Quick Self Defense Video

Here is a great little video for both men and women on the basic strategies and tools of self-defense.  A tactical flashlight (a flashlight that is very small, concealable, and easy to carry yet exceptionally bright) is a great tool and I carry one everywhere I go.  The nice thing is that you don’t need to spend a lot of money to get a decent one.

I carry the Olight S1 Baton and I’ve very happy with it.  It is very small but very well made and it is the brightest light I have ever owned.  Priced at only $60 it puts out an incredible 500 lumens, has a magnetic bottom which is very handy, and has a rechargeable battery.

I’m not a big fan of using your keys for self-defense (they can twist in your hand and injure you, you could damage or lose them and not be able to get into the safety of your car or house, and if you use them for self-defense you may have to give up your keys to the police as evidence) but a pen is a good tool.  You don’t need to buy a fancy self-defense pen, but a decent and sturdy metal pen will do.  I have a nice metal pen that is attractive, writes very well, I can walk right through security with it and take it anywhere in the world, and yet if I ever needed to use it for self-defense it is a more than adequate tool.

Knives are great tools but I’m not a big fan of carrying them for self-defense.  Pepper spray is much better for stopping someone than a knife in most cases and I probably will not accidently kill someone.  I always carry a small Swiss Army Knife in my pocket which could be used for self-defense but that’s not why I carry it.  James Williams (the man in this video) designs come great knives and I do have his smaller lock-blade knife called the “Hei Ho” (military strategy) which is a fantastic knife and I do carry it from time to time but a knife is certainly not my first choice for self-defense.

A Last-Ditch De-Escalation Technique

By Matthew Schafer

Copyright 2015, All Rights Reserved

One of the fundamental things that I was taught when I was a young student, and which I make sure to pass along to my students, is that the martial arts have two fundamental purposes: 1.) to teach you how to injure people, and 2.) to teach you how not to have to injure people.  Always stressing the latter, de-escalation techniques are something I spend quite a bit of time on with my students.

For the most part, de-escalation, as a concept, is pretty simple.  If you’re in a situation where there is no immediate threat you focus on taking the emotional energy out of the situation so you can once again communicate (keeping in mind that 80% of violent assaults and murders happen during or just after an argument).  In instances where an immediate threat is present, such as being approached by an individual you feel might become violent, then a more aggressive technique is normally used where you establish a boundary, become assertive, and use body language, voice, and verbiage to let that individual know that if they don’t leave you will defend yourself.  Typically that is the go-to technique but in certain instances where you have the ability to leave it is best to take a submissive approach and get out of the area as soon as you can.

A student recently asked me what technique would I use if I found myself in a situation where I couldn’t leave, I was outnumbered and perhaps there were multiple weapons so fighting back doesn’t seem plausible, and the situation was escalating and about to become violent.  It was stressed that in this scenario I could not escape and both fighting back as well as doing nothing would probably result in me being seriously injured or killed.  He said he saw a guy in a bar get into this exact situation where 5 large drunks backed this guy into a corner, yelled at him, threw glass bottles at him, and ended up nearly beating him to death (he assumes, he and everyone else left the bar before that point).

In this situation there are a few things I would recommend.  The first is to never get into this situation.  If you pay attention you can see most situations start to build up and you can leave the area before things get to this point.  However, if the situation escalated so quickly you found yourself caught off-guard and in this situation the first thing I’d do is ask myself “are these guys about to attack me or are they trying to scare me?”  If I believe they are just trying to scare me I’d go with the assertive body language and voice to let them know that I’ll fight back if they come closer and in most cases that does work.

However, with there being 5 of them the pack mentality can set in so even if they don’t plan on doing anything more than scaring me if one of them was to make a move the others would probably join in.   If I felt they were about to attack the first thing I’d do is I’d plan my attack.  I’d quickly try to assess which one is the leader (because if I take him out first the others may stop), where are their hands (are they in fists, clutching weapons, in pockets about to pull out weapons?), where are my exits, do I have any weapons on me, are there any environmental weapons I can use (chairs or other objects I can grab to use as a weapon or force them into to trip them, objects I can place between me and them, or nice hard surface like a doorframe where I can grab one of their heads and slam it into).

Now that I believe they are about to attack me and that I have to act the first thing I will probably do is to drop their guard and make a stupid mistake; the easiest way to do that is to act submissive to draw them in.  I will do the opposite of sticking my check out and puffing up, I’ll curl my back look down and to the left and act as if I’m scared.   If a second before the guy was going to pull his gun and shoot me there is now a good chance he’ll walk right over to me giving me an opportunity to disarm him and take him out.

Acting submissive will normally make them think they’ve won so typically they will let their guard down and give you an opportunity to set them up for a surprise attack.  If I have a weapon like pepper spray I’ll use my cowering movements not only to lure them in but also to conceal grabbing it and as soon as they’re close enough I’ll hit them all with a stream of pepper spray and run like hell.

