PART ONE
I
A Cultural Paradigm Shift
What I will be calling the “rough and tough” approach to self-defense, is one of the very most pervasive “schools of thought” within the self-defense community or industry. This school of thought may even be the single most persistent and influential perception of what “real”, “serious”, “extreme” or “hard core” street self-defense is supposed to be all about, at least in the collective imaginations of the average, untrained “layperson”. People may call it different things but just about everybody has come across some version of “rough and tough” self-defense advice or performances at some time or another. We have all seen it whether we realize it or not, either in person, in print, on line or on T.V. and movies.
These influences from so many sources have been around for so long and repeated so often that they became accepted as fact largely without question by purported experts and laymen alike. I feel that this “school of thought” or self-defense paradigm is possibly the most glaring example of untested assumptions and unfounded opinions coming to dominate not only an industry but the thinking of the general population as a whole.
Yes, we are of course talking about a version of the old-fashioned “striking” based paradigm that was so culturally widespread and ingrained in us, especially in the pre-Brazilian Jiu-jitsu/Mixed Martial Arts era. So much so, that many people didn’t even realize that alternative approaches to self-defense even existed!
Wasn’t self-defense just as simple as standing in front of some body and hitting them? In other words, striking and self-defense had become nearly synonymous but this also included a mind-set that the most serious situations required the most serious approach to striking and thus, the “rough and tough” school of thought was conceived, grew rapidly and continues to flourish even in what should be our more enlighten era.
It is interesting to note, that historically this idea or “paradigm” that striking is a simpler and more effective way to fight is actually fairly recent. If you go back far enough to the 1890s and turn of the 20th century it was wrestling not boxing that dominated the sports pages of newspapers that were the dominate form of “mass media” at that time.
When people of that time spoke about the “Heavy weight Champion of the World”, they were speaking about the wrestling champion. In that pre-WW I era a champion wrestler like Frank Gotch was one of the, if not the, most popular sports figures in the sports crazed USA. Everyone back then pretty much knew that boxing could not…well…stand up to wrestling (pun intended) and there were plenty of what were then called “mixed matches” to prove the point.
Mixed matches were kind of the forerunner to today’s Mixed Martial Arts competitions. The old style mixed matches were exactly like the early UFCs, in the sense that they were “style VS style” challenge matches. This arena is where boxers(and in Europe Savate fighters as well) were pitted against wrestlers and the new foreign and mysterious jiu-jitsu fighters ,to see live who and what method would triumph. These kinds of matches were far more popular and wide spread then we modern folks realize and some sources claim that mixed matches died out largely because of what poor opponents boxers made. Now days, this is a highly controversial position so we will have to save an in-depth investigative post for another time.
However, anyone interested in objective proof, which we all should be, need only look back to the very original “mixed matches” of the ancient world. In the original Olympics of ancient Greece their version of “Boxing”(which may have allowed any kind of standing striking) and “wrestling”(which was almost assuredly a jiu-jitsu like method of submission fighting and not like the modern idea of “Greco-Roman wrestling which has only been around since about the 1840s) were separate events or sports that had their own champions.
But there was a third event, the “Pancratuim” that was a combination of the two, plus those techniques like striking on the ground that did not fit into the rules of the other two events. To win this Pancratium event (which meant “all powers”) was the highest achievement in combat sports and it was entered by the boxers, wrestlers and pancration specialists. Many different athletes from many different schools contented for the laurel wreaths for hundreds of years and many of the records still survive.
The simple fact that can be proven by studying the records of who won and that every Prancration fan knew 2500 years ago- was that it was very, very rare for a boxer to win the event. The Prancrtuim was almost universally dominated by the wrestlers and grapplers and therefore had always proven the superior method of unarmed combat. However, I will certainly concede that by the time I was around and years before I got into the martial arts the opposite seemed to be the prevailing attitude.
Where did this paradigm shift begin? Well, as a culture boxing became hugely popular and totally eclipsed “pro”wrestling which had degenerated from a real hard core fighting art/sport into farcical theatrical “show wraslin”. Jiu-jitsu largely went into obscurity and became far more popular in its sportive “Judo” incarnation.
As for more direct self-defense influences, the post-World War Two era brought with it a huge influx of previously unknown but largely untested striking based Asian martial arts. These included Karate, Kenpo, Kung-fu and Tae kwon do. These arts began to become very popular in North America for reasons that also deserve a separate in-depth analysis, but I want to make the point here that they also fit well into the new modern, more visual, mass media and Television era.
I for one can’t really remember when those early striking based and proto “rough and tough” influences where first sown like seeds into my fertile, probably T.V. and comic book inspired, imagination. Back in the day, we only really had T.V. and a lot of action shows to warp our perceptions. You turned on the tube and you were bound to see something like this: the bad guy lunges at the hero who instantly fells him with a single blow.
Captain Kirk had his “Judo chop” to the side of the neck. Jim West of the original “Wild, Wild West” was knocking people down easier than bowling pins with similar moves mixed in with the good o’l American right hand, as James T. had done as well, although he might have had to call it the “Federation right hand” to be politically correct. There were plenty more of this “new” breed of Asian martial arts trained action heroes but Jim Kirk and Jim West were always two of my favorites.
I grew up watching these classic T.V shows in re-runs long before I ever got into martial arts so it was probably this “pre-framing” that taught me, along with so many others, what to expect and to except the idea that if you can’t take out a man (or an alien life form for that matter) with one martial arts blow you could not really know…“The Right Stuff”.
(Come to think of it, I never did bother to ask anyone why dudes in the old west had the same training as outer space adventurers in the distant future; I guess I just figured this is the way skillful “real men” had always “thrown down” and always would. Of course, I was just a kid then and didn’t ask the really deep questions about life, the universe and everything until later when I began to more maturely grasp the absurdity of television and began to ponder more life altering and important questions like… what about those really tight pants they both wore, could this fashion faux pas really survive all those centuries??)
The two mighty Jims took it awfully easy on the bad guys compared to some of the extreme and ferocious looking moves I later saw and are advocated by today’s “rough and tough” instructors. (Of course, these new guys don’t have to contend with the truly formidable adversaries that heroes of the “Star Trek” era had to…none other than 1960’s T.V censors-now those guys were tough.) (Yea, this was the era that you couldn’t show racially mixed couples on television so imagine what it was like trying to show Jim Kirk getting it on with green alien chicks…talk about where no man has gone before!)
Was it all about television? No, I don’t think it’s that simplistic although a more visual mass media certainly went hand in hand with more visual combat sports like Boxing and fighting entertainment pieces on movies and TV. Where once people had to go see live real fighting events to help form their opinions and ideas they now had staged T.V. fights pumped into their living rooms every night. Even before the rise of TV, we cant forget just how hugely popular boxing had become and in the pre TV days of the 30’s and 40’s any town of significant size had live “club fights” that where much faster paced and spectator orientated than the old wrestling and mixed matches from a couple generations back. Every one now knew who the heavy weight champion of the world was and that he was of course a boxer.
As a culture it also seems that we became more violent or at least more concerned about violence. Television news casts soon out striped newspapers as the way most people got their news and the television screen could bring in more visually violent reports of crime and combat right into the living room as well. Therefore, the now striking biased self-defense paradigm had to become at least more violent looking in order to combat more violent times, demands and perceptions. Ergo, the modern “rough and tough” school of thought was given great impetus.
II
Visual vs. Tactile Violence
Nevertheless, even for those who claim to be thinking on a purely practical and “real world” level one of the main reasons for this “rough and tough” proliferation must be the intuitive and emotional appeal of its deceiving visual simplicity and almost cinematic directness. For the lay person it looks easy to understand, brutally simple to apply and viciously powerful.
Who can deny this visceral appeal, especially when compared to the esoteric mumbo jumbo or rigid artificiality we saw so much of in the classical martial arts, and which has turned off large numbers of self-defense consumers for a long time. In the same way, but at the other end of the spectrum we have the “irrelevant sport” syndrome that alienates just as many, if not more, people who are looking for “street defense” skills.
The best example being “Jiu-jitsu/Judo” that was arguably the world’s most successful fighting and self –defense system in that early 1900s period, before rushing headlong into total sportification and combat irrelevancy. When I was coming up as a martial artist in the early 80s, no “expert” that I came into contact with, was advocating judo or any kind of “grappling” for high risk self defense. This was not just a local phenomena,since the Martial Arts magazine industry which was a reflection of the self-defense community as a whole, very seldom printed articles on Judo or grappling. The entire influence of the early Judo movement appeared to have simply been forgotten. It was expunged from history like some thought control experiment in a eastern block communist country.
“Just teach me how to fight”, is the refrain from many people who constantly say things along the lines of: “I didn’t sign on to wear white pajamas, learn how to score brownie points or listen to flute music”. For these people, a “rough and tough” methodology appears to fill the reality gap and offer a real alternative that is fast and to the point. The “rough and tough” approach promises to deliver all the meat with no fat.
