Defensive Grappling: Difference of Size and Strength

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. Whenever we talk about unarmed combative or fighting or self-defense. People really wanna worry about size differences or strength differences, or someone's weaker than me or someone stronger than me, or I'm older, smaller, anything like that that's going to indicate an immediate weakness. Or what's important to remember is that; a predator, someone who attacks you and tries to make you a victim probably is not gonna pick you as the victim if you start out larger, stronger, obviously more skilled, more aware and more alert, faster, or in any way seem to have advantages over them. What they're probably gonna do is try to find someone that is smaller, presumably weaker.

So what's important to do whenever we talk about these types of techniques or any self-defense is realize that we're talking about efficiency. You're talking about maximizing your personal strength. Being as strong as you can be. Now we've talked about ways to do that, and I've had Jamie come in here to the training area with me again no watches, any injuries? No.

No. Okay So we're stretched out we're ready to go. We're gonna now practice some of these techniques and we're gonna look at how in a very realistic situation, someone who is significantly smaller and presumably weaker in a pure strength race if we were to sit down and do pushups, I might be able to do one or two more than Jamie. But what she's gonna be able to do is still use something like the wrist lock, to cause pain to cause distraction and of course not in a training environment but in a situation of a real attack, she would be able to actually disable using that kind of an attack. And again, combining it with some other things.

So let's get into a scenario where I've confronted Jamie maybe I've got her pinned up against the wall or some confined space. So as I go in and grab her, and get control of her her hands gonna come around and immediately she wants to get me off of her but she's also gonna remember that this gives her the opportunity to now turn this into a risk block very quickly. She's going to reach up, grab the hand, bend my fingers back and pull down now its important to notice that she doesn't need to push back. And if you're training in a technique, or if you're training with your training partner and immediately the first thing you do is bend this hand back and push it away. Well it's not very realistic training remember the point is, I'm someone who outweighs her, is stronger than her and is attacking her, I'm pushing in.

So she wants to work with that. And instead of trying to push my hand back against my strength and against my body weight, she simply gonna turn it down and move it down and away from her shoulder. This creates that tension for the wrist lock, and as that grip weakens as that causes more pain, I'm much more likely to pull that away, to try to get away from it. Her job is to keep that angle, keep that down. Meanwhile, over here, of course this hand is still free to come up and attack so she's gonna get into that greater than 90 position, use her forearm, try to stop me from hurting her she can support my weight in that position.

She could also get her hand down into my face and now start to attack maybe with a claw attack, maybe attack my throat area, maybe she's gonna come through with that forearm and jam it against my body and try to change her attitude so that her hips go back, again while maintaining the wrist lot, her hips go back. She drives forward and starts to push me back and create space for the next move. That next move may be an elbow may be a kick or a knee or a stump. Maybe her next move is simply to scream, and then alert someone to the situation that can come over and help her. Whats important to remember, is a risk lock is not the end all be all that's going to get her out of this situation and make me surrender and her remain safe.

What we know it can do however, is cause some distractions, some disability or again, one of our goals is to move the opponent, so we go from being pinned against the wall in a very vulnerable situation, to immediately getting this arm off and getting some distance and some opportunity to create space, move me off of her, move me around so that she can now escape and move away. That's one of the advantages of being able to use these small moves that don't require a lot of strength, to hurt an attacker that may be bigger, stronger, faster, more aggressive, and that has the initiative because they spring the attack on you. Check out more videos just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.