I sat down and worked out the other day that I have been involved in what is loosely called close quarter combat for just over 20 years. Scary!!

I threw my first “Tiger claw” when I was fifteen; this was followed by tutelage in a whole range of close combat skills and techniques over the following years.

 

I have never been what you might call a “traditionalist” preferring the more practical approach to close combat rather than studying the intricacies of an art or style. Since that time combatives has been turned into an industry by some and has become the most overused word in the self protection dictionary.

 

I’ve (sadly) seen the rise of the celebrity instructors, internet “gurus” and their groupies. Individuals who have re-invented the wheel by re-hashing techniques that existed anyway and passing them off as groundbreaking or the next evolution of self protection systems. Its nonsense mostly as people were doing them years ago (and better in some cases) and most certainly there were people doing them WAY before we ever came onto the scene. Good marketing and advertising does not necessarily make revolutionary or effective techniques. As WW2 close combat instructor E.A. Sykes stated; “It is true that every so often a man will think out or discover by accident something hitherto unknown to himself and his immediate associates but the probability is that somewhere someone else knows about it already."

Which is why whenever I see someone advertising a new self protection/martial art revolutionary system or "secret fighting techniques" DVD - it always makes me smile as the chances are its all been done before.

 

One of the best lessons to learn is to take the core skills and put our own spin on them. Don’t become bogged down with “tactical technique” overload. Now explore by all means, learn, YES – but anyone who needs THAT much training to throw an elbow strike (or whatever) should probably stop what they’re doing now and try something a little less demanding!!! Have the ability and the courage to discover what works best for you – after all it will be YOU dealing with the attacker not some instructor.

 

Close combat is not doctrinal, it’s not regimented, and it doesn’t have to be done “just so” – it’s just FIGHTING!! That is its strength its simplicity and its greatest asset.

 

From my own point of view my personal close combat system has changed little over the past two decades; the evolution has been mainly in the field of weapons skills, scenario training techniques and interactive assailant fighting such as the padded man attacker. But, importantly, the things that I have changed or no longer use, have been removed because I recognised that they no longer benefited me or what I was trying to achieve. Evolution and experience are the main bedfellows of what you are trying to attain. There can be no free rides in a self protection scenario - if it works use it - if it doesn’t BIN it! Good technique should not be just a museum piece

 

Despite this my main principles of close combat have stayed steadfast. The techniques may have evolved but the strategy has not. If we leave aside the principles of personal security for the moment (awareness, avoidance, etc) and just concentrate on the immediate pre and “in-fight” applications.

 

With this article I wanted to get back to basics and regain the core of some personal combative principles for the street, principles which should remain constant regardless of your chosen personal combat system, and which can easily become “lost” in the overload of techniques.  So let’s have a look at an overview of our fundamental combative strategy and the applications we need to consider.

 

 

 

For me mental combative attitude is the engine room of combative application. Get the mindset right and it provides an easier transference of gross motor skills. There are numerous ways to instil that “flick switch” aggression needed to win through in combat, many of which we cover on our modern combatives seminars and training programs. 

Good combative mindset is 90% attitude backed up with 10% techniques. Dave Spaulding, a noted US firearms trainer and law enforcement officer, classify’s good combative attitude as a combination of awareness and willingness (the NESS brothers in popular parlance). Awareness to spot and evaluate a potential problem, and willingness to take that figurative step over the threshold and go forward to engage in a physical action.

 

 

 

Adjacent to combative attitude is the forward aggressive drive – the mental and physical action of actually taking the fight TO the enemy. A third I would submit would be intensity – keeping up the pace and drive until the individual is no longer a threat. I’ve seen this tactic work at first hand where with the correct mindset and attitude, a determined smaller person can literally place a larger attacker on the back foot and turn the situation around. Forward drive wins fights – remaining static or going completely defensive is a recipe for losing or being badly beaten!!

