part0012

“A man strikes you, make him bleed. He makes you bleed; you break his bones. He breaks your bones, kill him. Being hit is inevitable, strike back twice as hard.” — Bruce Lee

While most karate systems include grappling and groundwork, the art is primarily about percussive violence and escape. That’s why when we analyze kata and application, we discover that roughly 70 to 90 percent of our techniques are applied with strikes from our hands and feet. The remaining throws, groundwork, pressure points, and the like round out the system holistically, but are not our primary focus. Here’s why: Grabs quickly lead to entanglement, especially if there is no strategic purpose behind them.

You see, grabbing is about control which can be useful in many situations, but all too often it is incompatible with the strategy of karate. That’s bad, but in practical application it gets worse when it comes to a street fight. You see, only one of three possible outcomes of a grab betters our position.

Only one of these three outcomes, flight, improves our position during a violent confrontation. That means that in most circumstances we are far better off striking an adversary, save for times when we are using a grab to set up a strike or using the grab for a specific tactical purpose such as to restrain a suspect and hold him or her until the police arrive.

The location and intensity of a grab can indicate its purpose, exposing our intent and altering the other person’s response to what we are attempting to do. For example, grabbing an extremity helps us control another person. Controlling their head is even better, but more hazardous to the subject, hence often deemed unallowable by authorities such as law enforcement officers in low-level force situations.

Consequently, wrist and armlocks, often performed in conjunction with verbal commands, are commonly used to restrain a threat. Because the subject of these techniques knows that there is authority behind the law enforcement or security officer using force on them, they are likely to comply.

In civilian context, however, we rarely have the authority to order a person to comply like a sworn officer is able to do, so an identical attempt to grab a limb may be met with fiercer resistance. That means that whenever we grab an adversary, we are using suboptimal technique, an application that does not leverage the strength of our karate training. A preference for jabs over grabs helps us resolve most confrontations in our favor.

We will delve a little deeper into these three potential outcomes, grab, flight, and strike, to expose their dynamics and a bit of the underpinning fight psychology involved…

If we grab a person and they in turn grab us back, we are now in a fight or at least a fairly serious confrontation. This return grab can easily disrupt our plans. For example, it can drive the fight to the ground, which is not the strong suit of our karate fighting system. Consequently, we are not interested in going to the ground and should be cautious of entanglements with those who prefer that outcome. After all, as mentioned previously, our best chance to prevail is playing our game while keeping the adversary from successfully implementing his or her own.

Our goal should be staying upright, while knocking the adversary to the ground, preferably in an unconscious state. Our strategy of remaining standing is addressed in more depth in Chapter 6, but the key takeaway for the moment is that we must keep our feet during the fight, so grabbing a grabber is dysfunctional on multiple levels.

For those predisposed toward violence, our grab will almost certainly set them off. From there, our situation descends into chaos, which is by no means our friend whether we wind up on the ground or not. And, win or lose, we may face legal and/or civil consequences if our grab sparks violence. So, grabbing a grabber is a bad thing.

While a grab may illicit another grab, it can just as easily generate a flight response where the person we grabbed pulls away. This flight response is based around a visceral understanding that the situation is not going to play out their way. Deep in that other person’s psyche is the belief that our goal is inevitable, that if we get a hold of them, we will prevail. Consequently, their only option is to run away.

This instinctive response is common with small children. How many times have we seen a boy or girl pulling back from their parent’s hold on their arm in a mall or shopping center? The same thing applies with grown adults who believe themselves outmatched, such as the junkie pulling away from a law enforcement officer even when they viscerally know that they have no chance of escape. Generally speaking, if a threat pulls away and attempts to flee, we are best off letting them go.

When a person is grabbed and they reflexively strike back, they likely come from a world where violence is a tool. They are comfortable with the proximity and the intimacy of hand-to-hand combat. The rules of in this world are simple, when offense is perceived instantly attack and do so with excessive proportion. Get violent, do it fast, and make it personal. Does this sound like someone we really want to tangle with? Likely not. But if we’ve grabbed someone who’s instinctive response is striking back, we will have little choice but to go toe-to-toe with them.

A person whose instinctive fight, flight, or freeze response is to attack can be dangerous even if they have no martial arts or combative training or experience. You see, when people are faced with a perceived threat, their brain believes that they are in danger and their body automatically reacts with a response designed to keep them safe. This response may or may not be suited to the situation at hand, such as running from an aggressive, growling dog which may trigger an attack, but the hormone reactions produced by the autonomic nervous system in these cases make us stronger and more resilient in the face of whatever follows. Consequently, an untrained individual who mercilessly attacks back may easily injure or even kill a trained practitioner who is unprepared for the ferociousness of their response.

Always stay true to the strategy of your art. For example, in Okinawan Goju Ryu karate which both authors practice, the fundamental strategy is to close distance, imbalance, and use physiological damage to incapacitate an adversary. While that may leave room for certain types of grabs for techniques such as momentarily posting an adversary’s weight on one leg in order to blow out their knee with a joint kick, those applications are few and far between.

Roughly 70 percent of our art involves various hand techniques such as punches, elbow strikes, and forearm smashes, with 20 percent dedicated to kicks, knee, and leg strikes. That’s about 90 percent percussive techniques, which means that our training should be 90 percent focused on using our hands and feet to prevail in a fight. We train enough in grappling, throwing, and choking to be competent, but that shouldn’t be the primary focus of our practice… or yours.

Research the underpinning strategy of your art and keep it in mind while you train. Since all the art’s tactics are built around this strategy, failure to follow it will almost certainly lead to failure in application. That means that everything from stances to movement to breathing, methods of power generation, and techniques such as punches, kicks, throws, and groundwork all rely upon a coherent, strategic framework and approach. Know it, use it, and improve your chances to prevail.