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JWT
JWT's picture
Just for kicks

How viable is kicking as a self defence tool?

Last week I spent a long time reviewing the footage of every single normal speed self defence scenario that I've ever run since I started using body armour.  That meant looking at hundreds of videos of participants engaged in role play in armour.  I made a decision that I was only going to set aside videos that met the following criteris:

1. The speed was normal (ie not a slow skills access rehearsal).

2. The scenario was not pre-rehearsed, so the trainee(s) involved had no prior knowledge as to whether an attack would occur or not, who the attacker was, what the nature of the attack would be.

3. I would only include kicks made by people who were not role playing, so those who kicked while acting as an aggressor and already fixed on an attack strategy would not be included (though they feature if the defender also kicks in the same video).

4. I would include all attempts at kicks, whether they landed or not, whether they were successful or not.  I would not count knee strikes as kicks.  As a result I was looking for front kicks, roundhouse kicks, side kicks, flying kicks etc...

5. I would include less intense attacks if the recipient was an inexperienced student.  We have people who are ungraded trying our Sim days in addition to people who have 6th Dans.  As our aim is to push people rather than crush them, students who have shown themselves to be less able in early acclimatisation stages will face more intense attacks as the day progresses, but role playing attackers will still go easier on them than on more able participants.  

The footage in the video below shows the results of the above search criteria from a pool of approximately 350 videos.  There were 60 participants in the pool in total, 20 of them my DART Karate students, 40 from other styles.  The participants ranged from people for whom this was there first ever form of martial arts training to people who had been training for decades (in one featured clip there is a 6th Dan JuJitsu Instructor and a 6th Dan TKD instructor) and included people as young as 12 years old.  The non DART pool of trainees comprised people from the following backgrounds: BJJ, K1, Seido Karate, Wado Ryu Karate, Goju Ryu Karate, Shotokan Karate, Mushin Bushikan Ju Jitsu, Krav Maga, Choy Lay Fut, Modern Arnis, TKD, and San Shou.

One thing I found interesting was that the majority of kicks, successful or otherwise came from my DART Karate students.  I found this of interest because we drill kicks against pads, but we have only one set drill that involves a kick (a round kick to the leg).  The kicks they used (excluding knees which are bread and butter to us) were the front kick and the leg kick, although under pressure they frequently did not turn into the leg kick enough to get the power through.  I stress kicks as a means of closing and creating distance, but all our drills are tactile and close range. 

There are students participating from other systems who have done as many Sim Days as my guys who did no kicks, and a number of these come from styles that have a heavy emphasis on kicking training, so I think that the key factor here was not so much familiarity with the chaos of the simulated environment as familiarity with the possibilities of the range.  A number of my students kicked on their first ever pressure training session.

If you've not seen this type of video before, be warned it looks messy and scrappy.  The contact to the head is always pulled, but the students always try to go full contact to the rest of the body (bar the neck) - some of them manage this, others don't, but that is part and parcel of the psychology of this form of training and shifting between no contact and contact training depending on background.

WARNING - VIDEO CONTAINS SWEARING!

Some of the kicks were game changers, whether launched from the standing position or on the ground.  But an ineffective kick attempt could also cause a lot of problems.

I hope there are things that people can take away from this footage.  Comments welcome!

John `Titchen

Mark B
Mark B's picture

Hi John,

I'm not a fan of kicking in the scenarios you shared.  In the full contact kumite I teach in my dojo attempts to kick often disadvantage the kicker in my experience.  We use the Blitz full face head guard (I think I spotted one on your video) but we don't pull head punches which might account for the lack of kicks in our work.  I do advocate Nami Gaeshi (Naihanchi returning wave kick), unfortunately it's not a kick you can apply in any form of sparring. 

There's some good stuff on your video and I do like the way you set up the environments.  One question- the "good guys" were rarely pre-emptive, was this a prior instruction in keeping with the scenario you wished to create?

