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This is about self-defense. I say self-defense because fighting, except as applied in sports, is illegal and combatives, although a great sound bite to attract customers, is also illegal and used, from where I sit as an inactive Marine, as a means to apply hand-to-hand in combat when other means of combat are missing.
Self-defense as currently taught in many dojo and SD courses is all about feeling good, feeling safe and building self-confidence and that means using a technique-based teaching and training model. It kinda goes like this, “If your attacker does this, you do this as a counter and then you do this to make sure the attacker is down, out and unable to continue the attack.” Sound familiar? Listen, I was trained a long time ago with this model along with combatives as a Marine in karate and martial arts. It was the way it was done and as the times passed it made a great syllabus that was easily taught, easily tested and easily assigned rankings all toward the commercialization model and for sports.
In sports you can easily see the technique and based on perceptions, some from experience (in sports not real life attacks) and some from the perception of experience to say, “This one is too dangerous so it is forbidden, this one is safe so we can use it, etc.”
In combatives as I see them it is almost exclusively about ROE or Rules of Engagement dictated by those rules of war that society and the civilian/military leadership enforce for a variety of reasons not always the best for combat.
In self-defense society once again rules the roost and it is about perceptions and distinctions that are not always about true application of self-defense but rather a perception and distinction derived from those who have the least amount of experience, knowledge and understanding toward conflict and violence, real life conflict and violence not the media entertainment versions we all tend to assume is reality.
Now that the ground work is laid out we can hit the topic of this article, multiple methodologies, i.e., “Multiple Defense Methodologies [actual tactics and attack methodologies of impacts, drives (pushes), pulls, twists, takedowns/throws and compression are best for stopping a threat (types of force applied such as spiraling, scissoring, carving, vibrating, and/or sheering forces.)].”
If we remove all references to what specified technique or combination is for any one specified method of attack and focus on methodologies then we are not tied to specifics. In self-defense there is no way one person can know “All the Attacks Possible” in a technique based defense but there are only the above methodologies that are applied in ways that get the job done according to those methods used in an attack.
One of the most amazing things about the human being is our brains and the vastness of its capabilities to change and modify things so that there are innumerable amount of unique ways they can apply any one or combination of methodologies to attack. Use the phone like keypad of a security process just to get into your phone. There are also almost innumerable combinations of those ten numbers on that keypad you can use to safeguard your data and that is why the FBI and Apple are in contention because getting past that keypad combination of numbers is almost impossible - almost. Now, the above list of methodologies, i.e., six of them as listed, are used if trained and practice properly to make innumerable techniques and combinations not tied to specific techniques to achieve a goal of either defense or attack.
Think about that, learning to use and apply methodologies not tied to the restrictions of any one type of technique leaves you the ability to incorporate one or any along with an infinite amount of defensive actions to stop an attack, most times putting most attackers in a OO bounce or loop trying to catch up in lieu of you trying to find that appropriate single techniques that will work against his attack, think about that for a while.
Once you figure out how valuable multiple methodology models work then you add in two more models to make that tri-pod of integrated wholehearted karate and martial arts for self-defense, i.e., the fundamental principles and the types of forces applied through a principled based application of multiple defense methodologies. That is it, the full monty of karate and martial arts exposed (pun intended). It is worth thinking about.
Now, here is the greatest aspect I see in all this, it is that the atomistic teachings of the techique based model is still a valuable teaching tool. A tool used in the first phase of karate and martial arts self-defense. The beginners model that gets you through to the point where you have a foundation of references that when you start teaching multiple methodologies and types of force you begin to take out the atomistic and put in the integrative whole of self-defense as described here.
Everything else comes from the teaching of principles that are taught from day one. Principles are that very foundation that leads us to integrate the other aspects in the first phase so we don’t become mired down in a techniques based model. Granted, this model kind of makes it difficult to test and grade but you might find that for self-defense, if you need it and it is your goal, it is the best path to follow.
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