Furthermore, and just as importantly; for the self-defense provider or often “pseudo professional”, it’s one of the simplest and easiest courses to market, explain, demonstrate and deliver. In fact, I can probably boil down 75- 90% of all “hard core” self-defense courses (especially in the pre-Brazilian Jiu-jitsu/MMA “dark ages” era) into five lines:
-gouge the eyes
-kick the knee
-rip the groin
-chop the throat
-run away
(Got it? Great… that will be 150 bucks please, and don’t forget to call me “Master”.) You must have come across this kind of advice before even if it was contained within a larger body of more traditional martial arts teachings. Hell, I have long ago lost count of how many completely untrained and inexperienced “regular Joes” have told me, of all people, the very same things. I suppose in an effort to sound like they know what they are talking about or because they really believe things they have absolutely no experience in because of cultural indoctrination…in other words, “if everyone believes this and I have no reason to not believe it then it must be true”. Therefore, in one guise or another “rough and tough” ideology is everywhere so you probably have some idea what I’m talking about.
III
A Working Definition
Nevertheless, in order to avoid as much confusion as possible, let me first begin by defining more specifically what it is I mean when I use the term “rough and tough school of thought”. I always like to have clearly defined terms, for the same reason that any discipline with the pretense of being “scientific” must clearly define its technical jargon and terminology. Ergo, I refer to any self-defense system, unarmed fighting method or hand-to-hand combat philosophy that fundamentally espouses that most, if not all, real world (and in particular, very high threat) self-defense can and should be simplified and distilled down to the application of a few basic, “gross motor” (often purportedly “deadly” or “lethal”) standing strikes or attacks, as a “rough and tough” approach.
More precisely, we are discussing the kinds of strikes that are generally “outlawed” in most combat sports and training/sparring protocols and are most commonly directed at the “holy trinity” of anatomical weak points, none other than the “eyes”, “throat” and “groin”. This alone has always given these kinds of strikes a sort of dangerous and forbidden mystique. Furthermore, the “rough and tough” arsenal probably includes additional attacks such as biting, eye gouging, ear smashing, rabbit punching, pinching, clawing, hair pulling or anything else that is simple to do and can cause pain and injury while not strictly being “strikes”. Kicks are not generally emphasized but when used are always very simple and low with the “kick to the knee cap” probably as revered as the “holy trinity” of weak point strikes.
Hence, the method looks and sounds pretty “rough” and the instructor is often an “ex” something, (you fill in the blank: “cop”, “soldier”, “special ops spy” etc.) or “wan-a-be” who just like everyone else, can’t really apply the techniques in training or demonstration (because of their alleged lethality) but at the least implies that he has because of his “ex; status and often has to talk “tough” in order to convince people and motivate them.(Not to mention, apparently to have an ego workout far more gratifying than any physical one could ever be…which goes a long way to explaining why there are so many laughably obese “ex” somethings out there teaching these methods and being hailed as among the “deadliest men alive”…yea,…“alive” as long as they don’t suddenly drop dead from a diabetic stroke or lard induced coronary.) The result is a distinctly recognizable, rough looking, tough sounding self-defense approach I have unsurprisingly labeled, the “rough and tough” method. The practitioners themselves tend to use various alternatives to the ubiquitous “martial arts” or generic “self-defense” labels. Terms such as “military combatives”, “Close quarters battle techniques”, “Hand-to-hand combat” system or simply “Combatives” have become awfully popular.
In days gone by, this kind of thing might have been merely referred to as good old fashioned “dirty fighting” and we should never forget that really this is pretty much all there is to it, or at least the very essence of it. However, when grafted onto a “military back story” and infused with battle field mystique it gives the “rough and tough” method a further distinctive flavor and apparent authenticity.
What two untrained thugs do to each other in some filthy ally is one thing and many people would not consider it worthy of study but put these guys into military fatigues or it’s the “good guy” cop against the thug in that ally then you can change people’s perceptions of the material. In fact, it is this “military” mystique that is a major marketing tool and really helps it to stand out and be branded as distinctive from the traditional/classic martial arts on the one hand and the competition orientated combat sports at the other. (As well as supplying badly needed jobs for individuals that evidently failed at their original professions as police officers or soldiers and who’s fitness level precludes them actually doing anything strenuous.)
This is of course an oversimplification of the doctrine and I have made a few “tongue in cheek” jibes at a now comical, but still very real and near stereotypical “personality type” of instructor that has always been attracted to, and associated with, this kind of material; for reasons we will discover as we go along. However, there also appears to be some serious and well-meaning people within the “rough and tough” camp and now days most methods, as we know, are on a sliding scale of content and techniques.
Sometimes the “rough and tough” philosophy is reserved for only certain techniques within the larger frame work of martial arts or self-defense curriculum and we could refer to this as a “rough and tough technique”. Nevertheless, many methods have this paradigm at the forefront of their approach to self-defense training; in other words, they believe this is the most effective and important part of self-defense and real fighting so all other things are secondary and may even remove nearly everything else.
Hence, any methods or styles that advocate this “lethal strikes” school of thought and particularly those that claim some military origin go under my umbrella term of “rough and tough”. Therefore, when I use this term in any of my writings and posts from here on out, we will all be on the same page as to what I am referring to without getting too side tracked with my, or anyone else’s, stylistic or personal biases.
Thus, the fundamental difference between a true “rough and tough” approach and a more generic strike based approach to self-defense is that the strikes advocated are considered far more dangerous and at the extreme end of the sliding scale are said to be “crippling” or literally “deadly” and “lethal”. Therefore, the “rough and tough” mindset is: why would you need anything else if you have an arsenal of deadly, proven and all-purpose strikes? (Or even have to work out for that matter…eh?) This is the defining tactical philosophy of the purist version of the “rough and tough school of thought”.
IV
Many lay people are surprised and even disappointed to discover, that as a committed self-defense professional I teach very little of the above kind of stuff. Yes, that’s right…the rough and tough stuff (say that five times fast while keeping a straight face). It’s got a nice ring to it, don’t you think? So I am going to call it the RTS for the remainder of this post. They surmise, that I can’t really be into “hard core” street self-defense or know anything about it, if I don’t teach and practice the “most effective” hard-core techniques.
Well…my counter to that unfounded assertion is, instead of believing “fairy tales” or the chest pounding “tough guy tale tales” largely excepted without question by an “industry” often benefiting from this deadly mystique and built around untested assumptions, I’ve done a whole lot of research and training into the “most effective” street methods (and this includes…gasp!…real fighting!).
Guess what? I still don’t teach a lot of the RTS for serious self-defense, not because it can’t ever work-it can…up to a point. The problem is that literally anything can “work” on infrequent occasions or rare circumstances but good self-defense is not about what could work in theory or looks like it is “deadly” in a demo or movie. It is about first understanding what is actually happening in real life fighting situations then playing the percentages and understanding what will work the most effectively the most often for the most people, then training accordingly.
There are a lot of sources directly or indirectly responsible for spreading the doctrine of RTS. Interestingly both the traditional martial arts and the military combatives are basically advocating the same tools for “hard core defense” like the chop to the throat and stomp to the knee even though they are often perceived to be very different styles. The real difference is often no more than one guy wears a karate Gi while the other a t-shirt and camo pants, but the actual material can be surprisingly similar. (For a lot of these “military combatives” guys id revert back to the traditional Gi, it hides a huge bloated belly a lot better.)
This is one of the reasons RTS use alternative labels like “combatives”, they want to generally distance themselves from more traditional martial arts and the cultural and stylistic baggage that a lot of these styles have overburdened themselves with. Not to mention, because of the growing public perception that martial arts are primarily an activity for children along with the dwindling confidence in these children`s activities as viable, real life, self-defense methods. Many people, particularly adults, no longer want the sanitized “karate kid” experience but the down and dirty military experience…or at least the fantasy of it.
Furthermore, the more classic martial arts approach is built around a longer training period where there might be kata, hundreds and hundreds of moves to memorize, sport applications, traditional rituals or a belt system and often a more “philosophical” or “ethical” tone about “character development” or sportsmanship. It is in these areas that RTS tries to be very distinctive by generally eschewing anything peripheral to the “life or death” approach to self-defence. Thus, RTS has the added marketing advantage of claiming much shorter training times. This has always been an advantage for people who rightfully want to get to the point of self-defence, none other than being able to defend yourself but in an era of even more immediate gratification this appeal has grown.
V
Nevertheless, most martial arts have some teachings or techniques that definitely fall into the RTS category…and there are a whole lot of different martial arts out there being seen by a lot of people. Like most things, when it comes to martial arts, consumers like novelty and so do movie directors and fight choreographers, not to mention, Audiences. The martial arts have been an integral part of the entertainment industry for a long time. Hence, there are a lot of RTS sources to draw from and each seems to have been given its 15 minutes of fame over the years. This ends up indirectly influencing far more people through TV, movies or news items than ever walked into a self-defense school. This in turn can affect the choices people make as consumers, “fashions” and “trends” are powerful social forces so you end up with a proliferation of certain self-defense methods simply because they are popular not because they have ever been anything close to proven to be valuable.
