In sports, particularly in American football, we often hear the adage “the best defense is a good offense.” This basically means that, if you have a good offense, you are keeping your own defense off the field.
If you are on defense, you are defending, and that effectively means you are losing.
Remember how the Nazis swarmed Europe with their blitzkrieg offensives?
This is the case in the world of self defense as well, which is why some of us prefer the term “self protection” over self defense.
In football, we’ve seen time and time again over the years that the best team defenses have been those that are aggressive.
Think of all those games you’ve watched where one time has a lead late in the game, and then goes into the ole “prevent” defense, only to let the other team march down the field to score the winning touchdown.
The same holds true in a fight. If you are just trying to prevent yourself from being injured, you WILL get injured.
At some point, in order to prevail, you MUST go on the offensive.
Unfortunately, many assault victims never go on offense. This is due mainly to the fact that they stay in a state of shock from the initial stages of the assault and fail to react.
Combatives training can help with overcoming this initial state of shock through the use of simulation and scenarios training. Initially, you’ll learn to get knocked around a bit, and then this progresses to simulation and more realistic scenario training.
Below is a video I found that demonstrates some of the types of training you’ll be exposed to in my teaching. I can tell you from experience that this was never part of the curriculum where I learned kung fu.
In fact, in my eight years of training in kung fu, I was never hit with any type of authority. This is why it came as no shock to me the point made by the instructor in this video (Richard Dimitri).
Have a look…