 

 

For me fitness is the glue that bonds together good MINDSET and realistic TECHNIQUE. Good close combat fitness should consist of strength and endurance training, and be headlined with that sudden BURST of the energy/aggression mix that finishes the fight in a matter of seconds. We won’t have minutes to warm up or get our body ready, and we don’t want to engage in minutes of skilful fighting. It’s a flick of the switch, zero to hero application and if the fight has gone on for anything longer than 30 seconds, well…..be prepared for the long haul of gouging, biting and ripping!!!

 

Now some individuals are going to be better than others at certain levels of fitness – that’s just life. But we should endeavour to “push” ourselves as much as we can. A 30 second street fight can leave even the fittest people panting and wheezing due to the effects of fear and chemical responses of adrenaline. So maybe it wouldn’t do some people any harm to up the level of their personal fitness training once in a while – an extra mile, an extra 10 reps.

For combative training – less is more, especially in the training of techniques. It’s the quality of the reps rather than the quantity of the reps that is important. For new people who train with us there is always a tendency to blast through techniques. We slow them down and tell them we would prefer five quality strikes rather than twenty-five half hearted below par strikes.

 

 

 

Ht them first, hard and fast!!

 

When should we go pre-emptive?  Who knows? It’s an individual judgement call.

 

However, I would like to bring up one part of the personal security pyramid (awareness, evaluation and avoidance), namely - evaluation – as it is one that is often overlooked or not completely understood.

You hear people banging on about "oh you've got to have awareness, awareness is everything, etc".

And it is - Awareness is vital to a good self protection plan. But aware of what? Bad men, nasties, meanies! Well bloody hell what do they look like then. I've known bad men dressed in $800 suits, and I've seen real gents dressed like refugees. Go figure?

If we haven't worked on our evaluation skills, i.e. how to "read" people and assess the probability of their "bad attitudes" towards their fellow human beings, then that can be as much of a hindrance as NO awareness.

The potential for that is that you could end up jumping at shadows at every stranger that crosses your path. I think its all about perspective. Read the situation correctly and the weapon stays in its holster - read it incorrectly and you'd end up drawing a weapon every five seconds in some places!

Once we are aware of an individual entering our "awareness radar" we then have to evaluate; from there we can decide whether the situation has deteriorated enough to start a pre-emptive assault or to go further down the force continuum scale by using verbal de-escalation techniques to “talk them down.”

 

 

 

At “bad breath” distance power takes precedence over speed. This goes back to the old truism whoever hits first will be the winner. If I am 10 inches from an individual who is fronting me and I can touch him – then it’s not speed that I need its power. So how do we get power into our strikes?

 

For this there are various methods that can be used – we work from two. The drop step and the double hip system. The drop step is an old boxing technique utilised in the past by the legendary Jack Dempsey, and is a way of leaning power forward at short distances. The striking hand connects with the target at the same time as the lead foot takes a step forward. The double hip, as advocated by Peter Consterdine, centres on a rotation of the body via hip movement and coupled with the “whip” effect of the delivery system, usually the arm. Both these methods of power delivery have merit and we encourage people who train with us to try them both out and see which benefits them the most.

At this distance the fundamental rule is that we should not telegraph our intent by “drawing back” our arm or blading our body into what some would call a traditional stance. Our stance may be an everyday casual position, but nevertheless we have to go from nothing to everything in the power delivery stakes in the flick of an eye.

 

 

If you are in honest fear from serious injury or death from an attacker on the street, a weapon can give you an advantage! I don’t want to fight him/them fairly I just want to get to an implement and STOP them. That weapon can be an improvised/expedient tool or a purpose carried implement depending on your job (LEO or military). Either way we want that edge – both physical and mental – over an attacker as soon as possible. Even the most basic item can have merit. Not everything has to be a purpose bought tactical weapon. In most cases it will be whatever is in your immediate environment – chair, brick, stick. It is simply a tool to do a job, nothing more and it doesn’t have to be the latest gizmo fashion accessory - you just have to know WHAT you’re doing with it to make it count.

 

 

 

Adapt your techniques don’t adopt is a good benchmark to work from. Play to your strengths and work on the techniques that work for you!!

