Examining Personal Defense Vulnerabilities and Training Methods

Here's another important video from the personal defense network. When it comes to our preparation for self-defense we always want to integrate concepts that apply both unarmed and armed. We talk about anatomy. There's some things we should think about when it comes to training and what techniques we actually want to spend time training to deal with the human weapon system. That's exactly. Right. One of the things that many people will talk about they'll talk about pressure points and I'll talk about being able to get someone to do what they want by applying a joint lock or a pressure point. One of the things that's important to understand about that is there there's a wide variability and the susceptibility to the effectiveness for those maneuvers. One of the things that is consistent, however is that you can train to be able to not have those have a greatest influence on you. For example, one of the things that's frequently talked about is using a come along hold where they were, the the point of this is to flex the tendons in such a way that you create pain. So the person wants to comply. Well in point of fact, tendons are one of those things that can stretch and be manipulated by training in such a way that there's not much influence there for someone who's trained. However, there is a piece of cartilage right here that when pressure is put on that you can't change that the level of pain that comes from that kind of cartilage. There's only three places in the human body that occurs. One is in the temporal mandibular joint here at the jaw where we have problems with TMJ. And the other is, is the meniscus in the knee. And you'll hear people talk about having torn in meniscus and it never really gets well, unless you have surgery. Likewise, the same thing occurs, a person who has TMJ pain. It's a very problematic situation because of the tearing of that cartilage. A wrist injury and pressure on the cartilage that occurs here is very painful. You can't out-train that, but you can have an influence for example, on the tendons and the ligaments because you can build strength in those ligaments especially in the hand and the ankle. And you can also build flexibility there also. Another frequently held idea is that a stunned to the brachial plexus will cause an instant loss of consciousness. Well, that is true because one of the things that we know is is that when there is an overload of electrical activity a person will lose consciousness. They will sustain a concussion and there will be damage to the neurological tissue. The point there is an overload of electrical activity actually striking the brachial plexus will result in an overload of electrical activity that causes the person to lose consciousness. What's interesting about that. However, is it has to be perfectly struck and it has to be perfectly exposed the body, the creator of the body knew that kind of thing. And so we protected that vulnerability with the trapezius muscle and with the other musculature in this area, a person with a short thick neck does not have a brachial plexus that's exposed. What is a brachial plexus? It essentially is a highly concentrated area of nerves that is directed toward one of the upper extremities that comes directly off the spinal cord itself. It's concentrated in this area here. Just above the clavicle and just below the trapezius. And when that's exposed, there's a vulnerability there, but you cannot count on striking that resulting in someone passing out. You can hit that several times and never make that person pass out. So the problem is that a lot of times we train and in what I call compliance training. We have a willing partner who's entering into the fight with us, and he's doing something like throwing a punch and exposing that area where we're going to throw a block or some counter to the wild roundhouse bar fight type punch technique. And we're going to try to strike into this, this brachial plexus into this nerve cluster. And the fact is that if the person is leaving this arm down and they're just looking at us and they're saying, okay, are you ready? And we're saying, we're ready and they're going to throw a punch. And they do that. And your magic block results in hitting an area that was offered up naturally in your fight, in your pretend fight. You're not really training in a realistic way. If you assume that's going to work in a street fight where people are going to be crouched, people's shoulders, come up, their hands come up to protect. And then that punch comes in. You can see this is a much harder area to hit and we needed to train realistically and understand the realistic vulnerabilities when it comes to these pressure points and nerve strikes. Now, personally, I feel the same way about the strike against the outside of the leg, the nerve cluster that's here, that we know that, that can work wonders to drop somebody to distract somebody, but only if it's set up perfectly and in a training environment, that's usually easy to do but in a fight, that's not nearly is easy. Once again, it is the electrical overload that has its effect. And when you're in a combat situation and you're in a conflict situation, that person is all already ramped up, so to speak. And so his physiology has already shifted from what is considered as normal in already compliant or a conflict with someone who is willing to be compliant. So when we actually want to examine the true vulnerabilities, we need to examine them in context and we need to understand how to affect them. So if you are preparing for your fight and you want to make yourself less vulnerable your human weapon system stronger, think about strengthening and making your ligaments and tendons more flexible. And also when we talk about attacking that other person we can't count on them having inflexible tendons, inflexible ligaments, inflexible connections, that they're automatically going to submit to pain. Now, you mentioned this area here let's describe the exact attack, the exact control that we want to use to exploit the weakness of the cartilage. One of the things that people will do is they will flex the wrist. And when they flex the wrist, they will apply pressure here. Well, that's sort, that can be problematic. And for the person on the receiving end of this but to create a, even more pain you have to compress this cartilage. And what you will see people do is they will apply this to someone who is very flexible and has trained that way but you can't train the cartilage necessarily. And so to make that much stronger not only do you flex it, but you turn and flex it That's a big difference. Let me assure you that there wasn't anything happening here. But this doesn't do anything. Yeah. But if you bring it that way the person in, and if you'll notice and I don't know if the camera caught that but the very first thing that he did was he went from flection to extension and he took a deep breath. The human weapon system was packing itself with oxygen, fixing to explode. Learning, to integrate with those natural reactions understanding that the human weapon system is designed to prime itself for a fight. Even here, making a training video with someone I've known for years, someone I consider a friend and I trust. The minute I felt that pain, my human weapons system got into a fight mode, started loading the body with oxygen, got myself into that extensor, that muscle recruitment concept, all kicked in. Learning that's going to happen and understanding how to integrate with it, understanding the true vulnerabilities of the human weapon system and training to both protect them in yourself and exploit those vulnerabilities in your enemy are all important parts of self-defense preparation. Check out more videos just like this one at the person defenses network.