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STAND UP FIGHT
I want to start by reminding
everyone that anytime that you take action there is consequences to that
action. Assuming that you have no choice but to defend yourself and you
find yourself in a critical situation, then the fight will usually start
in a standing position and in about 90% of the cases end up with one of
the two of them down on the ground. We will break this article up into a
2-part article, this week we will talk about the stand-up fight and in
our next session we will talk about the ground fight. I have friends
that often remind me of all the different aspects that go into making up
a good athlete and a trained fighter. They will talk about his hand
speed, his flexibility with his kicking drills, his body size, and
other things. I am often asked which one is the single critical thing
about fighting. Whether it be street fighting or whether it be
tournament play, or whatever, and my answer is always none of the
above.
The single most important
factor is distance. Ground fighters will normally throw some type of
hand or foot technique more as a decoy than anything else, although they
will hit you with it. The intent is simply to close the distance and
get into a clinch and do a takedown. Stand-up fighters will close that
distance, and when they are close they will use hand techniques. There
are 3 ranges or distances for stand-up fighters. One is where you are
out of range and the technique can't reach you at all. Normally you are
2 steps away. This is a good distance that a lot of tournament fighters
like to stay in that position, just out of range of their opponent, and
at the appropriate time they will move in and deliver a technique and
close the gap. In social settings, many times you will find you are
very close to a person, such as elevators, trains, restaurant settings,
etc., and you are so close, in fact, the kicking drills won't work for
you. In that case you have to use hand techniques and be close enough
to deliver it. So you start at a distance, when you are at mid-range,
or say one step of an opponent, that is when you use your front kick to
keep them off balance to deliver roundhouse kicks, hook kicks, side
kicks. Whatever, or if you are a kick-boxer, deliver that front kick
right angle with the lead hand to the ribs or whatever and then the
third position is whenever you closed that gap and you actually hand
deliver elbows and hands.
I tell many of my young
fighters if they want to learn how to use their hand techniques they
need to find a good golden gloves gym somewhere or a good boxing coach
and box for a 1 1/2 - 2 years. Boxers as a normal thing only use about
4 basic techniques and then they will deliver many combinations off of
that. They will have a hook, jab, cross, and uppercut, but then they
will deliver many variations of that. They don't use heel palm smash or
the knife edge of the hand, ridge hand, which is the first knuckle
thrown as a hook. But they use those 4 basic techniques, but they
develop speed and combinations and learn distance and fighting in close
and are very quick and powerful and learn how to put a shoulder behind
the punch, and I think any serious fighter needs to learn boxing
technique.
Most karate styles do a
fairly good job of teaching foot technique. In my opinion, the
Tae-Kwon-Do stylist are superior with their kicking technique. I would
suggest that a young athlete learn flexibility because they master it,
and the kicking drills from a good Tae-Kwon-Do instructor. Again, the
kicking drills are excellent for groin attacks, attacking rib cage,
front kick underneath that lead jab of a boxer, and back kicks, and for
those who are flexible enough to deliver it with speed and power, of
course the head kicks and heel kicks. Not everyone has the flexibility
to deliver it with power.
Along with the kicking drills
and hand drills, again, we will talk next week about ground fighting and
you got to know that the odds are about 90% certain that you are going
to the ground on a street fight and we will cover that in detail in our
next article. As far as stand-up fighters, after you have trained with
an instructor that teaches kicking drills and boxed and you should
become a part of a system similar to the Okinawan Isshin-ryu. They
don't do the kicking drills, as a usual thing, there are many good
kickers in Isshin-ryu as well, but they don't do the kicking drills as
well as Tae-Kwon-Do do.
Then you need to seek
balance. Again, as my friend Bruce Lee used to say any system and every
system. The truth, the balance in your fighting is somewhere in
between. Isshin-ryu is excellent in that it has 50% hands and 50% feet.
Any system, whether boxing or Tae-Kwon-Do, they are both deficient, if
all they are teaching in the case of a boxer is hand techniques, and in
the case of Tae-Know-Do, if they emphasize 70% kicking, that is not a
complete system. You need a balance in your stand-up fight. In your
free-sparring or stand-up fight or street fight, angles are terribly
critical. If you are fighting a very fast fighter, if you throw a
technique or a series of techniques (3 or 4 techniques) and stop in
front of that fighter, and you have not taken them out with your barrage
of techniques, then he is probably going to knock you out at that
point. If he is quick and you stopped in front of him you are a ready
target for him. In our training we draw a V or tape a V on the floor
and we have our opponent standing in the middle of that V. We throw
back fists, ridge hands, or straight punches or kicks or whatever, we
train our fighters to pass by our opponent, so that even if they misfire
with their technique, the opponent can't counter attack. Of course,
many fighters are very good at not letting you pass them or get to their
back. Of course, it is true, whether you are in a stand-up fight or
ground fighting, a person to your back, and you are in a very precarious
situation. If you are ground fighting and he has gotten to your
backside, or if you are a stand-up fighter, and he has got to your
backside, you are in trouble.
There are many reflex drills
that you can use outside the ring without having a partner. For years,
boxers have used the speed bag, and they do that for timing and judging
of distance and reflex. You can get much of the same effect by hanging
a tennis ball from a tree limb or with a bungee cord. The ball moves
and it is not stable, so you have a moving target and that is a good
drill. Some of the sticky hand drills that you will find in Kung-Fu are
very useful, not only do they block, but they block and they trap and
will end up blocking and trapping and striking eight or nine times off
of one lead punch. We have many reflex drills as it pertains to the
knife. We are learning to block and counter, and those are certainly
good drills. One step sparring, where an opponent throws a technique,
or you can even do it yourself, where you imagine an opponent throwing a
technique, much like a boxer would shadowboxing, and then you react to
that technique without them countering. These are all good reflex
drills that you can do if you are injured or out of shape or whatever,
these are all good drills you can do. You can do the shadowboxing for 3
minute rounds; it is very similar to kickboxing or the aerobic workout.
Again, as is always the case, distance is the critical thing. Do not
let people within their arms length of you. If you are in a dangerous
situation, again, in a social setting it is hard sometimes to maintain
that distance, but if you are having an altercation or if there are
words being exchanged, or if there is reason to think you are in harm
stay at least an arms length away from your opponent. You can back up
once or maybe even twice, if your opponent is aggressive and continues
to close that gap then you have to take action, because regardless of
your hand speed or your skill level you let that person close that gap
and throw the initial move and you have to be very quick to close that
gap and stop the technique. If an altercation is inevitable then you
should strike first and take the initiative in the fight. As a
novelist, if you have not had any formal training, and you are faced
with a fight, then I would say the fury of the tiger should prevail,
meaning throw as many techniques as hard and fast as you can throw them
without thought about how hard you may get hit, or the fact that you may
even get hit. Because your salvation will be your speed and your
natural ability and your strength and power you have. So if you not a
trained fighter then throw it as hard, fast and quick as you can. If
you are a trained fighter, you have to watch, cause even as a trained
fighter if you are not careful, they will close the gap quickly and
throw 5 or 6 techniques and you are in trouble. The distance thing again
is critical.
There are 3 or 4 basic things
such as a snap kick, heel palm smash, eye gouges, elbow strikes, and
don't try to do the high kicking techniques in street fighting cause you
got to understand even with the big people, if you hit them with it, and
you don't knock them out, they are going to close that gap, and they are
going to take you to the ground, and you are going to be in trouble if
you don't have a balanced attack.
Pete Mills,
Grandmaster, Isshin-ryu Karate
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