[This is no exaggeration, I can remember clearly what it was like to be the only BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU school in Canada back in the very early 90s and before the UFC made it mainstream. Some people would come in and just could not believe or understand what they were seeing. Some folks were actually horrified: “this couldn’t be a self defense school!” Why aren’t you punching the air and doing kata? “your crazy”, the self proclaimed expert would exclaim “you cant take some one down who is punching you!!!” They had never seen training like that before therefore it couldn’t be any good. I was generally quite wiling to demonstrate our Brazilian Jiu-jitsu approach to fighting…by actually…well…fighting. This was even “crazier” to this lot who would then scurry away and for some reason I would never see them again although apparently they were all able to “beat me up”. I got more takers from the mouthy street punks that hung around near my academy then I ever got from the mouthy “experts”.]
It was interesting to discover that every one, and I mean every one had an opinion on fighting and it was usually the ones with absolutely no experience or knowledge of anything even approaching real world self-defense that had the strongest opinions. There were plenty of people who reacted that way because of cultural indoctrination then there were others who had actually been in real fights and self defense encounters who instantly recognized reality. The point being that perception and reality are often in conflict.]
VI
The Blind Leading The Blind
Like it or not, we all have to admit that we as individuals and as a culture are influenced by the entertainment industry and media. Especially those people who have no other frame of reference when it comes to fighting and self-defense. The big gross motor strikes of the RTS are picture perfect for the easy to follow drama and action sequences of TV and movies and therefore have always been a favorite with the choreographers.
What has been passed down in the schools and courses is constantly reinforced on the movie screen particularly by those that want to appear “gritty” and “realistic”, this then affects what the public wants and you get more schools that match up with what people see on the movie screen. Currently, we have more debate and conflicting perceptions about what is “realistic” because of the rise of MMA but if lay people are still making the “action” movies for other mostly lay people then it can still be a case of the blind leading the blind.
More importantly, we must also not forget that this “blind leading the blind” idea extends to the lay bureaucrats or “officials” who have traditionally made the decisions about what hand-to-hand or defensive tactics programs are adopted by government agencies like the military and police. Don’t kid yourself, for decades these decisions were usually made on the bases of little more than Demonstrations, not anything that could come close to being called an objective study.
[Case in point, contrary to popular belief, Brazilian Jiu-jitsu was not entirely unknown in North America prior to the late 80s and Rorion Gracie’s ground breaking marketing campaign that culminated with the UFC in late 1993. Before that, other individuals had tried to introduce the system into North America but had had no large scale success despite all the system had to offer.
As early as 1968 Flavio Berhing and, I believe, one of the Barreto brothers had come to North America to give demonstrations to various American agencies and it was Carley Gracie who permanently moved to the USA to teach in 1972, after being brought up by the US Marine Corps.
These early North American inroads were directed to organizations like law enforcement agencies and the military, that you would think would be very interested in a proven superior system. In the end not much happened because the decisions were not based on the results of real fighting that the Brazilians excelled in, but at best on the same old demonstrations and opinions and at worst on political connections.
In other words, whoever put on the best show probably got the job. It wasn’t until 1993 that Rorion Gracie put on such a big show that it caused a martial arts paradigm shift and the police and military, like most everyone else, had to take a second look at methods that had largely been passed over because they had not fit into the existing paradigm.]
The bottom line, is that theatrics work. Theatrics are impressive when performed well and more importantly affect us on an emotional level when played out before us, whether in a live demonstration or on a movie screen. This emotional influence can be far more powerful than any rational decision making process. It is this emotional appeal and influence that often stands in our way of not only finding the truth but often even looking for it and helps keep the RTS myths alive.
For example, who wasn’t impressed the first time they saw Sylvester Stallone as “John Rambo” kick, knee and chop his way out of a police lock up in the original “FIRST BLOOD”? I remember that one very well because it was filmed not far from where I lived.
They filmed “First Blood” in Hope, British Columbia, a small logging town in the eastern Fraser Valley about an hour`s drive from where I grew up. It was in Hope a few years later that I ran my first karate program as an assistant instructor at a satellite club and so we all felt some affinity for o’l Sly and his RTS. Can you blame us? Who would not want to be able to chop down numerous armed attackers like so much B.C lumber (and you would not even have to deal with the environmentalists).
This is just one memorable RTS fight scene that comes to my mind out of thousands that have been played out in front of millions of people over the years and profoundly influences how they think about self-defense, not in an entertainment context but what kind of self-defense they seek out as consumers. “I want to be able to do that” they muse, so the lines between entertainment and reality are always blurring.
[Personally, I think there have been much better and far more “realistic” fight scenes that are not limited to RTS and actually demonstrate pretty well the chaos of real fighting and how bodies collide with each other and invariably hit the ground. Not to mention, the need to use the ground as a brace a lot of the time, in order to be able to actually finish a skilled opponent.
Most recently, there was the bathroom club attack scene in the Tom Cruise flick “Jack Reacher”. They played it with too much slap stick I suppose, but it may still be the best screen version of fight chaos and what can go wrong in a real fight as opposed to the usual smooth give- and take ballet like choreography we come to expect and then are horrified when our real self-defense encounter does not go that way.
A defining example of a mostly unarmed fight, is the final fight scene in the first “Lethal Weapon” movie.The Riggs character uses a triangle choke from the bottom to finish off Gary Busses’ character after first messing up his arm-lock attempt and ending up the bottom. This was of course choreographed by Rorion Gracie, long before the first UFC, and marked the first time most North American martial artist had seen a triangle choke and their introduction to Brazilian Jiu-jitsu (it was for me).
However, there is another great example that was ahead of its time and came out long before the advent of the Brazilian Jiu-jitsu or MMA influence. I am referring to “Marathon Man” and Roy Shirder’s deadly fight in his Paris hotel room with an assassin.]
We are talking movies here, but I think it is very valuable to realize that the reason there were not more fight scenes of that kind, with more complex holds or realistically sloppy ground action rather than simple strikes with exaggerated consequences, is because the audience had a harder time understanding what had just happened and this is the very same simple appeal that a person looking for self-defense is drawn to. Simple and brutal looks more “shocking” and “realistic” because the audience completely comprehends what is going on, on both a physical and just as important emotional level. It is persuasive on both a conscious and unconscious level. Instead of asking themselves “what is that he is doing?” or “what just happened”? or even “can you really do that?” This is exactly the reason that current MMA fighting is so artificially forced to be mostly standing striking. But that is a topic for another time. )
Simplicity can be inspiring as opposed to being confused by stuff we don’t understand. I’ll bet if you look into the back ground of a huge portion of martial artists and combat athletes out there you will find they were originally motivated to get into the martial arts because of some kind of entertainment piece, whether sports or movies. Therefore, you can see how this kind of self-defense/fighting has been insidiously ingrained on us culturally in all kinds of ways and I think with far too much unquestioned reverence.
This unquestioned reverence can be expected from the lay public but even members of the self-defence community, astonishingly in this post MMA world, still have this misguided belief or agenda that not only does the RTS work well but that it functions better than anything else against the most extreme kinds of violence! I called this highly irresponsible self-defense paradigm a “belief” because that is exactly what it is, since I have come across absolutely no hard objective data to support it while there is an ample amount of information discrediting the central thesis, which over the years matches up with my own personal experiences and research. Either you believe in the Easter bunny or you don’t but believing doesn’t make it so. I think this is the perfect place to inject a quote from one of my favorite experimenters and critic of “untested assumptions”, he is talking about calorie counting diets here but the sentiment is the same:
“It’s attractive in its simplicity, yes, but so is cold fusion. It doesn’t work quite as advertised”
-Tim Ferris
VII
Myth Busting
Therefore, this very popular but basically myth based approach to self-defense is in need of some serous debunking, but debunking based on the facts not the same o’l unsupported opinions. If we are to move the self-defense industry forward into an era of “scientific” and fact based conclusions we must do better than the myth makers.
As I have discussed elsewhere, our first step to becoming “scientific” is to use methods that are “observable”, “testable” and “repeatable” and combine this with good old fashioned statistical analysis which is our best approach to measuring or quantifying self-defense data. As imperfect as this can be, it is still light years ahead of the generations of usually ego based groundless assertions that the self-defense “industry” has had to endure and that I for one am tired of having to suffer through-“just the facts mam”.
I believe this is very important and a lot harder than we might think when we discover that generally very sane and rational Self-defense instructors(a rarity in itself) are still often seduced by the alluring charms of RTS. Case in point, I was personally horrified when I got a copy of Mark Hatmaker’s book,“No Second Chance”, subtitled “A Reality-based Guide to Self-Defense”. Now don’t get me wrong, I really like Mark Hatmaker’s stuff and my book shelf is full of his works. In fact, Hatmaker is one of the first, if not the first, self-defense writer and instructor to write about statistical analysis, disproving old dogma and an overall more scientific approach to martial arts who was able to go into relatively wide general circulation and that is a very, very good thing. I have never had the pleasure of meeting the man but felt a kind of “kindred spirit” like connection with him because such a rational approach to fighting is both so rare and badly needed in our industry.
