you practice them
- Find a course that discusses the use of non-traditional and improvised weapons.
- Don’t take just one course and think you’re set for life - periodically either take another course or find way to practice some of these skills (and yes, martial arts study is one option)
My recommendations for self defense in general is:
A) Stay in the best shape you can - if you look healthy and strong you’re less likely to be messed with. You have to be able to run a marathon - just be able to run to either help or further than your attacker wants to bother chasing you.
B) Avoid trouble
C) If touble finds you anyway, run away
D) If you can’t run, hit as fast, hard, and often as you can
E) If/when your attacker falls back (or falls down) run away
Also - fight dirty. If you’re a woman you’re probably at several disadvantages. You’re most likely smaller and weaker than your opponent. Spit. Thow dirt. Gouge eyes (if you can reach them) or other tender bits. DON’T BE NICE.
Don’t depend too much on a weapon - you may not have one when you need one. I stopped carrying weapons because I never had a chance to get them out and use them, or else I didn’t have them with me when I needed them. Of course, that was a period in my life when I was young, strong, and healthy - now that I’m getting older I might choose to arm myself again. Because, let’s face it, an 80 year old women is just not as physically capable of defending herself as she was at 20.
DON’T worry about legal ramifications while you’re fighting for your life or bodily integrity. Prior advice about cooperating when the police show up applies, and not boasting or elaborating and listening to your lawyer. If you’re scared and shook up let yourself LOOK scared. It’s OK to cry afterward. Makes the other guy look bad, you know? Anyhow - when you’re in the thick of things worry about survival and let the cops and lawyers sort it out later.
Don’t pull a weapon and threaten with it. If it gets to the point you need to pull a weapon use it. Don’t give up your advantage of surprise. Don’t carry a gun unless you are prepared to deal with the possible ramifications of killing someone. Don’t carry a gun unless you’re willing to use it.
And that’s about where I’m going to stop, unless someone has specific questions.
Eh… I’ll be pointing out your post to a few of my (girl) friends, very interesting points.
One thing that made my jaw drop… You tried to disarm a knife wielding attacker without being properly trained? That’s just asking to ket skewered. You’re VERY lucky.
I’m JUST starting to see dagger combat in my medieval martial arts training, and it’s friggin’ ruthless stuff. Even seeing the basics done I certainly wouldn’t try the same thing were I to be in the same situation (the gods forbid).
Glad you’re still with us though!
The Stranger: I had never heard of it prior to you mentioning it. Looked online and seems pretty decent as far as I can tell. Keep in mind, that as with every style it is going to vary wildly from school to school, instructor to instructor. Whenever picking any martial art to study it is vastly more important to pick a good school and a good instructor then get hung up on style.
AnimistDragon: The most important thing is that you’ve broken the cultural taboo. That by itself is worth more than you can imagine. In my line of business, I’ve heard countless stories from women who have been assaulted and now want to learn to defend themselves. Many of them have said something to the effect that “I just couldn’t hit him”. It is very tragic.
I’m not familiar with the specific of what you’re doing, and knowing that would help in making an assessment. But based on my knowledge of similar schools I can make some rough estimations.
You’ve probably developed a healthy ability to control your fear instinct. This is very good and important. I can say this because by becoming repeatedly under attack with the potential to get hurt, even if it small, helps get over that. To what degree will depend on what exactly you’re doing and how much potential danger you’re in.
The biggest problem is that you might not be experiencing good adrenal stress with that type of training. So, that could be a bit of a shock if you ever come under real attack. Also, your reaction will be to use instinctive attacks; which, although I’m not a fan of technical solutions to self defense, instinctive attacks aren’t alway best especially for women.
For example (and be honest): A man jumps out a dark alley and grabs your upper arm. He demands, violence obvious in his voice and manner, to hand over your purse. He starts to try to drag you into the alleyway. There is seemingly nobody else around. What do you do? (Men can play along too, what would you tell a spouse, girlfriend, etc to do?)