Regards

Mark

JWT
JWT's picture

Mark B wrote:

Hi John,

I'm not a fan of kicking in the scenarios you shared.  In the full contact kumite I teach in my dojo attempts to kick often disadvantage the kicker in my experience.  We use the Blitz full face head guard (I think I spotted one on your video) but we don't pull head punches which might account for the lack of kicks in our work.  I do advocate Nami Gaeshi (Naihanchi returning wave kick), unfortunately it's not a kick you can apply in any form of sparring. 

There's some good stuff on your video and I do like the way you set up the environments.  One question- the "good guys" were rarely pre-emptive, was this a prior instruction in keeping with the scenario you wished to create?

Regards

Mark

Hi Mark

All the good guys are free to preempt at any time.  The lack of preemption is in part due to the mixture of people and different training backgrounds, in part due to judgement calls.  Every scenario you see here has gone to a fight - that's not a certainty in my scenarios, it all depends on the briefing given to the role players and the responses given by the othrer participants.  The days are designed to train and assess much more than just fighting skills.  We've often had fights when the attacker would have backed off given the right stimuli just as we have people failing to read the signals enough to preempt to escape.  We do have occasions where everyone is pumped full of adrenaline raring to go and under pressure but they successfully talk down the situation.

I use the Blitz cage helmets quite a lot in addition to other head guards.  We pull the hits because otherwise the training would have to stop.  The sustained head trauma would be too great, the risk too high.  Even with the pulled shots we've had black eyes and on rare occasions TKO.  On a day like this a role playing attacker takes a large number of head shots and a defender could take a fair few too - they wouldn't be able to go and do scenario after scenario otherwise - the five hour courses tend to have 45 scenarios.  Not everyone has it in them to be a good bad guy so often that role is shared out at random among half the participants.

With regard to kicking itself - when it is pulled off it is a real game changer.  I'm a great fan of kicking, but I'll generally only use it to create or close distance, or if the angle I'm holding someone at makes a kick better than a knee or an arm based strike.  Often the range makes the knee more suitable and I use the knee a lot.

All the best

John

Mark B
Mark B's picture

Hi John, 

I didn't take into account the length of the sessions.  That makes sense.  In my dojo we might spend 15 minutes on full contact kata kumite.  At full go that's plenty so pulling your shots makes perfect sense.  

As you say at close quarters knees are the way to go although I would still advocate Nami Gaeshi,  either as a stop kick to an advancing opponent (low level target) or as a stamp kick if you are attatched/ grappling. 

I'm not a fan of Mawashigeri.  Against pads it is awesome but as you point out the rotation is often incomplete in full on work, the kick becomes nothing more than an annoyance which as you know won't do. 

Regards

Mark

JWT
JWT's picture

Hi Mark

Funnily enough I use Nami Gaeshi quite a lot in the close quarter Pinan Flow System material for which I've just finished the photography.  It's a nice technique.

Personally I like to do sideways knee slams into the inside or outside leg quite a lot and these are options in the drills I teach.  I do like the round kick with the shin as a chaser where a front kick target isn't readily presented (person turning away as they retreat), but it is very important to get a solid cut into the leg rather than a glancing blow.  I'm fairly good at causing a dead leg with only a light kick through armoured shorts.

At close quarters the front kick can be an excellent tool as the student in the purple shirt demonstrates - he's in and out of training a lot, living away at university with martial arts a secondary sporting interest (he features here in sim days a year apart, in both cases doing a few hours in the summer plus one of these but nothing in the preceding year), so it was interesting to see how he fought and how he used the tactic to create space, particularly as a lighter person. With the plate armour most are wearing it just winds on contact - without armour those kicks might well end the fight.

Although there is only a light kick in it I think the fight management of DART Karate Coach Chris Nicholls in the final scenario is excellent.  He has the problem that two of the role playing aggressors are so hyped and excited they aren't going down when his headshots (and body shots), if not pulled, would have ended the fight.

All the best

John