As I have mentioned many times before on this blog and elsewhere, when it comes to effective street self defense it is best to keep things as simple as possible and not over complicate your responses too much. The key to good self defense is to respond to an attack in the simplest way possible to stop or subdue the attack. Over-complicated techniques will not usually be the easiest and best way to stop an attack. In fact the complete opposite is often true. Trying to do over-complicated and difficult to perform techniques while under pressure will prove to be counter productive and you’ll likely dig yourself into a deeper hole.
I find it ironic that the martial arts, while offering people a means to defend themselves against a violent attack, also offers people enough rope to hang themselves with by giving them too many techniques to learn. If you spend years studying the martial arts then eventually you will have hundreds, maybe thousands of techniques floating around inside your head. You’ll have a dozen different responses to a face punch, another dozen to a kick attack and if someone grabs you by the lapels, well you have about twenty different responses to that as well.
The question is, is having so many responses to a particular attack a good thing? Does having so many different responses make you prepared for anything as most styles claim to be the case, or does knowing so many techniques merely lead to what is known as technique log-jam and ultimately defeat at the hands of your enemy?
The Consequences of Technique Log-Jam
Let me tell you a story that may answer that question. Some years ago when I was bouncing I was attacked while manning the front doors. The club I was working in was quite small and there was only three bouncers working there, one of whom was me. For the past month or so, things had been pretty quiet for a change and there hadn’t been any real trouble so our job had pretty much consisted of standing around and keeping an eye on things. With no fights to break up or people to put out we started to get a little complacent. In terms of awareness we had stepped down from a code red (high awareness) to a code white (little or no awareness) and that as it turned out, was a big mistake.
On this one particular night a known drug dealer who we had barred some weeks before came to the door and demanded to be let in. I obviously refused to let him, but he persisted for some time and I continued to block his entrance. I was on my own at this point, with the other two guys I was working with upstairs in the club. So when the drug dealer guy decided he would attack me by punching me in the face, I was on my own with no one to help. After the punch to the face he rushed through the doors and into the hallway where we started tussling.
Like I said, I had gotten too complacent and the attack had totally taken me by surprise so it wasn’t until the guy had wrestled me to the ground and gotten on top of me that I finally woke up and started to think about how defend myself against his sudden attack. So I made the conscious decision to try and end this attack but a funny thing happened (maybe not so funny at the time), I froze, not out of fear, but out of indecision. I had two or three different responses in my head and I couldn’t decide which one to go with. Meanwhile I had this guy on top of me doing his best to hammer me with his fists.
Eventually I snapped out of my indecisive state and slapped my hands over his ears which stopped his punches, and then I grabbed the back of his neck and put my elbow into the top of his head. He rolled of me at this point and as I was about to get up and finish him of the worst happened. Four of his mates appeared from nowhere and one of them grabbed my leg and began to drag me out the door towards the street so they could all give me a good beating. I now had five guys to content with and I was on my back getting dragged towards the door. What the hell do you do?
Luckily one of the other bouncers came downstairs at the right time. My leg was released and I got quickly to my feet. Between the two of us we managed to get my assailants out the door before locking it so they couldn’t get in again.
“What the hell happened?” my colleague asked me.
“Don’t ask,” I replied.
So What Did Happen?
What happened was I had too many responses in my head to choose from. My reaction time was fatally drawn out because I couldn’t decide on the right technique to use to stop or subdue the attack. First of all I should never have allowed my attacker to catch me with that punch. If I had known about the fence back then it would never have happened because I wouldn’t have allowed him to get that close.
Second of all I should never have allowed him to wrestle me to the ground because I should have reacted with a strike of my own immediately. A good front kick to the groin would have stopped him in his tracks.
Thirdly, when he was on top of me, I should have reacted immediately by hitting him in the face and rolling him of me before finishing him, but as it happened I had too many different responses to choose from and I couldn’t decide on which one to go with.
What I experienced was technique log-jam- I knew too many techniques and that was detrimental to my response time.
Know the Difference between Art and Self Defense
After that incident I quickly realised that I had to make a distinction between my martial arts training and my self defense training. As I mentioned before in a previous article and also in my free e-book, I came to realise that traditional martial arts training does very little to prepare you for what you will face in the street. There are just too many techniques involved in most styles of martial art and while it can be good to have options, you can also have too many options, to the point were you can’t decide what to do next. When you’re in the midst of defending yourself against an attack, this can prove to be fatal. You could find yourself being carted of in an ambulance wondering what the hell what wrong and why you bothered with all that training in the first place.
When it comes to training you have to almost split your mind in two. When you are practicing the traditional techniques and training for gradings and so forth, bear in mind that you are practicing what is essentially an art form with its own physical, mental and spiritual benefits. Practicing an art form will help you develop as a person, but it won’t necessarily help you develop as a street fighter. Traditional training is too formalised and there is way too much to learn in order to truly master it. It can take a lifetime of training to get good enough to be able to use those techniques for real, but what do you do in the mean time?
This is why I think it is much better to approach self defense training in a different way. Narrow down the amount of techniques you will use to just a handful and then practice those over and over until they become second nature to you. Also practice them under as much pressure as you can create in the dojo by employing effective training methods. Most dojo training will not prepare you for the reality of the real thing and that’s the bottom line.
Traditional dojo training overloads the mind and lulls you into a false sense of security and unless you have the foresight or the experience to see past this, you’ll end up in trouble when you try to use what you’ve been taught in the unforgiving pavement arena.
When you train for self defense make sure you are in the right frame of mind. Be aware that in reality you’ll want to stop the attack quickly and decisively and you won’t have the time or opportunity to pick and choose from your vast array of techniques, neither will those same techniques work in a real situation. At least if you’re training with that mind, if you’re keeping things simple and narrowing down your responses, you won’t be caught out if you ever have to defend yourself for real.
Split Your Training in Two
Do yourself a favour and make the distinction between art and reality. Split your training in two and train for one or the other but not both at the same time.
Real street self defense training should be blunt and to the point and your over all mindset while doing it should be different from when you are training in your art.
Making this distinction has actually helped me appreciate the traditional training more because I can relax into it and not have to stress over whether what I am doing is going to work on the street. I can simply practice the techniques and use the training to develop other (perhaps more important) aspects of myself like my inner being and my spiritual self, all the deeper aspects to martial arts that I had been previously neglecting because all I though about was, “Is this technique going to work on the street?”
Free yourself from the traditional baggage when it comes to self defense training and you’ll not only get better at defending yourself but you’ll also become a better martial artist for it.
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