Geoff Thompson
Violence in society is pandemic: punch ups, muggings and even
fatalities are frighteningly common in a society that is bulging at the
waist with unsolicited assaults. Due to astonishing growth-rate of
violent crime in Britain, skills in self-defence are almost a
pre-requisite if you want to get from the cinema to the Chinese and home
again in one piece.
But what is self defence?
And does the
martial art that you are taught in the dojo and sold through the
magazines really work when the mat is concrete and your opponent does
not now the rules?
__________________________________
One of the
many things I have learned in my forty years of martial arts training,
from working with masters and from following the deity of my own
experience hard won is that self defence and martial arts are not the
same thing. Sport MA and self defence are not the same thing either. And
recreational training – twice a week at the local sports hall –
certainly does not constitute a serious investment in real self
protection.
When people talk martial art they think that they are
automatically talking self defence but they are not. And when they talk
self defence they believe that it is synonymous with martial art. Again,
it is not. The two are very different, and they should be separated and
taught as such.
There is nothing wrong with sport martial art, I
love it, I am a big fan. And recreational training is better than no
training at all. But if people are ever to survive a violent encounter
on the pavement arena, it is imperative that they learn to distinguish
between the two.
If you train twice a week in martial arts and think
you are a serious player in self defence you’ll be in for a big shock
when it kicks off outside the chippy on a Friday night. If your penchant
is for sport martial arts (and all that it entails) and you think it
automatically translates to the street you too will be in big trouble
when the pub-warrior breaks your rules and twats you while your
un-zipped at the communal troth, or turns up for round two at your work
or your home with a hammer and a bad intent.
I must stipulate that I
am not having a go at traditional arts, at sport or at the recreational
player. I have a deep love for MA and for its practitioners but mine is
the reality game so I have to honour the truth above all else. And my
truth is not based on theory of folk law or how well I can make it
happen in the dojo, it is based on vast experience in all things real. I
have hurt many people to acquire this information over a long period of
time. I am not proud of that. But I do hope that the reader might learn
from my knowledge, so that they do not become a victim of violent
crime, or the next digit on a home office statistic about unsolicited
assault. Because it is not bad technique or even bad teaching that gets
people killed in street encounters, it is denial.
People are in denial. With their art, with their ability and with reality its self.
You may well ask, what is the truth?
The truth is that real self defence in its concentrate is not and
should not be about a physical response, as I will explain further into
the article. When I teach self defence I may flirt around martial
technique, and encourage people to invest in a core system, but the bulk
of my teaching is in the art of avoidance. And if an encounter does by
necessity become physical I teach and I preach the pre-emptive strike
(attacking first). It is the only thing that works consistently. All the
other stuff that you see, that you are taught or that you imagine might
work ‘out there’ probably will not.
Here is my advice for those
with an open mind: if it works for you I am delighted, if not don’t
complain, I’m not interested – just press delete.
I’m sure you
have already seen – and are tired of – the wristlocks and shoulder
throws that garnish just about every article and DVD on self-defence.
They only work in Bruce Lee films and on police self-defence courses so
I’ll spare you the embarrassment of a photo-shoot-re-run. If you don’t
mind I’ll stick to the stuff that works when the pavement is your arena,
and there are no referees with whistles and bells to stop a point
scoring match turning into a blood and snot debacle.
As I said
earlier, my premise is basic but empirical (I have as they say, ‘seen
the elephant’) and at some point it might prove life saving.
Whilst some situations actually start at a physical response (in which
case you either fight like a demon or you get battered), most are
preceded by some kind of pre-fight ritual and introductory dialogue;
even if it is only the uninspiring ‘are you looking at my missus?’ The
Real art of self-defence is not in bringing the affray to a messy
conclusion with a practised right cross, rather it is in spotting the
attack ritual in its early stages so that a physical encounter can be
avoided.
Hard Target
As a man with a varied and brutal
background I can tell you with sincerity and emphasis that violence is
not the answer. Reflecting this, my opening advice is to avoid violence
whenever and where ever possible. Make yourself a hard target by giving
volatile environments a wide birth. James Coburn was succinct when he
advised us to ‘avoid arseholes and big egos, avoid places where
arseholes and big egos hang out’. He could have added ‘don’t be an
arsehole and don’t have a big ego yourself’. It helps. The inevitable
consequences of toe-to-toe encounters are rarely favourable to either
party so around-the-table negotiation should always be exhausted before
sending in the troops.
The interview
Pre-fight management
is vital if you want to survive an altercation intact; the winner is
usually the one who controls the seconds before an affray. Most
situations start at conversation range and with some kind of dialogue.
