In my post about balance and first principles (“Part 2:Krav Maga vs. Brazilian Jiu-jitsu” ), I mentioned that by understanding the importance of balance and more importantly “stability”, on real fighting, you would know more about real fighting than the vast majority of the “pseudo-experts”. I wanted to clarify here some of the things I was alluding to and also further compare the general contrasting approaches of Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu-jitsu.
As we discussed in that post, understanding the elements of stability will allow you to understand how utterly essential it is to keep your balance since this is a prerequisite for being able to execute any self-defense technique effectively. As we demonstrated with our “weight lifting” experiment, no matter how strong you are you could not use your strength if you are “unbalanced” or “destabilized”. In fact, this is the “first principal” of applying Jiu-jitsu techniques in the real world. You do not want to tangle with a much larger opponent with out destabilizing him so that he can not bring that greater strength and weight to bare. You can now understand that if you did find yourself in these vulnerable positions of destabilization, trying to hit your attacker could be little help at all and might only waste precious time and energy.
Let us add a second experiment to further illustrate my point. It is winter where I am, so if you have access to the great out doors, try to find a frozen pond or even just an iced over puddle. If you are not in a rural setting try to go to an ice rink and just try to walk across the ice in your regular street shoes. How are you walking? most people find that they are not really walking anymore at least not with the conventional “human gait”. They are instead dropping their center of gravity and spreading there legs out wide to try and compensate for the constant unbalancing effect of the ice under their feet.
On the ice taking small shuffling type steps that leave your feet in contact with the ground surface as much and as long as possible becomes the norm. What does this instinctive position look like? Most of the time it looks a hell of a lot more like the Brazilian Jiu-jitsu “standing base” than some kind of “fighting stance” advocated by Krav Maga. These kinds of Krav Maga “sparring” stances are just fine for the “sparring” that happens on a smooth, flat, wide and unobstructed surface; however, the real world is often a lot different.
You may not be actually walking on ice but your balance is still always precarious because gravity is constantly and unremittingly acting upon us. We forget this because we have been doing it so long that we can’t remember a time when we were not routinely compensating for gravity and moving quite efficiently. However, if we went back far enough to when we were infants we would recall how it literally takes a human years to learn to be able to stand and walk because it is no easy task. Hence, you may be able to walk and stand easily as long as no other force other than gravity is acting upon you but as soon as one is, everything changes.
Now think what it would be like to have to defend your self with strikes while in this situation of destabilization. Try to swing with all your might when doing a “walking on ice” experiment. It is very hard to do, if you stay low and with a wide base you cannot rapidly shift your weight (that is why you are stable) so you would have to raise your center of gravity and narrow your base, if you make any large shifts in your weight it is likely to pull you off balance and make you slip and fall. Now all you have to do is replace the ice destabilizing you with a much larger assailant grabbing, shoving, punching or otherwise buffeting and knocking you around. Ergo, a real fight is likely to feel a lot more like trying to walk on ice than it will feel like hitting a bag, or aiming practice punches at a compliant partner who is not acting on you in any live unpredictable way.
Therefore, If you are destabilized in a personal defense encounter, you must do everything you can to recover and maintain your balance. Your instinct should not be to flail your arms around trying to strike the attacker as so many would advocate. If you look at surveillance video of real street fights,(especially those that are not gross mismatches) you can often see exactly that happening.
People are wildly swinging and flailing their arms at each other, using every ounce of strength and energy but generally not much happens. Clearly, if you are using that much force and energy and getting that little result you are not using an efficient or practical approach. (See my post: “Fist Fighting, A cultural Perspective”).
This is very much in contrast to what you often see in self-defense demonstrations particularly in systems like Krav Maga that emphasize immediate retaliation with strikes. It may look good in demonstrations to see one “fighter” launch into an unanswered salvo of strikes while the pretend victim gyrates around from the pretend effect of the pretend blows. However, this seldom can happen in the real world when the smaller defender is engaging a much larger opponent for the simple reason that both people, the attacker and the defender, are moving at the same time and exerting some effect on each other while trying to compensate for the effect of gravity. The larger mass of the big person much more easily destabilizes the smaller person whether they understand what is happening or not.
What is actually happening in this real fight footage, but is not understood and missed by the “experts”, is that the punches and swings may be connecting but if you are not stable they cannot deliver much power and so they destabilize each other back and forth, as one fighter begins to recover his balance he is hit and buffeted by another blow and destabilized again. Finally someone might walk into something and get knocked down, more from his own lack of balance than from the force of the blow.
This is what I was alluding to when I pointed out that to most people, laymen and “experts” alike, fights like this appear to be nothing more than confused chaos. They are at a certain level, but they are also examples of the constant and over lapping effect that the vital role of “unbalance” has on two combatants trying to do the same thing to each other and at the same time while also trying to fight gravity. They are in effect making a “competition” out of the fight whether they intent to or not. They are competing and trying to punch around and through the other person’s strikes because unlike the Krav Maga demo, it is all happening simultaneously.
Ergo, I hope that we now understand how difficult it is to try and “defend yourself” this way and particularly for a smaller person to try and do this to a larger person. I would suggest that in a real “fight” we never try and play the attacker’s game and “compete” with a much larger person for that control of the space between us. It is far more difficult than the public is led to believe and can be very dangerous.