Stu

When you practise for self defence, there are plenty of factors you need to take into account, including how easily a particular move or idea will work under stress, whether it exposes you to further danger, whether it will work against a much larger and stronger opponent, and whether the likely effects of the move are going to constitute a reasonable response to the attack in the eyes of the law. One thing we can be reasonably certain of not having to worry about, however, is how are techniques look. Except that we should worry. We should worry a great deal.

That may sound odd, but I assure you that there is some sound reasoning behind it, because the way people around you at the time see your techniques can be vital. It can affect the way they respond to you, and it can also affect the way the law responds to you, thanks to the requirement that you not use excessive force in protecting yourself or others.

Let’s think about a potential scenario. You’re in a bar or nightclub, and someone comes up to you. You know from experience that they are about to attack you. They even say it. There don’t seem to be any other options, so you hit them with the biggest, hardest haymaker you have and knock them out. Great, except that let’s see that from the point of view of everyone around you. What they’ve just seen is some thug knocking out a drinker who wasn’t doing anything other than talk to them, and doing it in such a big, obvious way that it’s clear to them who started the whole thing. That’s what they tell the door staff. That’s what they tell the police.

Or let’s say you’re attacked by someone in the street. In response, you come out with something particularly flashy, and by some miracle you get away with it. Let’s say you’ve somehow pulled off a spinning kick to the head without being pushed over, or grabbed, or head butted. You’ve dealt with the most immediate threat. Unfortunately, you’ve just told anyone watching, or anyone who reviews the closed circuit TV footage later, that you’re some highly trained ninja, and thus someone who presumably has access to lower force techniques that would have done the job just as well. This can be a particular problem if you are huge, athletic, or just generally dangerous looking, because people don’t notice things like the friend the guy harassing you has brought. They just say “oh, the big guy hit him.”

I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I try to keep my specifically self defence based practise simple and not very obvious, but the moment I switch over to messing about in ‘martial arts mode’ I do go for the things that have spinning, or jumping, or flying in the name. When I’m playing the game of MMA, sparring with friends, I have a particular fondness for going for rolling leg locks. And those techniques are probably about as practical as any submissions get when it comes to actually applying them. They’re fast, you don’t spend much time on the floor, and they disable the opponent’s ability to attack you pretty much completely. Yet you can imagine what it would look like from outside if I ever did one of those for real.

So am I saying that we should never go for the big, high force techniques? Obviously not. You need to do whatever is necessary to protect yourself. But the vast majority of the time, you can do that without making it obvious, particularly if you train for it. Practise strikes at close range that don’t register as much to people, yet have plenty of power. Try using some open handed strikes and slaps, which always make people think “at least he isn’t punching anyone” but can actually generate a lot of force.

Work on the mechanics needed to generate power without much wind up, and work on hitting to the right places so that you don’t need much power. Also, make sure those places aren’t the obvious ones that tend to disgust people. It’s entirely legitimate to stick your thumbs in someone’s eyes if the circumstances warrant it, but you have to be clear that they do, because even if you know that there are no rules in a real fight, people watching often don’t. Think about what you’re doing, and you can quickly come up with a selection of responses where half the time, no one has a clue what you just did.