Like anyone else, I didn’t always agree with every conclusion Hatmaker reached but I always highly respected and recommended his material because of the rational and scientific approach he was taking that was so far above the usual untested assumptions and unfounded opinions that our industry has passed off as expertise for far too long.
Thus, I cant resist the play on words and say, that my hat was always off to Hatmaker and I still heartily recommend most of his material. However, I have to take great exception to “No second Chance” and while there is still some every good material in the book well worth a look, it nonetheless degenerates largely, technically and tactically, into the same old “real street self-defense is about scratching, biting and eye gouging” nonsense.
Man, when I first read the book not only did I think: “this is nuts”, I thought it was downright schizophrenic! It really did appear to be the work of a split personality, one of the most rational, scientific and research based self-defense professionals was now advocating school yard dirty fighting as the ultimate tool for self preservation under the most extreme adverse conditions. A writer renowned for trying to move the martial arts past the myths and dogma of the past by proper testing and training was advocating the very techniques and methods most mythologized and resistant to testing and proper training!
The point here is not to single out Mr. Hatmaker and attack him personally, which of course is the hallmark of the jealous frauds and phonies who are constantly making fools of themselves by slandering people they have never met let alone trained with ,all too common in this pseudo-profession of martial arts instructor. Instead, I want to point out that if someone as rational and practical minded as Mr. Hatmaker (who was a ground breaker in things like statistical analysis of the most functional techniques for MMA competition) can be seduced by the charms of RTS than we all can be susceptible.
Ergo, Let’s move onto one of the central purposes of this post and take the time to look at some of the specific unsupported assumptions and claims about various self-defense techniques that make up some of the most persistent dogma of RTS. This is the first phase of our debunking; to simply explore how much bio-mechanical potential for murder and mayhem these RTS strikes have actually been proven or at the least observed to have…and I’m not talking about on the movie screen.
For example, back in the pre-BJJ/MMA era that I came up in as a martial artist and self-defense instructor, one of the very most common RTS assertions was that if really seriously attacked all you had to do was kick the attacker “in the knee cap” or “stomp his knee”. This was supposedly nearly guaranteed to produce crippling injuries and even a small person or woman could do this to a huge attacker-problem solved. I was told this by so many instructors from so many styles and systems that I think it was by far the single most universally espoused bit of RTS for serious self-defense that I heard at that time.
Sure, a lot of this classic RTS advice came from the usual glorified baby sitter “Black Belts” who had never been in a fight in their life let alone crippled anyone with a knee kick or anything else, but it was also standard teachings by people who were at the other end of the “applied karate” spectrum. People such as one of my karate instructors who had the classic “bad-ass” resume of barroom bouncer but, less commonly, had also been a professional level hockey player. Maybe most martial artist don’t actually have to fight but pro hockey players sure do, so we all assumed he knew what he was talking about. (At the time, it never occurred to me to ask him just how many people he had actually kicked…with skates on.) Hence, this tactic was treated like gospel by large numbers of students around the world and passed on without question.
Now days I am surprised that this particular example of a classic “untested assumption” is still occasionally trotted out by so called self-defense “experts” and more commonly still believed by lay people at the slow end of the information curve. It is also taught by some Brazilian Jiu-jitsu instructors but generally, but not always, in a less exaggerated and functional form.
In case they missed it, we now have this thing called Mixed Martial Arts competitions. I’m often amused by how It still comes as a shock to many lay people and even the many “flat earther” type martial artists, when I point out to them that in MMA matches kicking someone against the knee joint is perfectly legal.
If I found that amusing imagine my levity when it turns out that some MMA competitors themselves think this move is illegal! As was revealed by an admittedly possibly stoned Nick Diaz in his immediate post fight comments after his match with Anderson Silva at UFC 183.
Moreover, to my recollection (and while I don’t claim to have done an exhaustive study, I do watch and systematically analyzes a lot of MMA fights and have an extensive personal data base.) no kick of this kind has ever produced injuries sufficient to end a match! (I am talking about the more classic self-defense/karate/jiu-jitsu type kick, like a side kick thrown directly against the knee joint at roughly 90 degrees. I am not talking the Thai style “roundhouse” kick that is theoretically much safer yet has been responsible for several knee injuries and fight stoppages.)
The counter argument is that this kind of kick is not used that much in MMA and perhaps its potential has not been fully realized. While this may be true to some degree,(and there has been a couple fights ended by kicks like this to the body) I think the main reason for lack of documented results is because this kick, simply does not work very well under MMA conditions (i.e. real fighting-albeit under somewhat “laboratory” like conditions).
I have watched a superb kicker like Anderson Silva repeatedly side kick an opponent’s knee joint in a manner right out of a karate movie, it may have slightly injured the opponent’s knee and I am sure he had a very sore leg the next day but it nonetheless came nowhere near ending the fight. If a fighter the size and skill of Anderson Silva, who is so feared for his uncanny power cannot drop an opponent with several very well placed kicks to the knee joint the odds are, that most people will not be able to do it most of the time, so “self-defense” instructors need to stop telling people that they can…it’s nothing more than a myth.
[For those of you interested in objective, verifiable data like I mentioned, all of us should be, I am referring to the Silva VS. Leites fight of UFC #97 which I reviewed for this post. By my count Silva threw 17 full-power, highly proficient looking side-kicks nearly all of which appeared to land flush on or just above the knee joint of Lietes. It certainly looked dangerous to see Lietes’ leg jammed back at the joint and I would not be at all surprised if he suffered some sort of injury from the hyper-extension of his knee joint that did not manifest itself until after the match, yet those kicks, in the heat of battle, could not end the fight.]
Another once nearly deified technique from the pantheon of RTS is the “ear smash” or as the old timers called it, “boxing the ears”. This is using cupped hands to slap over the ears which the acolytes that worshiped at the altar of RTS claimed would always “burst the eardrums”. Well, like the apocalypse or second coming, it was much warned about but never seemed to materialize. Furthermore, like the kick against the knee, this kind of tactic is not prohibited under MMA rules and we used to see it used to some degree, more in some of the Japanese MMA events, but it now seems to have all but disappeared. Once again the harsh environment that forces MMA “evolution” has caused the extinction of yet another fabled species. Man, this “science” stuff sure has the annoying ability to shoot down our myths and legends don’t it?
[That being said, I am not suggesting we throw out the baby with the bath water and start abandoning valuable techniques because they fail to live up to their mythological counter parts, and worse yet replace them with what…more goofy sport moves? That is being foolish in another way. Since a kick to the knee joint or a slap to the ear is a very tactically sound way to cause an attacker pain and fear and force him to keep his distance or discombobulate him. In the real world this is a hell-of-a lot and we shouldn’t have to deify our techniques and methods and then be crushed when they can’t deliver in the same way a child is when he discovers there is no Santa Clause. Instead of trying to compete to be “deadly” we should be ecstatic to be “merely” effective.]
VIII
Myth Busting to Ball Busting
Another much touted staple of the RTS curriculum is the “kick to the groin”. Like any simple technique it has it place and uses. Problems arise, however, when we again attribute near super natural and magical powers to rudimentary strikes. I think TV really is as much to blame for this one as anything else since we have all seen countless “bad guys” get kicked in the groin on TV, then fall down, doubled over like they are in the grip of a Grande mal seizure, (also known as “doing the funky chicken”) to the delight of the females in the audience. I’ve seen this countless times on the large and small screen but I’ve yet to see it on the street and I’ve seen my share of people get kicked square in “the nards” in real fights, not one of them ever fell down.
[I am speaking here of actual serious altercations where people have “bad intentions”, not kids playing around in the back yard and Johnny gets a soccer ball in his privates. It’s a deceiving paradox that lighter taps to the groin in more non-threatening situations often produce more overblown reactions than full out groin attacks. Part of it is the slapstick comedy of it all and societal expectations yet no one can deny that the groin is a very sensitive area. It is then easy to then make the extrapolation (or leap of faith) that if a relatively light blow gets this kind of a reaction a hard, purposeful one must be a hundred times worse.
Generally in a fight, it can’t be- for the same reason that if you are sitting relaxed in your comfy chair and someone sneaks up on you and pinches you really hard, you are likely to jump up and down and squeal in pain and anger but in a life and death hand to hand struggle you literally would not feel that same pinch. Pain and injury, especially debilitating injury are two very different things and your body is well designed to disregard non-critical pain signals during physical crises.]
