Reality-Based Self Defense and Personal Protection Resources
Reality-Based Self Defense and Personal Protection Resources


self-defense fighting

The ultimate, undefeatable secret self-defense fighting technique doesn’t exist. Sorry.

After eons of tearing into each other, it’s all been done, cataloged and trained. Ad nauseam. There is, literally, nothing new under the sun.

What we do have from all that awful R&D is a vast spew of systems, styles, traditions, paths and ways. And in the squabble for recognition and dominance, the principles underlying the reason why anybody who wins actually wins get overlooked in favor of arguing approach and technique.

Well, screw all that.

The only thing I’ve ever been interested in is results.

I don’t care who gets it or how they get it: Debilitating injury speaks for itself.

Breaking something important inside the man is the only thing that makes a difference (unless you’re counting on him to quit, and you really shouldn’t).

Far and away from approach or self-defense fighting techniques are the two things that line up just right in every disabling injury:

  • Maximized physics, and
  • Minimized physiology

Maximizing the physics means putting in more kinetic energy, more momentum and more work (force times distance) than the tissue can safely dissipate without failing. In other words, put in enough oomph to rupture or tear human tissue while you’re self-defense fighting.

Minimizing the physiology means putting all that work into a single square inch — rather than spread out over a wide area — that has an important job to do. Like the eye. The throat. The precise point on the knee joint where the sudden load will tear ligaments rather than just move the leg…

Line the two up and the most likely outcome is disabling injury. Insufficient physics results in a boo-boo that can be walked off. Poor targeting is a waste of effort. (Look at missing the eye and getting the forehead instead, for example.)

The question is never the superiority of one system or one self-defense fighting technique over another; the question is always “where’s the injury?”

Everybody has the potential to get it right, regardless of training. Reference the “one punch kills” that come out of bar fights or the simplicity of shoving someone, a moment of lost footing, and a life-threatening brain bleed when the head bounces off the sidewalk.

When it all lines up and no one means it, we call it an accident.

The question is, can you line it up when you mean it?

Tim Larkin


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