If one of them has a weapon either in their hands or sticking out of their pants and they get close enough to me I might disarm them and use it against them. 

Perhaps I see that just to my left there is a table and chairs so as I act submissive I move to my right to place the group in front of those chairs so that if I suddenly grab the closest guy and shove them into the rest of the group they’ll have something to trip over and hopefully injure themselves.

A decent technique that works very well when dealing with a group that is standing close together is to let them get close enough and the use the heel of your hand to strike the closest man under the nose and then and then drive forwards.  As soon as you strike him his body will loosen and when you drive him back into the group he’ll hit the guys behind them and off balance them and as you continue to drive forwards with all your body weight you can actually drive him backwards through the entire group and then as soon as you’re clear you can run like hell for the exit.  This technique is all about physics so it doesn’t matter if the group is 3 people, 30 people, or 300 people once the dominos start falling, so to speak, you can escape.

However, we’re supposed to be talking about de-escalation and there is a last-ditch de-escalation technique that works very well but I would only use it as a last resort.

If the other de-escalation techniques don’t work and you feel you’re about to be attacked and for whatever reason you can’t or won’t fight back there is one technique that does work very well and could save your life.  The technique is to do their job for them but only better.

If someone is going to attack you or bully you they’re trying to demean you to a certain level.  So, for example, let’s say that on a scale of 1 to 10 that measures you’re self-worth and social standing you’re at 10 which is the normal everyday rating of a typical person.   If that person just wanted to kill you they would just walk up and kill you and you probably wouldn’t see it coming, so if a group is ganging up on you and cornering you they’re trying to assert their dominance and take you from a 10 down to a 4 (to pick a number at random).  By intimidating you and beating you they are trying to teach you a lesson, make you realize you’re not as good as them, and lower your social standing in the larger group.

Here is the trick, and again only use this as a last ditch effort.  If that group wants to bring you down from a 10 to a 4 you then turn on yourself and bring yourself down to a 2.  If someone decides that they want to make you look scared in front of a group in order to bolster their social status but as they begin to intimidate you drop to the ground and beg him not to hurt you you’ve just done his job for him.  He wanted to make you look scared and now you’re cowering on the ground...at this point he has got more than what he wanted from you and he never had to touch you.

If you do this, and bring yourself down to a 2 when their goal was to get you to a 4 they will quickly realize three things: 1.) you’re probably crazy, 2.) you’re pathetic, 3.) their job is already done.  They’ll see that you’re so pathetic they will just walk away and at the most they might hit you once or twice for principle but it won’t be full force.

To make sure you truly understand the concept lets flip this around; let’s say you’re walking down the street and this guy who is half your size suddenly turns and hits his girlfriend.  You become outraged and since this guy is half your size you have no problem getting in his face and bullying him to show him what it feels like.  You approach him, shove him into the wall, and you get into his face yelling at him about what a piece of shit he is.  You’re just about to give him the back of your hand when suddenly he throws his hands up in front of his face, drops down to the ground, and starts crying and begging you not to hurt him.  Now what do you do? 

Maybe he starts calling himself stupid and worthless and starts to slap himself across the face; perhaps he hits himself hard enough to give himself a bloody nose; maybe he starts crying and urinates in his pants.  Maybe he pulls out a pocket knife and starts to cut his arm while yelling how stupid he is.

The point here is that if someone is trying to bring you down to a 4 and you turn on yourself and bring yourself to a 2 or even a 0 there is nothing left for them to do.  They’ll see you as sad and pathetic and even if they were amped up to start hitting you and bringing you down to a 4, now that you’re a 2 you’ve taken all the fun out of it and are suddenly not worth their time.

Due to the extremes and the fact that you are debasing yourself I would only use this technique as a last ditch effort but if it is something that needs to be done it does work very well.

Why Karate Punches Don’t Measure Up

Written by Matthew Schafer
Copyright 2015, All Rights Reserved

One main reason people study the martial arts are to develop power, or at least a sense of power.  I started studying Karate at a point in my life when I felt pretty powerless and the training gave me a sense of getting some of that power back.  By spend hours upon hours at my local dojo throwing punch after punch, and kick after kick, into the air I began to feel that I was powerful and being a small kid that really helped my self-esteem.

The problems came later when I really began to test my skills and see how powerful I really was.  At the age of about 12 I was a black belt in Taekwondo and studying Ryuku Kenpo and, while it was clear that it was all “Karate”, what I was learning in Ryuku Kenpo was so drastically different from Taekwondo that I decided I needed to test things to see what worked and why. 

