subject: Defend Yourself - 4 Ways To Keep An Attacker From Rearranging Your Face With His Fist! [print this page] Are you serious about learning effective self defense skills that will work against real-world attackers? Do you want to give yourself every advantage to being able to defend against and survive any attack situation? Then, you're in the right place.
Every martial art and self defense system seems to have its own favorite method for preventing a punch from hitting its mark. But, if you're serious about developing real world self defense ability, then the key to making this happen for you is in having options for each phase of a self defense situation. In this article, I share four strategies for keeping an attacker from changing your looks with a punch to the face (or any other part of your body)!
Each of these options can be seen in one form or another in different martial systems. But, it's only when you stop playing the style game and recognize that something that one of my own teachers told me all those years ago, if I wanted to be a survivor instead of a victim. What he told me was this:
"Flexibility is the key to longevity."
Do you get that?
What he meant was that, if you want to live longer - as long as possible - that you must have options and the ability to adapt. You can't be rigid, inflexible, and limited to only one way of doing things!
So, in that light, here are 4 tactics for preventing an attacker's punch from hitting it's mark and damaging some part of your body.
1) Jam it. If you're stronger than your assailant, or if you can take up the stronger position, you can literally stop it with conventional blocking.
2) Use long-range defensive angling. By pulling your targets away from the incoming strike and getting off the line of attack, you can kill 2 birds with 1 stone - you can avoid the punch, while simultaneously exposing his own targets for your counter attack.
3) Intercept his movement before he can fully commit. This is the "get-him-first" strategy that uses direct, committed, aggressive movement that sends you forward and into him before he can fully engage.
4) Slip by the attack - Instead of trying to stop his attack by jamming it or attacking him yourself, and rather than pull away and potentially give him the space to continue, we can use last-second timing to move our target and allow his attack to harmlessly slip by us.
This article is not about teaching you about "what to do next." It is simply a first stage exploration of phase 2 in my 5 phases of effective self defense action that are a part of my EDR: Non-Martial Arts Defensive Training Program - Neutralizing the effect of his attack.
