Thumbs
The thumb can be used as a wedge to displace the eyeball from the eye socket. This is done by placing your thumb against the inside of the bridge of his nose and pushing into the corner of his eye socket. Typically, you’ll use your fingers as a guide alongside the other guy’s face. It works much better if you can support the head with your other hand or block it with a solid object such as a wall or the ground so that he cannot move his head back or twist away.
When shoved forcefully into the eye socket, your thumb works much like a wood-splitting wedge, displacing the eyeball. This ultimate result is not a full removal of the eye from the socket, which is very challenging, but rather a stretching of the optic nerve that attaches the back of the eye and shoots excruciating pain into the brain. Stretching this nerve makes the eye short out, for lack of a better phrase. It can cause blurred vision, disorientation, shock, and in some cases blindness, more than enough trauma to let you escape to safety in most cases. If you actually displace the eyeball, the disabling affect is even more severe.
Fingers
Raking the eyes is about damaging the cornea of the eye, the outer lens. Scratching the eye in this manner causes excessive tearing, light sensitivity, and pain. A vertical claw brought down the face from eyebrow to cheek will most likely fail. The brow above the eye and the cheek protect the eye, an imperfect and poor attack but an attack nonetheless. Moving your fingertips laterally across the eye, on the other hand, is likely to be much more successful.
Again, this attack is done powerfully, more than once, and with resolve. The chances of failure without these three points are high. Attempting to put the fingertips into the eye is a strike better left to the skilled martial artist. It is fast and effective but can hurt your hand if you do it incorrectly. Everyone else should follow this method of horizontal raking.
In this example, we will use the right hand. Palm thrust to the attacker’s cheekbone. This bone will serve as an anchor and guide. Thrust the finger tips into the eye (the number or which fingers is not important) and in a twisting motion, similar to tying to take the lid off a jar of pickles, twist away from attacker’s nose toward their ear. Keep trying until it works.
If you are a trained martial artist, you almost certainly know how to do an open-hand chest block (for example,
When shoved forcefully into the eye socket, your thumb can stretch the optic nerve or displace the adversary’s eyeball, causing debilitating pain, shock, and disorientation.
Inclement Weather
The old dog-fighting trick with sun can be used in hand-to-hand fighting too. If you can get the sun to your back, particularly early in the morning or late in the afternoon when it’s low in the sky, you gain an additional advantage in a fight. The same thing goes for wind, hail, driving rain, and other inclement conditions. If something is blowing in the other guy’s face, it’s tougher for him to fight. Good footwork and body positioning can help protect against these things being used against you, though it is prudent to wear sunglasses and brimmed hats such as a baseball cap to protect your face from the weather too.
This classic chest block can be a set-up for a follow-on eye strike.
Bounce off his arm in a circular clawing motion to rake across the eyes.
Use Neck Cranks or Chokes to Put Him Down
It’s important to have both a “standing” game as well as a “ground” game, as you never know where a fight will lead. Chokes and neck cranks are very effective, particularly on the ground, but also very dangerous. Security guards generally don’t use these techniques. In many cases, the techniques are categorized by law enforcement as being at the same level as lethal force on the force continuum or banned outright by policy. The reason for this is the same reason that the guillotine made such an effective means of execution during the “Reign of Terror” that followed the French Revolution in the late 1700s. These are all methods of separating the control system (brain) from the supply system (heart/lungs) of the body, because they attack the neck, the “super highway” between these two systems.
There are different ways to choke someone effectively. You must either close off his carotid arteries or compress his trachea. The carotid arteries run down both sides of the neck. By restricting the blood flow in those arteries, you can impede the oxygen flow to the brain. After a short time in an oxygen-depressed state, the brain effectively goes to sleep. When that happens, it no longer has any control of the body. Brain goes to sleep, bad guy passes out, and you win. A carotid choke is relatively safe because if you let off shortly after the other guy loses consciousness, he should revive. You can see this kind of thing happen in martial arts tournaments all the time. Medical intervention is rarely necessary. However, if you continue to compress the carotid arteries after the other guy has passed out, you can cause brain damage or death.
Compression of the trachea or the windpipe is another way of doing a choke. The trachea is on the front of the neck directly underneath the chin. You can stop or restrict the flow of air to the lungs by compressing the trachea. This causes suffocation, a condition that if left untreated will rapidly lead to unconsciousness, brain damage, and death. This is a more dangerous technique than a carotid choke because you can damage the trachea in a manner that simply releasing the choke won’t often restart the flow of oxygen to the brain. Consequently, carotid chokes tend to be safer than tracheal chokes.
Architecture of the Neck. You can look at the neck as a pentagram. It has five points that are important for martial applications. The two trapezius muscles at the back of the neck form the first two points and the carotid arteries form the second two points. The carotid arteries are located along side the sternocleidomastoid and the trachea. The trachea forms the fifth point.
Choking Weapons—the Arms and Hands: We are only going to demonstrate chokes that utilize the forearms and hands in this book. While other parts of the arms, hands, and fingers can be used for choking, they require more study with a qualified instructor to pull off effectively on the street. The techniques listed here are those that we believe are the easiest to learn and apply.
• Arms: When using the arms it is helpful to think of them as propeller blades. Airplane propellers have a leading edge and a trailing edge. Look at the palm of your left hand. The edges of your arm, to the left and to the right are the leading and trailing edges that are used to perform the techniques. Those hard, bony edges give you solid leverage for performing chokes. The flat parts of your arms, directly in front of you and directly on the