I asked a lot of questions of my instructors, read lots of books, spent hours in the dojo and at home hitting punching bags and homemade striking pads, and of course getting into fights.  I learned that while both arts taught the reverse punch, they were different in their application and I found that I could hit a lot harder with a Ryuku Kenpo reverse punch than a reverse punch from Taekwondo; later I was floored to discover that I could hit a lot harder than either method by doing simple western boxing techniques.

Every now and then I hear about studies that say this as well.  In every study that I’ve been able to find is seems that when tested the force delivered by a boxer’s punch seems to range between 776 pounds of force per square inch on the low side to about 1,300 pounds of force per square inch on the high side.  A popular 1985 study of professional boxer Frank Bruno showed that he averaged about 920 pounds per square inch of force. (Note: it should be noted that these figures were compiled in a laboratory setting where boxers stood in one place and focused on punching as hard as they could.  In a ring where they have to move around and worry about getting hit the numbers you’d see would undoubtedly be a lot lower.)

When martial artists are given the same study and given the opportunity to put the reverse punch up against the boxer’s cross the numbers are considerably lower:  in most tests the force delivered by martial artists range between 325 to 412 pounds of force per square inch.

If the martial arts, Karate in particular, are so sophisticated and deadly why are our punches so much weaker?

The answer isn’t that difficult and can be found both by looking at physics and what other arts teach.  For example, Taekwondo is largely Shotokan Karate which was developed by Sensei Gichin Funakoshi.  Sensei Funakoshi grew up studying Ryuku Kenpo but then changed the art from the effective fighting system that it was to a greatly watered down version designed to improve the spiritual and physical development of school children.  He wrote about this in his autobiography about how his “Karate-Do” was a far cry from the skills he learned from his teachers.  Many things taught in Karate-Do are actually designed to NOT hurt people so it would be safe for children to practice them on each other during school.  However, when we look at the original teachings in Ryuku Kenpo and even the Chinese styles of Crying Crane and others that formed the original arts we can see that there are a lot of differences in the teachings that make the techniques more effective.

The first thing that robs a Karate punch of power is the lack of intent.  I’ve wrote about this numerous times, about how boxers tend to be able to beat up martial arts practitioners largely because of their intent, or in other words…boxers train to hit people and martial artists train to “preform techniques.”  Every time a boxer works their pads, the heavy bag, the speed back, spars with their partner, or even shadow boxes the air, with each and every punch they’re thinking about hitting their opponent and putting them down.  Boxing is the art of hitting people with punches and they do it very well. 

Contrast this with a typical Karate class; students and teachers walk up and down the floor punching and kicking the air.  In most schools they don’t actually hit things with their techniques very often and when they do throw a punch or kick they’re thinking about how their arm is positioned, where their knee is, etc.  More often than not a martial artist is focused on preforming the technique a certain way and that is a huge problem the martial arts face today if they expect their practitioners to be able to survive a real violent assault.  Sure, you have to get down the performance side of techniques but once that is done you should spend your time actually using it; learn to actually hit things with it and when you hit things with it start to build the intent of actually putting people down with your strikes.

By getting used to hitting things and by starting to develop that intent to deliver the force to put a person down will by itself greatly increase the power and effectiveness of all your techniques.

The second thing that robs the Karate punch of power is really the context of the punch.  While I do, from time to time, break boards or other objects for training I believe that board breaking is largely to blame for the lack of power in Karate punches.

I remember I was told that it took the same amount of force to break a pine board that it does to break a rib bone so if I could break a single board then I could break a rib and if I could break 3 or 4 boards with my punch then I should pretty much just register my hands as deadly weapons.  The problem is that while there are some great benefits to breaking boards, there really isn’t any correlation between the experience of breaking a board and the experience of hitting the human body.

To break a board you need to snap your technique so the force is delivered in a very short burst in a very small area.  Since boards are stiff and don’t give they fight you and break as long as you have that good snap.  Hitting a human body is the opposite; hitting the body is like hitting a big sack full of liquid and it bends, compresses, and gives in order to keep from breaking.   

If I hit someone in the ribs what will happen is firstly the soft tissue of muscle and fat will absorb some of the force, then the body will move away from my punch and it may bend, curl, and rotate to further dissipate the force of the punch.  After that the ribs will actually compress about 3 inches to avoid breaking.  If you want to hurt the things inside the human body you have to focus not on snapping your punch which will largely be absorbed by everything I just mentioned, but instead you have to focus on driving your punch through and penetrating with your blow. 

If you really want to be able to cause injuries and put someone down when you need to, you need to focus on driving your punches and pushing them through the target.  Since the ribs can compress about 3 inches make sure your punch penetrates at least 6 inches, or better yet why not 12?