I had an enlightening, personal myth-busting if not ball busting experience back in the mid-80s when I was a young Black Belt and instructor at a Karate school. Similar to the reaction by lay people about knee stomping being perfectly legal in modern MMA, I get kind of the same reaction of disbelief when I tell people that kicking to the groin was perfectly legal back then in “open karate tournaments”, routinely held on the west coast, sometimes nearly every weekend.
We made an art and science out of this kind of low kicking and of course wore standard hockey groin cups for protection so most of the chance for injury was eliminated. This allowed us to train very hard in what we felt was more realistic street type techniques. We couldn’t protect the knees in the same manner so those kinds of kicks couldn’t be used in sparring, but the groin, thanks to all the sports that use “jock straps” was a different matter.
In fact, these kinds of rules and training methods were some of the reasons I gravitated away from more ring and glove type kick-boxing and into freestyle karate during this period since I was looking for the most realistic street self-defense training. Well, like many people still believe today, what could be more realistic than practicing full speed “nard” booting I reasoned? I had a great time practicing this kind of “foot to ball” and became very good at it. My nick name around the dojo was “snake leg” because I could weave my leg around people’s defenses and usually find a way to kick them in the groin or anywhere else I wanted. For a smaller, light weight fighter like me it seemed the perfect equalizer.
Then one day I had an experience that began a giant rethink on the whole concept. A new guy joined our karate school. He had just moved to the Canadian west coast from the American south if I remember right. He was about my age and size as well as being an experienced, fit, young scrappy karate fighter like me. We became good friends and sparring partners but on that first day I met him I asked him to work out after regular class. He happily obliged me and we must have sparred for well over an hour. We kicked, punched and foot swept each other around the dojo and I of course included many of my patented “snake leg” groin kicks.
How many times did I kick him in the groin? Who knows but it was dozens at least. When we were done our workout we went upstairs to the change room and my new friend went to the bathroom were I heard him throw up. When he came out he sat down and I told him that he looked pretty bad-what was wrong? “Oh” he said casually “you kicked me in the nuts so many times…and I’m not wearing a cup”.
To this day I have to chuckle when I think about that, the poor guy never said a thing to me. Where he was from groin kicks were not allowed and he must have thought it was some bizarre bad-ass initiation to the dojo.( Yea, welcome to Canada, zero population growth.) The point being, that he took multiple hard shots to the groin for an extended period of time and it had little appreciable effect on his performance. He certainly did not fall down and do the “funky chicken” (or the “worm” or “break dancing” of any kind for you people that remember the cultural high points of the 80s…and yes, I think I did have a mullet when this happened).
IX
This brings us to the first, very critical and what should be an obvious problem with the RTS approach. So very common that lots of people recognize it and try to point it out in different ways but we often miss the key flaw and fail to express the problem in succinct, irrefutable terms.
Lets do that now, it really is painfully simple but we often miss the obviously simple when it has lots of complex variations. RTS is by definition “unscientific” because it is largely untestable. Its that basic. Anything that can not be tested or even observed simply can not rise above the level of theory, no matter what we want to believe. It really is that simple, if you cant really do it its not real. Theories cant be “deadly”, theories cant be “brutal”, they cant be “vicious”, “lethal”… they cant be anything except theories.
Back in the pre-MMA “dark ages” people were so convinced of the crippling power of the kick to the knee or the smash to the ears or a kick to an unprotected groin for that matter, that no one would dare actually do it…and so the myth is born, grows and is perpetuated over generations.
Am I saying that kicking to the knee is not dangerous and does not have the potential to severely injure a knee? Of course not, but that is the paradox and trap of the RTS, the potential for injury is great enough to prevent it being tested properly but nowhere near great enough, in reality, to be relied on in the chaos of serious self-defence. Just ask Tailes laties or Nick Diaz.
The same goes for groin kicking. Can not a kick to the groin rupture a testicle and severely injure a man? It sure can, it is just very, very rare and the only documented report of it happening that I came across in recent years was a story that appeared in a Langley BC newspaper. A man was walking down the side walk and as a female pedestrian approached him, she with out warning kicked him in the groin and fled.The poor victim was injured badly enough that he had to have a testicle removed.-no I couldn’t make this stuff up.
Moreover. Slaps to the ears do injure people on occasion, as the reports of aboriginal children who where abused in British Colombian residential schools bare out. Years later many of them still suffered from hearing loss from the slaps they endured. These things have and do injure people but they are relative rarities.
Of course there is always lots of anecdotal evidence, otherwise known as “tall tales”, where this guy supposedly killed that guy with this technique or that technique. As a kid growing up and training in the martial arts in the pre BJJ/MMA days that was half the fun, hearing all the legends and stories passed down from instructors to students.
From a scientific perspective however, anecdotal evidence is no evidence at all. On the other hand, there are occasional success stories that can be verified and incidences that can become very well know especially if caught on video and spread virally on conduits like YOUTUBE. What we have to realize in these cases are there is a reason people take so much interest in them. They become so popular or prolific exactly because they are so uncommon and we don’t see them very much. They are the exception “that proves the rule”, not the rule.This is another simply way to express the underlining flaw of TRS. Do you want a self defense system based on the “exception” or do you want a self defense system based on the “rule”.
Potential for injury is in fact the basic drawback of all strike based self-defense but like most things there is a sliding scale of perceived potential for injury. In the case of the stomp kick to the knee and “boxing the ears”, MMA has helped expose the truth and undermine the myth. However, some stuff like eye gouging is completely untestable (yea, there must be a joke in there about a “double blind” study.) Not only are they untestable they are for all practical purposes unpracticable.
In other words, there is no way to realistically practice them. If you cannot practice something and cant test and assess it how the hell can you be expected to be able to not only perform it, but perform it well and under stress? Once again, its not that it cant work, its that we can not know it can work because it is untestable and therefore unscientific.
In order to improve and develop a true skill set you have to have feed back. If I keep dropping my jab in sparring and my partner keeps hitting me with a cross over top, then I’m learning and getting feed back and correcting. Each sparring or rolling session is a mini experiment based on “trial and error”. As long as I can objectively use the feed back to improve my performance I’m being very empirical and therefore scientific.
X
Severity Vs. frequency
As for injuries from these kinds of RTS blows I think the old “myth” is partially built on misunderstanding “severity” vs. “frequency”. It seems to me, that a knee injury is always bad, it does not seem to have the same kind of sliding scale that a lot of other parts of the body have, and an injured knee can plague you for the rest of your life. Hence, they may not be nearly as frequent as we fear but their severity and long term consequences exaggerate the risks and dread in our perceptions. Therefore, we eliminate all risks as best we can because we find any risk of this nature unacceptable.
Life is full of these perceptual paradoxes. The most glaring example is probably driving a car. Statistically speaking, driving a car is extremely dangerous people are hurt, maimed or killed all the time yet we never think about driving to work as particularly risky or “brave” but things that are astronomically more remote like acts of terrorism, certain violent crimes or certain diseases fill our collective minds with concern and fear, sometimes to the point of near hysteria. Or at the least bad political decisions.
[An interesting corollary that supports my above point is, not long ago a writer for one of the MMA magazines wrote an editorial demanding that these kinds of straight thrust type kicks to the knees that we have talked about, be banned!-I believe they were categorized as “linear kicks to the knee”- He went on about how dangerous they were and that some athlete was going to have his career ended by them and scary, scary, scary.]
Personally, I thought the guy was a loon, here he was having a diatribe against a techniques that has produced, as I mentioned earlier, no sever injuries in MMA that he could point to, while basic punching is inducing concussions and long term brain injury every fight! “Heel hooks” are routinely shearing ACLs apart and really are threatening careers but let’s protest techniques that no one to date has been hurt by!
“It’s bound to happen”, was his warning, while we cart another unconscious brain damaged fighter out of the octagon without comment. I mean is this nuts or what? Furthermore, this was not some misguided “do gooder”, like the BC doctors who wanted MMA banned because it was too dangerous while themselves being avid skiers and kayakers-activities that are statistically astronomically more dangerous than MMA and have racked up a considerable death toll. This was a guy who worked in the MMA industry and was purported to be an expert. When it comes to our knees, a good kick may not break a leg very often but it sure can turn the brain off.]
Our list can go on and on but it should certainly include the “chop to the throat”. This one must be on every RTS advocates top ten “deadliest strikes” list. There are a lot of things we could say but again, It often gets down to the very simple question: can a chop to the throat not kill someone? The answer is “yes” but a very qualified “yes” because we cannot forget that any and I do mean any hard blow to the head or even chest has the potential to be fatal.
The chance is infinitesimally low but it does exists. Peoples hearts do occasionally stop from being hit in the chest during mundane activities or contact sports and any kind of brain trauma is a tricky and unpredictable thing. The throat carries the oxygen to the brain and if something interferes with that then you have a very serous and potentially fatal problem.
Can blows to the throat not cause a complete oxygen blockage? As we have said, “yes” but so can unknown severe allergic reactions that cause the throat to swell up and close. This does happen but is statistically pretty rare but has probably killed more people in a span of years than strikes to the throat have in perhaps centuries. The point being is that all kinds of things have a small potential to injure your airway so badly that you cant breath through it, the most common being allergic reactions, but it is difficult and not very common. but who wants to find out so we stay away from the throat and a myth develops that it is very easy to severely injure.