Whichever technique you utilise – try to keep its application gross motor and uncomplicated. Work on an arsenal of a few easy to retain and use skills. People will always counter with the point about having more choice of techniques to work from, and that is OK if the student has the time and inclination to carry on with the training over an extended period. But if it’s for an expedient situation (say working overseas in a rough environment) then the student needs something that works NOW. The phrase "What you learn in the training hall this afternoon, you should be able to use for real in the car park on the way home" springs to mind.

From my own experience the techniques to discard as unworkable or unrealistic pretty much stick out anyway and trying to make a failing technique work in mid-fight (that is obviously failing for whatever reason) is a bit like taking the long route home in the pouring rain – pointless.

 

 

 

I was having a conversation with one of our seminar attendees recently in relation to low-line kick attacks. He was putting in kicks to the knee/shin bone area. At the end of each technique he was retracting the leg – making impact minimal. When we stopped and talked about it I made the point that his mindset should not just be to strike the leg but to crush it. That is a vital visual/mental gear change.

 

There is a Russian underworld phrase; “zomochit” which means to smash, break and pulverize. That is the end result that we are after – we are not scoring points or counting hits – we are going out to make him non-ambulatory. Take away a man’s fighting tools (arms, legs) and you’ve broken down his weapon system, once he’s at that point we can start to work on more prominent targets.

 

This also applies to any strike that we offer. Why waste time “softening him up” – in a real time violent assault we should be striking to mainline targets and creating maximum damage as quickly as possible. This is never more so than in the combination conundrum of “Do combinations work?

 

There are people who will tell you yes, others will say no. The problem lies in the training application of them versus the reality of a fully functioning human adversary. I submit that hitting a bag, pads, etc, you have that restrictive impact movement and in many cases people sacrifice the first strike for that big barnstormer second or third strike hoping for that blockbuster KO.

 

This however goes against the basic principle of hit first, hard and fast, and they tend to sacrifice power for speed (as we have noted above). However when hitting a human target it tends to go away (funny that!!) due to impact and the transference of kinetic energy. What I think you can do is hit the same target SEPERATELY multiple times. A strike to the head will result in movement. From there we need to correspond to the target again, reassess and regain a physical connection. Hit, regain/flag, hit regain/flag, this linked with forward aggression is the key to a successful multiple striking system. This is nothing new and most of the noted combat specialists of the 20^th Century have come to this conclusion and used this method in times gone past.

 

 

 

This is true of every “situation” I’ve ever been in – armed and unarmed – it’s not necessarily how you think its going to be. The fluidity and dynamics of a fight can throw up some very strange situations, reactions and occurrences and the old colloquialism of Murphy’s Law (i.e. if it can go wrong it will go wrong) usually comes into force at this point.

The strike that you’ve done a hundred times in training has no effect against the guy about to rip your head off and the choking technique that your instructor told you was “a death lock” is seemingly not working no matter how hard you crank it on.

This unfortunately is the reality of a FIGHT; no one said it was going to be easy, after all a fight by its very nature is a physical struggle. So how can we override these X-Factor situations?

 

Well for us the best method has been to run plausible and high probability self protection applications in a variety of scenarios. This type of training helps us to deal with the “shock and awe” factor when it all comes on top and we have to be able to function effectively in a high stress situation of a physical assault. It’s the chance to step outside of the comfort zone and feel the hot sweaty reality of close combat. After all we would rather make life or death situational mistakes in a training scenario than in the reality of a combative street situation.

 

 

 

Throughout this article, I hope the overriding factor that is coming through is that SIMPLE IS GOOD. This is never more relevant than for the individual with limited unarmed skills or combative experience. In the fullness of time the technique skill-set can be expanded upon to create a personal combat system relevant to what works uniquely for them. From a technique point of view keeping it low-tech (for want of a better phrase) and with realistic expectations of what can be achieved is a positive step forward. 

This is not the time to go into James Bond mode – but it IS the time to bring on your neanderthal man persona and go all cave-man on your aggressor. 

A fundamental combative strategy may be crude, yes….. but boy it IS effective!