I’ve asked this questions many times in many classes to many women. If you answered as you statistically should you said “I’d knee him in the balls”. This is the wrong answer. It is another cultural problem that woman face since this answer is ingrained into the modern western woman.
So, it’ll be helpful for sure in developing some kind of instinct for overcoming fear. Other than that not much else is likely to come of it.
Again, the big caveat, I don’t know exactly what you’re doing. Provide me some details and I’ll gladly reassess.
My 2 cents on Tai Chi. BTW I did 4 years of Kenpo under Gary Garrett in the late 70’s/early 80’s. Virtually all the Tai Chi taught in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan is an exercise art. If you watch closely the hand movements, they sure look like they evolved from strikes and parries. However, now they are just hand movements.
I’ve done some of the sticky hands stuff with teachers. A minority of them are really really good. They will tie you up and get you off balance very efficiently. It is somewhat equivalent to Aikido but without throws.
IMHO, based on what I’ve seen and played with in almost 20 years in Asia, Tai Chi is far removed from being a martial art. I am pretty dang sure that even being way out of shape and practice, I could break a knee or take down a master practicioner (as it is commonly practiced here in China) pretty easily. I would not make such a claim against an Aikido master.
In the US, there are hundreds of different styles being labeled as Tai Chi. IMHO, it’s kind of meaningless to talk about Tai Chi and merits as a martial art.
I didn’t try to disarm a knife-weilding attacker, I did disarm two
I think you’re making the assumption my were assailants trained in knife-fighting - they weren’t. I, on the other hand, had received training in regards to defending myself against an armed attacker. Just some basic rules of thumb. Nothing elaborate, just some discussion of theory and a few practice moves with a partner. But it was enough to get the job done.
Which is why I emphasize to people that you don’t carry a weapon unless you know how to use it. In the first case, it was a situation were someone thought that vaguely waving a sharp object in my direction would get me to surrender. But it was obvious to me this person hadn’t a clue what they were doing. So I disarmed the jerk, threw the knife away, and then we were back to hand-to-hand. Second instance has slightly differing details, but much the same results.
As I said, my first choice is to run away - I only moved to fighting because I could not escape the situation. Normally, no, I wouldn’t go after someone with a knife but I wasn’t given a choice here - my attacker was coming at me regardless. There was already (in my estimation) a good chance of getting skewered regardless.
Which brings up another point about people saying “Don’t do X” or “Don’t do Y” - sometimes, you don’t have a choice. One night, coming home much later than I intened, I was chased by a small group of Young Bad Men with Ill Intent. I was on foot. They were in a car. I ran into a dark alley to escape them - hey, wait, aren’t we told from a young age to NEVER go down a dark alley? Well, yeah, but I knew there was trouble behind me that I couldn’t outrun, and I also knew that particular alley abruptly narrowed to become too narrow for a car to pass. So down the alley I went, and kept going even after I heard the >thunk< of a car wedging itself into two brick walls. Another part of self-defense is knowing when to break the rules. This also points up the importance of knowing your surrondings - I knew the alley had two openings. If it had been a blind alley or cul de sac I would definitely been in very deep doo-doo.
So, to re-emphasize my point - don’t carry a weapon unless you know how to use it. It can be all too easy for an inexperienced and unkowledgable person to be disarmed. I chose not to use the weapons against my attackers - you can’t count on the person you might one day confront to do that. You can’t count on me to do that next time, to be honest - I will do whatever I feel the situation requires.
I would also like to point out that it’s easily been 15 years since I’ had to do any of this stuff - moving to a better living situation is a good thing. There have been some incidents since, but not requiring actual physical fighting. I’d say easily 19 times out of 20 I’ve managed to get out of bad situations without resorting to physical violence - talking, fleeing, whatever. Don’t discount violence-avoiding techniques, the can and do work. Not in every instance, no, but quite a few.
The first thing I was told in self defense training was do NOT aim for the balls - they’re too hard to hit.