So again, I do not have the data to support the idea that blows to the throat are particularly deadly because there doesn’t appear to be any, outside of the anecdotal, but like knee injuries, when injuries to the throat do occur they are of a much more serious nature and this skews the perception of how easy it actually is to injure the throat when you want to.
Don’t forget, that people in striking based combat sports like boxing, kickboxing and MMA are routinely although accidentally hit in the neck and throat all the time. Anyone who doubts this has never done any contact sparring. In Thai boxing and MMA by extension, kicking to the side of the neck is perfectly legal and is the main target of a high roundhouse kick because the unpaded foot cant take the impact against the thicker boned skull. So the neck makes a good target because it is softer. Thus, hitting the neck instead of the head can be sound self-defense advice since it can protect your hands and has been proven to cause a “knock out” like effect by cutting the blood supply of to the brain.
By extension hand blows to the throat can also be safer for your hands and may cause more fear and psychological trauma to an attacker because the body is more hard wired to be cautious of the throat because it brings the oxygen to our brain. These are good solid approaches to self defense but are a far cry from believing that you don’t have to train properly because you can just drop any one any time with the Fred Flinstone “judo chop” to the throat.
XI
To return to our “deadly strikes” practice problem, some people might say that you can realistically practice eye gouging on bags, targets or even “BOB” dummies for example, that have life like rubber heads complete with eye indentations. There is some truth to this and I have experimented with this kind of training back in the day (once suffering a “mallet finger” injury for my trouble). However, on closer inspection you have to realize that you are really just practicing arm motions on an inanimate object and calling those motions “eye gouging”.
It’s very analogous to trying to learn how to shoot a rifle by picking up a piece of wood looking down its length and saying “bang”. No, I am not kidding, in both cases you are not really doing a thing but pretending to do a thing regardless of what you call it. Are you shooting a gun by holding a rifle shaped piece of lumber to your shoulder? Only in a symbolic sense; the piece of wood symbolizes a rifle but isn’t a rifle and the arm motion and pressure against a rubber surface symbolizes an eye gauge but isn’t in a practical sense anything like an eye gouge.
The same holds true for a lot of striking based training especially with staples of RTS like groin slapping or biting. I saw a training video on YOUTUBE recently of a Krav Maga class in which they were defending against a hair grab. It looks pretty impressive when the women do it full speed with lots of yelling and grimacing.
The simulated attacker would grab the defender by the hair and the defender would then slap at the groin (while of course never actually making contact) until the attacker lets go. Once again, very similar to a lot of the Karate type self-defense I was doing in the 80s. I will show this kind of thing to people who are initially impressed by the theatrics and easy to see and understand movements. However, they then have a totally different opinion when I change their frame of reference by pointing out that no one has actually done anything but dramatically move their arm in the air.
In essence, the defender pretends to slap the attacker in the groin and then the pretend attacker pretends to let go from the imaginary pain he is pretending to feel-that’s a whole lot of “lets pretend”. When we look at it in this more objective way, we begin to understand that this is “self-defense” in theory only and bio-mechanically there is little more going on than an athletic game of “let’s pretend” or combat pantomime.
We must not forget that self-defense and fighting is only partially about the techniques we use, the more important part can be seen to be how we actually train these techniques and what kind of functional skill sets we are developing and actually applying through feedback and testing.
To some degree, this was always a recognizable problem within classical striking based martial arts. Many traditional Karate styles did not allow head contact when sparring so you have to “pull” you punches and stop the blow from landing. some practitioners were taught that the punch was “too deadly” to use for real, others thought this was silly and even back in the 60s people were talking about how boxers could easily defeat the traditional Karate guys because the boxers practiced actually hitting people while the Karate guys were practicing not hitting people.
This is a very salient point since both systems are fundamentally using the same techniques(hand strikes), it was the training methods not the specific techniques that made one approach more functional then another. Of course the Karate rational is that a martial artist does not have to depend on his punching and when faced with superior fire power can fall back on his “deadly” RTS arsenal. Yes, if you have made it this far you begin to see the flaw in the reasoning that is if the stuff I actually practice and apply (to some degree or another) fails me then I can use the stuff that Ive never actually practiced or applied and that is going to save me.
On the other hand, we then have to realize after years of contact sparring in boxing or kickboxing we have done irreparable harm to our bodies and brains worse than what we might have suffered in a real fight. The solution that we have to get beat up worse in training than we ever would have in a real fight in order to learn “how to defend ourselves” is no solution at all and exactly the paradox I was contending with since the late 1970s trying to find the best self defense system.
(This reminds me of the scene from the classic Bruce Lee movie “Enter the Dragon”. At one point in the movie the villain, before his match with Bruce begins, holds up a board and breaks it in the air, with a punch, to try and intimidate Bruce. Bruce responses with his iconic line: “boards don’t hit back.” How about we paraphrase that for all the RTS instructors out there… “BOB”’s don’t hit back”)
Be that as it may, in the case of eye gouging and biting there may be some minor value in this kind of practice simply because it is reinforcing the idea in your brain that you should be attacking the eyes or other hopefully more vulnerable areas and targets. Under stress you are going to forget most everything that you have not practiced thousands of times and I would call this more “rehearsal” than “practice” because the potential for functional feedback and improvement is very limited.
This kind of rehearsal helps you not to forget what you might be able to do in a self-defense situation (in the same way an actor rehearses so he does not forget his lines, but it is a very different matter to be able to act well.) and could be added to an existing functional skill set (like positional control on the ground or clinch control or even boxing type strikes using open handed blows ) but can never be a replacement for it.
In all honesty, how many times do you need to press your thumb against the rubber “head” and plastic “eye” of BOB before you have pretty much learned all you are going to learn from it. The reason is simply that it can not give you any functional feed back.The biggest danger is that on the far end of the RTS continuum many instructors are telling people just that. That this is how you will learn to really hurt someone, and laypeople are very susceptible to the allure of the “simple” and “easy to learn/understand”, not to mention practice. Combine this with the “emotional appeal” which we should realize includes the obligatory “tough talk” of the RTS and you have a hopelessly flawed but attractive package that laypeople and martial artist alike will have a very hard time letting go of emotionally, while all the while believing they are thinking very rationally.
XII
This is what I mean; I was teaching a group of ladies who were completely new to self-defense. We were doing a standard and pretty simple Brazilian Jiu-jitsu street scenario, where the attacker grabs the woman by the throat and throttles her with one hand while pushing her into a wall or other vertical surface. The classic Brazilian Jiu-jitsu defense is a beautiful and highly reliable lesson in applied leverage, where you slap the hand off to the side (at its weakest angle) by hitting as close to the thumb as possible thus taking the attacker’s strength and forward leverage out of the equation.
What one of the women asked was very revealing on many levels. Her question was: “can’t I just knee him in the groin?” I thought that was very interesting and started to have flash backs to karate in the 80s or Krav Maga now days. I certainly had not filled their heads with these ideas, so where did this stuff come from and why do people except it without question? Here was a woman who had never kneed anyone in the groin in her life, yet was convinced of its effectiveness (or maybe the women were just looking forward to kneeing the men in the groin). My reply, I hoped, was both a little humorous and would get them thinking outside of the TV inspired box; I said: “maybe… but he is not attacking you with his groin”.
Some of the women instantly understood my point and some did not. thus, I first had to point out that the immediate threat was not from his groin so why think about it when there is a very real possibility of passing out from the pressure of his hand on your throat. I explained, that you might call attacking his groin an “indirect defense” because we hope (or assume) that by striking it, the strike will have a kind of “chain reaction” and cause the opponent to let go. However, the groin itself is not powering the hand that is choking the life out of you.
Therefore, you are not directly and decisively preventing him from choking you. This is a very common but dangerous idea and a too often relied on self-defense methodology (advocated by many self-defense instructors such as Hatmaker in “No Second Chance”). If the knee strike misses the mark or fails, which it is likely to do in this scenario since most of the women could not even reach the groin when they were pinned against the wall more realistically( with a straight arm that maximizes the pressure of a throttle as an attacker leans his body weight into it). Then you have lost valuable time and still haven’t dealt with the actual problem. What is worse, if someone only knows this kind of response and has been well indoctrinated they are likely to go into denial and keep attempting the ineffectual defense with the “raw, raw, raw” zeal of any brain washed boot camp graduate, never realizing that it wont work…until too late.
Furthermore, since we can never know what is actually going to happen when we knee the groin under real world conditions, do to the fact that we can’t usually practice it by actually kneeing a live human groin full power (and not a pad). We therefore can’t predict the result and why do we assume the most likely reaction is the one we find most desirable – the attacker letting go- is there any actual objective evidence to support this?