If this is mismanaged the situation normally – and quickly – degenerates
into a scuffle and then a scrap on the floor amidst chip wrappers and
dog-ends. The current crop of defence innovators recommends the floor as
the place to be when a fight goes live. In the No-Holds-Barred
one-on-one match fight sports arena they’d probably be right, but
outside the chippy where the terrain is less predictable and the enemy
nearly always has allies, taking the fight to the cobbles is suicidal.
It leaves you open to (often fatal) secondary attacks, especially if
you’re facing more than one opponent.
The fence
If you are
approached and the dialogue starts (this is known as the interview),
take up a small inconspicuous 45° stance and put up your fence: place
your lead hand in that all-important space between you and your
antagonist to maintain a safe gap. The fence gives you a degree of
control without your aggressor knowing. Placed correctly, your lead hand
and reverse hand will block the thoroughfare (without touching) of the
attacker’s right and left hand. If he moves forward to butt/kick/punch,
be prepared to shove him back and/or attack. Try not to touch the
assailant with your fence unless you are forced to, as it can trigger
aggression and possibly a physical attack.
If you want to stay in
one peice, don’t let a potential attacker touch you at any time, even
if he appears to be friendly. An experienced fighter will feign
friendliness, even submission, to make an opening for his attack.
Another common ploy is for an attacker to offer a handshake and then
head-butt/knife you as soon as the grip is taken. If you fall prey to
the verbal opener you will quickly become work experience for a student
nurse at the ER, so use your fence to maintain a safe gap until the
threat has gone.
Fear
Expect to be scared because, no
matter how experienced you are, you will be. If you are not taught about
pre-fight, in-fight and post fight fear in your dojo maybe it is time
to look for a different teacher. Fear will be present, not matter how
capable you are. And if you have not learned to manage massive floods of
adrenalin you are un-prepared. Get yourself as close to reality in
training as possible, so that you can get used to this often
overwhelming feeling (see my DVD Animal Day). Fear is the natural
precursor to confrontation. I’ve worked with some premier league players
and privately they all tell the same story; at the point of contact
they’d rather be any where in the world than where they are. So don’t
let self-doubt enter the equation if you feel like crapping your
Calvin’s because you’re not on your own, we all feel fear even if some
of us pretend that we don’t. Shaking legs, trembling voice and feelings
of cowardice are all natural by-products of the adrenal release.
Verbal dissuasion
Try and talk the situation down. Again, the battle will be more with
your own ego than it will be with your antagonist. Don’t be afraid to
admit that you don’t want trouble and beat a hasty retreat. Better to
follow the Judo adage and walk away with confidence than to end up in an
affray that might change the course of your life for the worst.
Posturing
If talking fails to make the grade (and you think it might work) you
could try posturing. I made it work for me as an 11 stone novice doorman
so you don’t have to be big to be effective. Posturing entails making
like a woolly mammoth in an attempt to psyche out your antagonist.
Create a gap between you and your aggressor by shoving him hard on the
chest. Once the gap has been secured go crazy; shout, salivate, spread
your arms, bulge your eyes and drop into single syllables. This triggers
the opponent’s flight response and often scares him into capitulation.
As soon as he backs off beat a hasty retreat.
Again this need to be
practiced in the dojo. Whilst it might not fit in with your idea of the
traditional ethos, it is essential preparation for the contemporary
enemy. Posturing is like using your kiaa, but with expletives. If you
look back at warfare throughout the ages you will see that everyone from
the American Red Indian right thought to the Paras in Northern Ireland
used posturing to intimidate the enemy forces.
If escape,
dissuasion and posturing crack at the spine and if you have honest
belief that you are about to be attacked you are left with two choices;
hit or be hit. As a realist my duty is not to tell you which to choose,
only to offer you the options, and allow you to select for your self.
The pre-emptive strike
If your choice is a physical response, my advice is to be pre-emptive
and strike first – very hard – preferably on the jaw (it’s a direct link
to the brain). The concept of defence at the point of contact is not
only unsound it is dangerous and extremely naive. Waiting for someone to
attack you is strategic madness because blocks don’t work! The
Kwai-Chang-Cain theory of block and counter-attack is even more absurd,
especially if you are facing more than one opponent. There is no finesse
about fighting multiples, they do not line up and attack you one at a
time they strike like a swarm of bees and luck is the only thing that’ll
keep a beat in your heart. If you look at any contemporary CCTV footage
of street attacks you will notice the immediate and ferocious nature of
this kind of attack. It is merciless and it often leaves people dead.
If you honestly believe that you are about to attacked, hit them before
they can hit you. Once you have landed the first strike, run. Many
defence gurus advocate a second strike, a finisher. I advise not. Your
first strike buys you vital getaway time. If you’re dealing with a
determined attacker (many are very experienced in the street) and you
don’t leg it after the first strike, chances are he’ll grab you and snap
you like a twiglette.