The problem with this is that this “driving force” is very effective when it comes to injuring a person and putting them down but it is not what you want to do when breaking a board.  In fact, I remember when I first learned the difference between “snapping force” and “driving force” and when I did my board breaking went downhill.  I had a really good right reverse punch that could break 3 boards every time, but when I started to focus more on self-defense and “driving force” I ended up either pushing my board holders backward or, a few times, pushing the boards out of their grip.  That is when I really stopped breaking boards because it wasn’t fun anymore.

Karate largely teaches “snapping force” both because of Shotokan’s “Do” design and focus on breaking boards that requires that kind of power.  When you focus on that kind of power there are two specific things you end up doing that really suck the force out of your punches.

The first thing that board breaking and the use of “snapping force” teaches you that robs you of power is to make contact with your target very briefly.  I see all over the place, schools teach people to punch and then retract their punch right away.  Some schools teach to retract your punch faster than the speed at which you threw it.  The problem is, in the same way that the longer you hold on to a hot pan the more you get burned, there is a direct correlation between the amount of time your fist has contact with the target and the amount of force you deliver into your target.  If you punch your target and pull back right away then most of the force generated in your punch will be spent retracting the punch and won’t go into your target where it does “work.”  The best method is to punch your target and then push your fist into the target until the target moves away from your fist.  That way all (or most) of the force you generate isn’t wasted.

I see people punching and kicking pads that their partner is holding and in their “snapping force is good” mentality what they’re looking for to know they’ve landed a “good punch” is largely the sound.  They want a good snapping sound when their fist hits the pad; however, it would be so much more beneficial if they focused on going through the pad and knocking their partner backwards.   One of the drills my students do is one partner stands naturally and holds a kicking shield tight against their body and their partner has to hit them until they knock then all the way to the other side of the room; and then they switch who has the shield and the other partner knocks them back across the room.  By doing this student’s learn how to actually use the punch so much more than they ever will by breaking boards.

The second power robbing thing that board breaking teaches is the improper timing of the hip.  When you throw a punch you get most of the force by driving forward with the legs, rotating the body, and throwing your hip forwards.  The moments while your hip is traveling forwards are the most powerful moments in the punch.

After I had received my 3^rd degree black belt I had an instructor tell me that I was ready to learn one of the closely guarded secrets of Karate.  He called it the “Double Whip Principle.”  He said the best way to generate force in a punch is to move your hip first and fist second.  He told me to start by bringing my hip back and then throwing my hip forwards and right about the time my hip was square I should start to throw my punch and finish my rotation.  I have to admit this was very powerful.  This works by increasing the acceleration of your fist which can greatly increase your power.  While I will always cherish this lesson it only took me a few weeks to find problems with this.

The “Double Whip Principle” is in fact a fundamental principle in Karate, and while not largely taught in the US from my experience, it is taught in both mainland Japan and Okinawa.  This technique generates a great amount of “snapping force” but it doesn’t generate “driving force.”

If you think about it, if I need to drive my punch a minimum of 6 inches into my target to make sure I break that rib then what happens at the end of my punch is the most important.  Since the time when my hip is in motion is the most power portion of my punch then it needs to come at the end as well.

I’ve seen more and more people in the martial arts community start to teach this and I think it is a great thing.  If you want to not just snap your punch and leave all your force at the surface of your attacker but rather drive you punch into your attacker so the force enters his body and defeats its attempt to absorb and compress to not be injured then you have to focus on the end of the punch and that hip needs to move second.

The best method for doing a reverse punch with power that I’ve ever seen is to start by bending your knees to lower your weight and ground yourself, then bring your right hip back so that it is at about 45 degrees from your target.  Chamber the punch and start by pushing with your legs and shooting your arm straight out with you palm facing the ceiling and your elbow tucked in and facing the floor.  Once your elbow moves forward enough to be flush with your side you both start to rotate your arm like a traditional punch (I always hit with my fist at a 45 degree angle) and you should throw your hip forward and rotate your body into the punch, finishing with an exhale and pushing your fist through the target, allowing the target to move backward and way from your fist.

By doing this you’ll notice that when your fist hits the target your arm isn’t straight and your punch isn’t done like it is in a normal reverse punch; rather your arm still has a good 6 or 7 inches to move and your hip still has a good 3 to 6 inches to move forward making sure you drive everything inside of your target.

While I’ve never used any electronics to actually test the pounds per square inch of force delivered in a reverse punch delivered in this manner I do know from personal experience that I can hit just as hard if not harder than any boxer I know.  I can have a partner stand naturally and hold a kicking shield tightly against their body and with a single reverse punch I can knock them backwards 4 to 5 steps and they all agree that if the pad was not there absorbing the impact they’d all be on the ground and wouldn’t be getting up.  Now while that is great for me, the important thing is that when I hold the pad and they hit it I have the same response.  It is the technique that works regardless of who does it.