The whole exercise is by definition the embodiment of biased, unscientific thinking. “When the attacker grabs me, my kick to a sensitive part of his anatomy will make him let go”. If you remember junior high science class we would call this a “Hypothesis”. A hypothesis is then either proved or disproved by an “experiment”, not a pretend experiment where the participants are already convinced of the outcome.
(On the topic of more “scientific” experiments, we are not talking about anything overly technical at a basic level. nevertheless, even simple experiments might have vastly different outcomes if we don’t factor in verious conditions. This is often referred to as controlling variables.)
What if I wanted to prove that a kick to the groin would make someone let go of his lapel hold-well I could possibly find a volunteer and kick him, its very likely he would let go under class room conditions. But then lets change the conditions of the experiment, lets change the motivation of the attacker, he now gets 1000 bucks if he does not let go and he is allowed to move around as I try to kick him. I’m not even talking about attacking me back or changing tactics, just moving around and pulling me as hard as he wants in any direction he wants.
Do you think this would vastly change the out come of the experiment? In other word, we are now introducing very simple but key variables that are very likely to be present in real life self-defense situations not just basing our assumption on the sensitivity of an undefended groin by a non aggressive person in a relaxed state under class room conditions.)
These same women then had an eye opening (if not bulging) experience when I demonstrated that the most common reaction to a surprise shot to the groin that I have actually experienced and induced on men, is for a man to shoot his pelvis back and bend at the waist. If I did this while throttling them and didn’t let go it actually forced the weight of my upper body even harder forward and increased the force of the throttle! That’s right, the “brutal’, “vicious” groin attack might very well cause you to pass out much faster!
(This, is such a common human male reaction that I can induce it, and routinely do so in class room demonstrations, without even having to make any contact! You can too, all you have to do is make the person believe you are going to hit them in the groin, by “selling” a very committed, unrehearsed and surprise fake to the groin. When I do this I get the same reaction but I never expect people to drop what is in their hands. )
This is no silly “straw man”where I build a weak version of an argument so I can easily knock it down to make a point-which is so common in self-defense “pseudo-profession” circles. Like the other things I teach its based on research and experience not unfounded opinion. I have had personal experiences not dissimilar to my demonstration with the ladies and it is those experiences that taught me to start looking more objectively at what I was being told and not just blindly believe anything I was taught.
Not that long after my first re-think on groin kicking courtesy of my (perhaps still childless) sparring partner, I had another more serous real life experience that further educated me to the limitations of the all mighty groin strike. By this time in my life, I was studying at Simon Fraser university in Burnaby BC. Not knowing the city that well I inadvertently found myself at a somewhat notorious Burnaby night spot where one thing led to another and to make a long “tactical story” short, I was accosted outside the club by a very belligerent and violent patron while I was trying to leave.
The assailant came at me and grabbed me with both hands by the front of my clothing in a classic “double lapel grab” type assault. He was trying to smash me into the exterior wall that had rough protruding bricks sticking out of it. Like I had been taught and practiced so many times my reflex was to strike his groin, just like most of the Krav Maga people today.
I had learned by then not to expect him to fall down and lay there in a quivering heap. Like he had been struck by a bolt of lightning cast by mighty Zeus himself. Nevertheless, I did expect this to be the simplest and most effective way to make him at the least let go so I could be on my way.
He was after all right in front of me and squared up with his hands occupied doing other things. Just like self-defense instructors all over the world have been telling students for generations, “his groin was wide open”. Although he was much heavier than me he also seemed fairly drunk and this helped me keep my stability and allowed me to lift my leg off the ground and nail him with a solid knee to the groin. All this did was force his hips back as he groaned, leaned forward, got madder and griped harder!
I now had the space to kick him in the groin with my shin which I did two or three more times, each time he bent over a little more which made it easier to deal with his greater weight in his awkward bent over position -but he did not let go! The strikes were good, hard and on target the problem was that no one had told my attacker that he was supposed to let go when hit in the groin!
Instead the pain, anger and adrenaline made his arm muscles tighten up more, not less, which is a far more natural and likely reaction than relaxing his muscles which he would have to do to release his vice like grip. I had at least broken his momentum and taken the initiative from him but once again one of the most common and universally excepted self-defense tactics had not delivered as advertised.
My “quick and easy” release was anything but. I had to now improvise and unlike our spacious dojos I didn’t have much room to work. I ended up having to grab his head with a modified Thai clinch that did include pulling his hair and twisting his neck and was able to bang his melon repeatedly into the rough brick wall he was trying to introduce me to.
This took the fight out of him and he finely had to let go and ran off. however, it was clear to me that it was not a case of him being “jacked up” on drugs or something that made him more resistant to pain as some might try and rationalize. When sufficient force and injury were applied to him he reacted in a more characteristic way. However, the groin kicks had simply not been sufficient to reach that threshold and I didn’t think I was going to be able to carry a brick wall around with me for self-defense purposes. I needed to look for methods outside the mythology of RTS and so does everyone else.
Part of the search for objective evidence is sometimes pretty easy; you just need to look at what is happening and being said about certain physical actions outside the martial arts world that may have an interest in perpetuating the myths.
This would be called “observation” and is an even more basic part of a “scientific method”, from observations we might notice patterns repeating themselves and from that form a hypotheses. Case in point, I was watching a DVD on an Israeli version of largely RTS self-defense. The instructor was repeatedly claiming and demonstrating that you could break an attacker’s neck “terminate him” by holding his chin with one hand and pulling on it (“This will shlock him out”).
I was really surprised most of the program while certainly in the RTS vain was pretty well thought out and a cut above some of the usual stuff. But now he was descending into pure fantasy, had no one ever pointed out to him that gripping the chin in the way he was recommending is perfectly legal in freestyle wrestling (and MMA)(which I had participated in and observed frequently since junior high school.) and if it was capable of breaking a neck there would be dead bodies scatterd all over the junior high school wrestling mats of North America (which I had never personally observed or heard reports off). How many necks had he broken with this technique to arrive at his conclusions? Nearly as many as my midnight fireplace vigils, held on the December 24ths of my childhood, revielved the arrival of a jolly fat man in red… ill bet.
Furthermore, look at the simple idea of generating force, which is what all strike based self defense has to be lat based on. But lets take the idea totally out of the context of martial arts or self-defense. Take something as simple and common as falling down. We all took a lot of spills just learning to walk as infants but as adults have you ever slipped and banged you knee into the floor as you fell? I have, more times than I like to admit and this home decor trend towards hard wood floors has made the frequency even higher. Has anyone ever seriously injured themselves doing this. I personally have not, but there must be some bad injuries, it can happen but it is generally very rare.
You bang your knee into the ground and you get some bruising and maybe some swelling for the most part. Now think outside the box a little, how much actual force, as in pounds per square inch do you think a gravity powered fall with your full body weight on to a hard surface generates in a measurable way? Now compare this to the force generated by a kick to the knee or a chop to your neck, which do you think generates more force? Of course there are exceptional human beings that can do incredible things but we are talking about the normal average person, even with substantial training once again it it’s the exception vs. the rule. Any self defense system that can only work when applied by a exceptionally athletically gifted person is no self-defense system at all.
Lets finish this section by looking a little deeper at the “eye gouge”. Anyone telling you that eye gauging is not a very dangerous street potentiality is an idiot. I have personally seen people viciously eye gouged in street fights and it changed their lives and I’ve had to use the tactic myself in very high threat situations such as multiple opponents.
I’ve also had scum bags try it on me and I haven’t to date had to apply for work on a pirate ship (knock on wood or wooden deck). Unlike “knee kicking”, there is a lot more real potential for causing serious injury so that part is no myth. The reason is pretty simple, the eye is said to be the most sensitive part of your body and that is because it is the only internal organ that is exposed on the outside of the body. This is all good news from a self-defense point of view but just because the eye might be a very sensitive and vulnerable target does not mean you are going to be able to get to it. The problems are the same, but lets drive the point home.
Once again let us revisit one of my ladies Brazilian Jiu-jitsu classes. Different scenario same idea, we were working on a defense for a front bear hug under the arms, after showing the classic BJJ defense one of the women asked me “can’t I just gouge them in the eyes?”. The more humoris answer that escaped me at that moment would have been to yell : “oh my god no! that is your friend Beatty!”. I don’t know if they would have got the joke, but I hope by now you do.
The point being, that of course you cant really gouge someones eyes in the training environment and she knows this so In one way she is really asking “can I pretend or simulate gouging Beatty’s eyes and then have Beatty pretend to feel pain and pretend to let go because of the pretend pain?”. As we have discussed, how valuable is simulated practice of this kind? From a scientific perspective, don’t forget the answer is not “practice of this kind is not good”, although few would argue about reaching that conclusion when your personal safety is at stake, but the actual answer is “we cant really know” with out proper testing and experiments. Which is all I am saying, not that eye gauging cant or wont work.