Self-defence is about doing the minimum a
situation will allow to ensure your own survival. It’s not about
defending a corpulent ego or misguided honour.
Having been involved
in thousands of live encounters the pre-emptive attack was the only
consistently effective technique I could find. As for the current trend
in ground fighting, forget it! Grappling is an amazing art, I spent 18
months as a full time player in Neil Adams’ international judo class,
and I loved every minute, it became a magnificent back up for me, but a
supplementary support system as far as self defence is concerned. It is a
match fighting and competition art, not suitable for a concrete mat –
and if you face multiple opponents (and cowards always usually come
teamed up) and choose to grapple the chances are you have just chosen to
lose, and in an arena that is as brutal and explosive as it is
unpredictable to lose often means ‘to die.’
My advice is to stay on
your feet, hit first, hit as hard as you can, using your fists (or your
head). These are (usually) the closest naturally available weapons to
the target (your opponents jaw), and offer the safest and most direct
route. At this point it would be a great advantage to have a heavy
investment in a punching art – preferably western boxing. Most people
think they can throw a good punch. From my experience – and certainly
under pressure – few can. A great way to learn is to go to a boxing club
or do focus pad work with a friend to develop the skills.
If you
do employ the pre-emptive attack make sure you know your legal rights
(a little more on this later) or you might be in for a double jeopardy
when you have to defend them against the second enemy – the law.
You dictate reasonable force; although you may have to defend your
interpretation of reasonable in a court of law. If you are so frightened
by an assailant that you have to hit him with everything but the girl
on your arm, then that is reasonable force. If, however, you knock
someone to the ground and then do the fifty-six-move kata on their head,
you might well be stretching your luck.
I can’t guarantee that you won’t end up in the dock, but I feel that it’s better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.
Forget the films where the good guy – using empty hands – prevails over
the knife-wielding psychopath without ruffling his own hair or popping a
shirt button, because on celluloid is the only place it’s going to
happen. Someone once asked me at a self-defence seminar ‘what could you
do against a knife?’
‘About 50 miles an hour’, I replied.
I’ve
faced a few blades and I’ve been stabbed some in my time and on every
occasion I was terrified. If your antagonist is carrying and you have
the option, run. Even with 40 years of martial arts training under my
belt, it was providence and not skill that kept me alive.
If you
are facing a knife, the best-case scenario is that you don’t die. If a
knife is pulled and running away is not on the option list, throw
anything that isn’t nailed to the floor at the attacker, and then run.
If projection range is lost your only other option is to blitz the
attacker with head strikes until he is unable to continue his attack.
The rule of thumb here is that stabbers don’t usually show the blade,
they just sneak up and insert it when you’re not aware. If they do show
you the knife they are usually just posturing. Always check the hands of
your antagonist – if you can’t see the palms, or a hand is concealed,
you have to presume they are carrying.
If the attacker does have a
weapon and doesn’t respond to your verbal dissuasion, your options are
two-fold: give them what they ask for (and just hope it’s not oral sex)
or be prepared to get cut in the affray.
As important as the law
may be, contemplating the legal implications of defending your self in
the face of ensuing attack would be unwise. It can cause indecision,
which usually leads to defeat.
I call the law the second enemy: this
is not meant disparagingly, but, having been on the wrong side of it a
few times I feel duty bound to highlight the inherent dangers of dealing
with – what can be – a sticky judicial system, post-assault.
Many
people are convicted for what they say and not what they do. This means
you could legally defend yourself and yet still be convicted and sent to
jail (do not pass go…) if you don’t claim self-defence (correctly) when
giving a statement to the police. Many of my friends ended up in prison
because they didn’t understand the law. Paradoxically many known
criminals have avoided prison because they (or certainly their
solicitors) did. So, if self-defence is your aim, then an appreciation
of this judicial grey area has to be an imperative.
Post-assault,
you’ll probably be suffering from what is known as adrenal-induced
Tachypsychia. This can cause time distortion, time loss, memory
distortion and memory loss. You may also feel the innate urge to talk,
if only to justify your actions (Logorrhoea). All of the latter affect
your ability to make an objective statement if the police become
involved. When/if you do make a statement it is hardly likely to be
accurate considering these facts. Six months down the line when you end
up in court to defend your right to self-defence, everything will hang
on your statement. So make sure you’re clear about your rights. If
you’re not clear, insist on waiting until the next day before making a
statement or ask to see a duty solicitor (or your own). It’s your right.