In the above scenario I’d scream - there might be someone in earshot, so it’s worth the trouble. Let go of the purse - if he’ll take the purse and let me go I can live with that. If he won’t let me go, if I can open the purse and spill everything out it might be distraction enough for me to break his grip and get away. If I couldn’t pull away I’d try any or several options: jump up and land on his insteps, hit or claw his face with my free arm. Kick. Bite. Spit in his eyes. Throw something in his eyes. Kick him in the knees.
If none of that worked, I might have to go for higher risk options. For instance, if we were on a slick surface (snow, ice, whatever) I might suddenly lean into him (which he certainly wouldn’t expect!) to overbalance him and get him on the ground. That’s risky, of course - you need to actually be able to get him down, you need to land on top, and if you can get him in the gut even better - but then allowing yourself to be dragged in an alleyway is pretty high risk, too. Alleys frequently have debris - is there anything I can hit him over the head with? Stab him? High risk again - see my posts on being disarmed - but it might or might not be your best option.
Um - hand over your purse?
Or perhaps, accidentally drop your purse on the ground, in the opposite direction from your escape route?
Wave the purse briefly in front of his face, then throw it about ten feet away. If his eyes follow the purse and he lets go, run like hell. If his eyes follow the purse and he does not let go, kill him.
If he is pulling on your arm, drive him backwards hard in the same direction he is pulling. While he is off-balance, palm strike up under the nose, then reach in for an eye gouge with the same hand as you go for the knee to the groin. Regardless of whether the knee lands, elbow strike to the face, followed by a head butt. Repeat until he lets go. Scream loudly and continuously. If you can reach the hand on your arm, bite it hard.
Do not stop under any circumstances.
Regards,
Shodan
Does anyone have any opinions or recommendations about TRS tapes? (TRS is a purveyor of dozens of self-defense tapes purportedly by “kung fu masters” and “SEAL combat veterans” etc. revealing their “closely held secrets.” Their advertising copy is wildly, hilariously over the top.) Are any of these tapes worth actually buying/studying? More generally, do you have ANY tape recommendations? There are lot of them out there, but most seem to be either sports-oriented or start with a presumption of a slow and dullwitted attacker.
Reader99: A long time ago, I got a free .pdf from TRS (I’ve still got it around here somewhere) that showed “the 5 things that an untrained dude can do to defeat any black belt” (or something like that). It was laughable. I think the techniques were, headbutt, elbow, throat gouge, stomp and the (Vunak?) “Barrier” wherein one braces their left elbow with their right arm and pushes the opponent at a distance.
A lot of these guys have gone onto get their asses kicked in the UFC (if I remember correctly, there was Bart Vale, Paul Vunak (who did the best of the crew) and some Israeli commando…) if that counts for anything.
I think we can safely say that it’s not worth your time. Their videos in particular appear to be aimed at the Maxim crowd.
Systema, on the other hand looks interesting except…their kick defense video seems silly (dude kicks at you and you turn your back and hook his leg in…your ass?), while their “Psychic Training” tape is…anyone?
As for being attacked in the alley, I’m taking this more as, “what would you do” as opposed to “what should you do” and unfortunately my answer is I would probably panic. I assume that falling on the ground and [hopefully] going into the groundfighting position is also likely.
Reader: That’s good advice. I suppose the thing that is the most worrysome is that there’s the idea that one has to stop when the attacker no longer becomes a threat. I assume that if one is not able to run away, and the attacker is “defeated” one won’t simply stand over this guy who’se going to be laying on the ground waiting for the cops. I’d imagine that, at the very least, one would want to detain this person via a compliance position if not a flat-out submission hold. Now, would an arriving police officer (in a generalized and hypoethecial situation) see that you are indeed holding (to his perception) some dude on the ground and that dude may or may not be screaming (especially once the police come and he realizes that should he make it look like you’re the agressor, later proceedings will heavily be in his favor). How about the lawyers? This attacker is certainly no longer a threat, but that could very well be simply because you’ve got him on the ground and have him in (gooseneck, Japanese armbar, rear naked choke…). Should one attempt to roll over into the guard so the attacker still looks like he’s attacking, or at least trying to?