In another way, she was asking: “in a real attack cant I gouge the eyes instead of the technique we just did because it seems so much more easier and effective.” My answer would be that it only seems so much easier and effective because you have never actually done it and you cant actually do it. At the time, I actually answered “maybe…but how do we get good at it? You can only practice it twice and then you need a new partner.” They got a kick out of that but out of all the RTS techniques eye attacks hold the most intuitive appeal and are on some level genuinely dangerous. At the same time, if you are looking for an all-powerful solution for any kind of attack, eye gouging is dangerously over rated and even more “unscientific”.
The problem is that since the eyes are the most sensitive and vulnerable part of our anatomy we assume then that they are also easy to attack and injure. They may in fact be easy to injure…under certain conditions but that should not be our hypotheses. The hypotheses should be: can we get access to the eyes and injure them when we need to during the chaos and surprise of a high threat attack? In other words, if the eyes are vulnerable to injury under certain conditions, do those conditions exist during unarmed combat? This is the difference between looking at the structural weakness of the eye in isolation (i.e. leaving out those pesky key variables again) vs. the tactical feasibility of actually successfully attacking them; this is a very big difference.
(This reminds me of the humorous quote from the famous bank robber who when asked: “why do you rob banks?” replied: “because that is where all the money is”. I think he said this from prison which should remind us that “yes” all the money is in the bank… and so are all the armed people and security devices there to protect it and a whole bunch more are a phone call away…just because the cash is there is no guarantee that you are going to be able to get to it and trying to can be a risky proposition.)
The eyes are indeed very vulnerable to injury, that is why nature has also made them some of the most highly defensive parts of our anatomy, just like the bank has to be highly protected because everyone knows where the money is. Humans are not unique in this regard, most species have vulnerable eyes. Can a zebra stop a loin from eating it by poking it in the eyes? I don’t know but it does not sound very easy to do and I have never observed it on “Wild Kingdom”. For humans it is more theoretically feasible because we have more versatile fingers but there are still the same problems that the other species have to contend with.
Firstly, the eyes are quite small and at the least, there is an ever present “blink reflex” that covers and shields them automatically and at lighting speed. They really are the part of the body that we are “hard weird” the most to protect. Moreover, finding data on the success rate of eye gouging is pretty hard to do therefore it would simply be irresponsible to endorse a mostly unproven and untestable methodology, I don’t recommend leeches and bleeding as a medical cure either but there was a time that many if not most “experts” did.
My own experience runs the entire sliding scale but mostly it occupies the two ends. On the one hand, I escaped a ferocious multiple attacker assault by grabbing the closest assailant , who was screaming how he intended to kill me, by the head in my multi purpose Thai clinch. A split second later he was literally begging for his life as I used my Thai clinch head control to force both my thumbs into his eyes and moved him around between me and the other scum bags. On the other hand, I’ve seen untrained people with little effort squeeze their eyes tightly shut and shake their heads which totally shut down the eye attack. Ive had to use this general approach myself so there is that much variation. Ergo, you can’t depend on it or test it.
In my observation, the best eye attacks have to catch the attacker totally by surprise, preferably when he is not moving much. In that moment, if his brain freezes and he hyper focuses on his eyes you have a good chance to cause some serious injuries. Even minor ones will cause him not to see well as his eyes tear up-these are all good things.
On the other hand, don’t forget that your brain is hard wired to protect your eyes more than anything else on your body. Once he squeezes his eyes shut and starts thrashing is head around it is very difficult to get to the eyes and this natural head moving makes it just about impossible to do any real damage. Only people who have never gouged anyone, which is just about every one advocating it, thinks that it so easy and effective-it can be… but it is very unreliable and hit or miss.
If you miss, you’d better have another skill set because his eyes are now on red alert you will in all likelihood not get a second chance at them. Furthermore, you just reminded him that your eyes are fair game so be prepared for the encounter to escalate to the highest level of viciousness. If it already is, then you haven’t lost anything…except time, energy and possibly a tactical advantage. Not to mention, the psychological or emotional demoralization of realizing your best and most “deadly”all powerful, good for all occasions attack just completely failed…(“shit”, BOB never squeezed his plastic eyes shut and flailed his rubber head around like…well…like a guy avoiding getting poked in the eyes…BOB how could you fail me like this…!!!)
Once again, just think a little outside the box think about what positions actually occur in real assaults not just TV role playing. Some may offer opportunities, such as being in top position when on the ground and some can be a dangerous waste of time, such as being under the “mount” (some one sitting astride you) where you are unlikely even to be able to reach the assailant’s face if he doesn’t want you to, assuming your arms are free.
Use my joke with the ladies as a guide line if you like. In the above case, “are his eyes sitting on me?” in other words make sure you can deal with the actual problem directly, not just assume “indirect defenses” are capable of dealing with the problem. They might be able to but start with the “what if”, everything else is a bonus. Thus the point, is that eye gauging can be fit into functional skill sets, as can a lot of the RTS arsenal so view it in that way not as something entirely different or worse yet a replacement for actual testable, usable skill sets.
As I have successfully demonstrated on many different students and “nay Sayers” over the years, some with far more brutal street experiences than I, Jiu-jitsu type positional control can negate much and even all potential “dirty fighting” tactics. The best example is, of course, a “back mount” where you are behind your opponent and sandwiching him between your body weight and the ground so he is stuck flat on his stomach. As I have pointed out to many RTS type advocates,: “in this position, if you want to have a biting contest I have an extreme advantage (not because I practice a lot of biting), if you want to have an eye poking contest I have a tremendous advantage (not because I practice much eye poking), in this relative positional relationship you cannot even spit on me” .
I don’t need to practice these attacks as separate things, because I practice Brazilian Jiu-jitsu/MMA which gives me the ability to control the opponent’s position relative to mine then I can hurt him in any way I chose, including eyes gouges or chops to the neck, etc. You might call this “hard floor” vs. “hard core” thinking. Of course this is another important topic for another time.
REALISTIC TRAINING METHODS
As for more functional and life like training, defensive training is a lot easier to do against eye attacks than offensive theorizing. Theorizing that will end up being little more than playing “The three stooges”. This is especially true if you already have an existing realistic skill set.
At my academy we have done a lot of training and experimenting on protecting the eyes when engaged in jiu-jitsu/MMA type clinching and grappling. This kind of training is pretty simple to do as a form of experiment and can be done full speed because it does not rely on the offensive effect of an eye gauge but only on whether the eyes can be reached or accessed by the attacker.
This is a huge training advantage. We used simple eye protection that allowed the attacker to go full power for the eyes and things like that. One person would try to attack the eyes and the other would use position, inside control and pushing his face into the body of the attacker to protect his eyes while attacking in more conventional and proven ways.
The results are the same, if you control the positional relationship between you and your attacker then you control the offensive arsenal that can be applied against you. If you lose control of that you become vulnerable to all kinds of attacks, eye gauging, biting and that sort of thing included.
This is of course, the over-all combat paradigm of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu which has a simple but highly versatile overall tactical approach to all unarmed combat based on “distance management”. It is actually this over all tactical approach and not really individual techniques that has been tested over and over again in all kinds of fighting situations and has proven superior to the woefully over simplified idea that self-defense systems are just a collection of strikes (or sport Brazilian Jiu-jitsu techniques for that matter). Once again this is a very large topic in its own right so must be reserved for another time.
Wow, we have covered a lot of ground here but I thought that such pervasive myths needed some in depth analysis and debunking from a lot of different angles. thus, let me summarize for you. In the end, the main points behind all this discussion are really pretty simple and basic. The main point is also the most obvious and has been pointed out by many commentators both layman and professional Self-defense instructor alike. So I am by no means the first, but I don’t believe that most commentators while willing to laugh at or disparage some of the excesses of the RTS approach seem to miss what I think is the very most important point-of just how classically unscientific RTS is.
If you cant test it, measure it, or observe it than its not “deadly” for god’s sake! Furthermore, this should be one of our main goals, to make self-defense more scientific. However, when I say “scientific” I don’t mean start couching it in pseudo scientific jargon in order to give it the air of science. For example, many RTS instructors, as well as all kinds of other martial arts instructors, can do this by using the Latin medical terms to describe all the bones they will break or muscles they will rend with their non-testable strikes. Or use physics formulas to describe how deadly these strikes will be (yea, maybe we can use the same formulas that “prove” hummingbirds or bumble bees cant really fly).
On the contrary, I am talking about applied science on its most basic level-the ability to have observable, testable and repeatable results from a given self defense approach.
Now that we have debunked some of the training and mechanical problems of the RTS strike paradigm, we will next time explore what I think is an even greater flaw in the approach. This major flaw is something I would call the difference between making something “simple” vs. making something “deficient.” For now, I’m going to finish this article with a quote from a well-known historical figure who was both a decorated combat veteran and ultimately a victim of violence. I don’t think he was talking about self-defense specifically but the sentiments are very revealing all the same.
“For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie-deliberate, contrived, and dishonest-but the myth-persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
-John F. Kennedy