Don’t put pen to paper otherwise. A police cell can be a very lonely
place when you’re not used to it, and the police can often be guilty of
rushing, even pressuring you for a quick statement. This pressure can be
subtle but effective; being left alone for long periods of time, being
told that you might be sent to prison, even the good cop-bad cop routine
(yes, honestly). Many a tough guy has turned from hard to lard after a
few hours surrounded by those four grey walls. Under these circumstances
it’s very easy to say things you really don’t want to say, just so that
you can go home.
If you have to defend your self and you damage
your assailant my advice is not to hang around after the dirty deed has
been done. This minimises the risk of legal (or other) repercussions.
Attack victims (especially those who successfully defended them selves)
often feel compelled to stay at the scene of crime post assault. Do your
self a favour; make like Houdini and vanish? Your life and your liberty
might be at stake. Better still don’t be there in the first place, that
way you won’t have to worry about long months waiting for the court
case and the possibility of suffering from a sever loss of liberty.
In conclusion
Be honest about your ability and your standard. If you are not as good,
or as fit, or as tempered or as experienced as you should be, make the
investment and place yourself before teachers of proven experience.
Either that or be honest with yourself and your students about your
ability, your knowledge and your lineage. There is great freedom in
brevity. It doesn’t matter if a technique or an art (or an exponent for
that mater) might not work in the street, who really cares at the end of
the day, as long as you stipulate that in your manifesto. There is
nothing nicer than doing ‘art’ simply for arts sake. If you kid yourself
that you are better able than you actually are it might get you killed.
When a live situation places your belief under scrutiny and you can’t
make your martial art work at the most vital time, it might get your
wife or your family killed.
Be honest with yourself about what a
real attack actually is: it is terrifying and violent, it is explosive,
it is unpredictable, it is savage and it does not abide by any rules.
Often it follows you home or it turns up at your place of work and gets
really personal. If you underestimate it, real violence can shatter you.
Too many people in the martial arts grossly underestimate it. I speak
to folk all the time who have stayed so long is safe systems that they
have sanitised reality, they have stripped away all the limb-trembling
uncertainty and the depressive terror that a real fight brings, and they
teach defence techniques like dance moves, as though applying them for
real is a walk in the park. A walk in the park it is not.
If you
are teaching it as a self defence you have an obligation, an obligation,
to qualify the potency of everything you sell as self defence, because
someone’s life may one day rely on it.
Train in martial art and love
what you do, partake in the sport, it is a great pastime and a solid
discipline, but above all esle ‘know’ what you do, know its weaknesses
and know its strengths, understand where it is lacking and fill the
gaps. All you need to do here is be brutally frank with yourself and
with your art. This is the age of CCTV, we have all seen numerous real
street encounter on film, or outside the pub. Be honest: how would your
art and you ability fit into those scenarios?
I watched a ferocious
gang fight in a pub when I was fifteen years old and a purple belt in
karate and I knew, I just innately knew that my art, my ability and my
preparation at that time would not survive an encounter like that. It
simply would not fit into it. And because I could be honest with myself I
was able to change the way I trained. I still practiced traditional
martial art because I loved what it gave me, I still dabbled in the
sport (even though I was not very good at it) because it offered
challenge, but I separated the self defence element, I isolated it,
placed it in its own box and practised it as a different art.
And self defence definitely is a different art.
Once you are able to strip the wheat from the chaff and master the
physical elements of self defence things get really exciting, then you
can start to look at bigger game, the art of fighting without fighting,
where you dissolve threat at the level of thought….
But that is another article for another day.
![[1879 ATHLETICS WRESTLING STRATHALLA BAGPIPES MATHEWS KENNEDY SPORT ANTIQUE PRINT]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uKhNAcsemyGOyIfNlAy4lHmwTR5zJHtuNFaFo2mdCFHcQvQL-NLwSKWeAt9G7PV1WIs6C3ydOAdNRVUOEwHGj0WXQP5P4r6wGZ_1X1Bdjmofp6T1NUGrW-md509yDK-v9mp9QYWg=s0-d)
![[1874 Sport London Athletic Club Gymnastics Swords]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vrhmfwh2DWvvrNTvV6fFAtaqzbwopFn9YNfZxvizYV797oS8Nbd5X63pIcA5510lao4A7HKA5dbPQMnXCZaSIKgLZN35lIC6oNA1TE6gDhAJpfDujLIBg9SDRH=s0-d)
![[1884 LONDON ATHLETIC CLUB ST. JAMES'S MELLO ROGERS CUDBY SCOTS GUARDS BAYONET]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_teWWwZCnuwDXGA_iIiiHibUVcN22ZO1OfmVl_7ioEPxzZQLj5OFb-iGWACbNOBpCS1P-N5P0YJOArenfD8KNshuRuNJ70cNkW6uxiaapgeZEpeReBUt7_bikx9DzRecZFsoM0WPQ=s0-d)
