Do Self-Defense Techniques Work?

(recently posted on Facebook by Mr. Rich Hale)

It was early in 1972, and I’d just learned Delayed Sword – I knew karate! In time, I learned more techniques, and eventually, I earned not only my yellow belt but my orange belt as well. Now, I really knew karate with enough techniques to use against any bully who came up against me. Or at least I thought I did.

Only as I eventually learned, my self-defense techniques didn’t really work that well on anyone who was actively resisting my techniques. They did work on cooperative partners, but if my partners were uncooperative, I’d struggle to get my techniques to work; so, do self-defense techniques really work, or are we merely brainwashed into thinking they do?

In short, yes, self-defense techniques work, but unless you understand how they work and what they work against, you’ll be mentally and physically struggling with self-defense techniques for the rest of your life.

The first thing you must understand is that Self-Defense Techniques are not Fighting Techniques!

The self-defense techniques of American Kenpo can generally be broken down into three phases. Avoiding and/or blocking the attack, then taking control of your attacker through a strike, series of strikes, body manipulation, etc., then injuring your attacker through additional strikes, etc.

Fighting techniques can generally be broken down into two phases – evading your opponent and striking him with enough force to end the fight.

Self-Defense techniques also include minor moves and checks, while fight techniques really don’t.

Let’s first look at minor moves. Minor moves are defined as subordinate moves that are not devastating but can cause ample damage and/or delay to allow the execution of major moves.  This is a perfectly good concept when dealing with a low-level attack. Someone pushing and shoving you around, an unskilled drunk trying to punch your lights out, etc.

On the other hand, fighters don’t feel pain or acknowledge damage. Not during the fight, anyway. Pain, blood, and physical damage mean nothing to a fighter. If anything, punching a fighter in the face might be just the wake-up call, he needs to crank the fight up to his most effective level. 

If the UFC has shown us anything, it’s how much damage a fighter can take without so much as blinking. Self-defense techniques consist of both minor moves and major moves because the average guy is affected by these things. Fighting techniques consist of major moves because fighters aren’t affected by anything else.

As for checking. In self-defense techniques, checking your opponent’s actions is critical to maintaining your control over him during a confrontation. Especially if you don’t want to inflict excessive damage. Checks can keep an average guy from grabbing, hitting, and so on.

Again, fighters are not average guys. These people know how to fight. They’ve hit people, and they’ve been hit by people. If you try to place a check on a trained fighter, all you’ve done is taken one of your weapons out of play. With that said, there’s a difference between passive and active checks. Passive checks are when you try to maintain a check against your opponent’s body. Active checks are more like swats or strikes in themselves. Active checks can hinder your opponent’s motion without taking your weapons out of play.

Now that I’ve briefly gone over the difference between self-defense techniques and fighting techniques let’s look at a few things that are needed to make any technique work.

To make any technique effective, you must understand the limitations of memorization when it comes to a technique. Memorizing a technique is essential to practicing a technique, and practicing is essential to developing the skill and physical attributes needed to make the technique effective.

The first stage in developing a technique is to memorize the technique. This is best done with a cooperative partner. The second stage is to practice the technique against varying degrees of progressive resistance. The third stage is to consider many of the what-if scenarios that surround every technique. What if he does this or that? What if he’s unaffected by a move, or over-affected by a move, etc.

Of these three stages, the most neglected is practicing against progressive resistance. Considering the time restraints in most karate schools, I can understand why this is so, but for a technique to be effective, it must be practiced against a resisting partner. The process is simple and straightforward; the partner starts out being cooperative, then less cooperative as the practice continues. 

It sounds simple, and it is, but there is one trick to making the idea work. It’s to keep the degree of resistance in the hands of the person doing the technique, not in the hands of the person defending against the technique. Left to the defender, the degree of resistance inevitably becomes too much for the practitioner to cope with. The uke should only increase their resistance at the request of the person doing the technique, as you’ll soon learn that even the slightest resistance can totally derail a well-rehearsed technique that has never been tested.

I cannot overstress the importance of progressive resistance in the development of self-defense and fighting techniques alike. I can only compare it to memorizing a bodybuilding book and practicing the exercises daily – with a broomstick.