Falling firmly into this category is the never-ending argument of which is best for “Real fights” open hand strikes or fist fighting techniques. For me the above rhetorical questions are a moot point. Which is best? Well to be honest neither and both! For me they are 2 sides of the same coin. Have a favourite by all means but train for both.

 

My home “system” – if I have one – is primarily boxing. It is were I started, first for sporting purposes and then adapting the art into more practical unarmed combat techniques by studying the techniques used a century earlier in the rough and tumble days of old style pugilism as propagated by the likes of Sullivan, Corbett, Fitzsimmons, and all the way up to the more “current” pugilists like Jack Dempsey.

 

For me pugilism is the core of every good fighting and unarmed combat system. It certainly is in ours at the Modern Combatives Group training sessions.

 

The old style bare knuckle boxing techniques and methods were the forerunner of today’s MMA and UFC style bouts. Punches, slaps, chops, smashes, open hand strikes, stomps, rips and gouges were all de rigueur. It was in short a useable combative system that could easily be transferred from the ring to the street.

 

For a well rounded close combat system the integration of open hand strikes such as Tiger Claw, chin jab, edge of hand and slaps, should be combined with punching and closed fist techniques.

 

The two are not mutually exclusive. I have no time for the “open hand only” zealots who espouse that open hand skills are the only ones that work. Unfortunately this is only one side of the story.

 

There is a misconception – especially amongst people new to the whole “combative training scene” – that combatives and more specifically WW2 combatives are made up solely of open handed strikes. As if it was a radical new invention. This misconception is sometimes propagated by people who don’t want to have to go through the hard work of conditioning and further training and are content with a minimalist structure of techniques. That is fair enough.

 

Unfortunately it is not an accurate representation to pass on to future students.

 

As a basic example let’s look at WW2 combatives training. If you scratch the surface of the training manuals and books you will note that many of the infamous instructors and syllabus of those times DID include boxing and closed fist strikes. Fairbairn was a great believer in the benefits of using punches, and he knew from first hand experience how effective they could be. The 1943 “Silent Killing” syllabus of Eric Sykes includes a section on “boxing blows”, John Styers Cold Steel utilises punching in various forms, as does the Jack Dempsey book “How to fight tough” which was designed as an unarmed combat manual for the US Coastguard during the second world war.

 

The open handed pre-emptive strikes were used as a first port of call to take out the enemy but they were always supplemented with the more traditional boxing blows and bare knuckle boxing blows. Why?

 

Well, the perceived wisdom was that because there was little time to teach a novice agent or soldier the intricacies of boxing, which they needed a realistic length of time and training to become proficient at. 

 

Added to this is the fact that in the early part of the last century, boxing was taught at many of the schools, universities and boy’s clubs, so many of the students would have already been well versed in the “noble art.” At least enough to know how to perform the rudimentary blows, and therefore rendering most of this part of the syllabus obsolete.

 

Fairbairn, himself, was very adaptive in his training syllabus. For example if he knew that a student already had excellent boxing or wrestling skills, he would move on briskly to other areas that needed to be addressed rather than spending wasted hours on techniques that the man (or Woman) already had at their disposal.

 

Wartime close combat instructors were able to impart the knowledge of much easier to train, use and retain open hand strikes such as the tiger claw and chin jab variants, especially when the training syllabus was condensed into a minimal time slot as was the case with the SOE syllabus. 

 

Aside from the limited training time, there was also the very realistic scenario of open hand strikes providing a minimal chance of breaking and/or abusing of the hands, which could in an extreme case lead to the disruption of an agent’s training period or operational time on the ground.

 

This is still very much reflected in today’s thinking. When new people come down to our training sessions – either as invited attendees or for private lessons we start them with the open hand strikes syllabus first. Why. Well for a number of reasons, most of which have been mentioned above, but once these basic skills are mastered and if the individual is comfortable with taking the training and skill set further, we move onto an “advanced” range of striking tools.

 

The word “advanced” is a bit of a misnomer as these strikes aren’t advanced in the classical sense of the word but rather we have simply chosen to instruct the attendee in one set of striking techniques before introducing a second set into the equation.

 

With the right instruction and proper training I believe that a closed fist is the ultimate human impact weapon for close combat. It is accessible, flexible in its application – jabs, hooks, smashes, uppercuts – and more importantly effective.

 

But what about the effectiveness of open handed pre-emptive strikes? Surely there is no point in training them if they don’t work or are ineffective.

 

Well, and again this is from my own experiences and from the experiences of people I have worked and trained with, they do work. No question about that. I have had the desired result from palm strikes and power slaps, and as a “first hit” knockout technique they are worth their weight in gold.

 

However violence doesn’t always go according to plan. While it would be nice to think that a well executed pre-emptive strike is both the beginning and the end of the fight, Murphy and his bloody law quite often dictate that things can go wrong and you may need more than a pre-emptive strike to end things. That’s when deception and pre-emptiveness go right out the window and FIGHTING actually starts.

 

You’ve shown your hand as it were and now the true mish mash and balls up that is close combat is up and running. If the combatant limits himself to a range of just open hand blows, he (or she) is doing themselves a disservice. We should be putting in blows, strikes and smashes of ALL denominations. In this arena we can’t afford to be biased, and really there is no need for us to be. 

 

I can edge of hand, face smash, uppercut, and hook. I can do all this seamlessly. My open hand can make a fist and my fist can open. I can transition between all of these in less than a second. There are no rules that demand we adhere to one set of options. I simply wait to see what targets are laid out before me and choose the most appropriate tool for the job. At a minimal level, say for a relatively new combative practitioner, we could even stress the old rule of thumb; “hard weapons hit soft targets and soft weapons hit hard targets.”

 

We are all (well nearly all) intelligent individuals, capable of making qualified decisions about the actions we choose. There is a worrying trend over recent years that “instinct” takes over in the heat of battle and we all start instantly flapping open our hands to deliver a range of slaps and smacks. Well really – I don’t think these people have either been in a situation against a live attacker of any merit.

 

My own experience and from incidents I have witnessed shows that a full range of striking techniques will be utilised – either by pure instinct or by a conscious application choice, i.e. prior training. So one guy trying to slap a well motivated and “fired up” street tough will have little if any chance of succeeding, unless of course said meat-head falls down from laughing himself silly too much!

 

The caveat with this that in order to have effective closed fist boxing skills a certain amount of conditioning to the hands and wrists are necessary. For those pugilists amongst us I’m sure you are all familiar with the inevitable months (and in some cases years) of bruised and bloodstained knuckles and hands in order to get a comfortable and sustainable impact tool.

 

Now no one said it was going to be easy – at least no one on this site or in this article – but nothing of any value or worth ever is. Sure you can get a quick fix solution to get you out of trouble, but it does rather seem that you are putting all your eggs in one basket. If it all goes belly up what is your back up plan? More slaps and open hands? Well if it didn’t work the first few times, it probably won’t anymore.

 

At the end of the day, as a combatant, you should have options. No one is saying learn dozens and dozens of variants and techniques. That’s too much. But if you limit yourself to one or the other then there is the real risk of your overall assault techniques being rendered ineffective.

 

Train hard and with intensity – throw out that jab with speed and power. Get a result. Chop down an arm with an Edge of Hand blow. Feel the arm crack under the strain. Throw that whole body upward to get a powerful uppercut, and feel the solid impact as your fist drives in.

 

But most of all train and use what works for you, by NOT cutting your nose off to spite your face.

 

Copyright Modern Combatives Group 2008