Materazzi in the chest, knocking him to the ground. He was subsequently ejected from the game.
Combinations
While all of these techniques can be used in isolation, they are more effective when combined together. The best combinations move along the body going high-low-high or low-high-low to create openings by disrupting the opponent. They work because your adversary’s head and hands will follow the pain when you strike him. His attention should shift to where he has been struck, particularly if he is not a trained fighter who has become desensitized against pain. Further, there is a natural physiological reaction that draws a person’s hands toward the body part that hurts. This gives you a momentary advantage to strike an unguarded area, providing that your combinations flow smoothly and quickly in concert with each other.
For example, let’s say that your adversary opens the fight with a punch to your midsection. One way to respond is by twisting to the side, evading, or shoulder blocking his punch and then immediately riposting with a palm-heel strike to his face. As he reels back from your hand strike, you can fairly easily stomp on his foot or ankle (or throw a low kick to his knee, depending on the angle of the opening). As his attention is drawn to the damaged limb, you can finish him off with a hammer fist blow to the face.
If Something Works, Keep Using It Until It Stops Working
He who knows these things, and in fighting puts his knowledge into practice, will win his battles. He who knows them not, nor practices them, will surely be defeated.
Chase him towards awkward places, and try to keep him with his back to awkward places. When the enemy gets into an inconvenient position, do not let him look around, but conscientiously chase him around and pin him down.
If something works, keep using it until it stops working. This idea can be said many different ways. Examples would include the old farmer’s axiom, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” or the business phrase, “Go with what you know.”
Have you ever loaded a supposedly “new and improved” program onto your computer only to find that it crashed everything else you had installed? Maybe you had intra-program conflicts, ran out of disk space, or your processor chip was just too slow? Or you quickly discovered that you wanted to print out a short report and couldn’t even do that. Or you were forced to upgrade to a new operating system only to find that you needed a whole new computer as well.
The same thing happens in a fight. If you just hit the other guy with your hand, don’t try a jumping, back- spinning, split kick to follow it up. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Go with what just worked. Do it again and again and again until it doesn’t work anymore. Then go to plan B.
Standardization and simplicity are the hallmarks of a good fighter. Oh sure, there are the professionals who can do these wild techniques and make them work, but frankly that is not you. And for the most part it’s not us either. If you watch these guys, professional cage fighters, boxers, wrestlers, judo, or
Street fighters, gang members, bouncers, bikers, law enforcement officers, and anybody else who settles things with violence has a set of favorite techniques that they will use over and over again. Why? Because they work. The cost of failure is far too high to attempt things that might not work.
Do not get fancy in any fight, but especially not against an armed assailant. On the street, there are no points for executing a technique with perfect form. Do whatever it takes to win no matter how messy or sloppy it becomes.
Once the fight begins, adrenaline will affect your fine motor skills so you have to keep things simple if you wish them to be effective. Use well-directed, efficient techniques—things you know you are good at and can rely on under extreme stress. There are techniques you know, techniques you can do, techniques you practice, and techniques you would be willing to bet your life on. Apply only the latter in a real fight. Use your favorite one again and again until it no longer works and then pull another one out of your bag of tricks.
Any mistake you make in a street fight could be your last, so stick with what you know. Hick’s[27] law states that response times increase in proportion to the logarithm of the number of potential stimulus-response alternatives. That is a fancy way of saying that the more choices you have to make, the longer it takes to make a decision. While you may know and even practice hundreds of techniques in your martial arts training, assuming you practice such things, a limited subset is required in self-defense situations. Choose your favorite and keep using it until it stops working.
Six Mistakes to Avoid in a Fight
If equally matched, we can offer battle; if slightly inferior in numbers, we can avoid the enemy; if quite unequal in every way, we can flee from him… Hence, though an obstinate fight may be made by a small force, in the end it must be captured by the larger force.
In single combat, we can confuse the enemy by attacking with varied techniques when the chance arises. Feint a thrust or cut, or make the enemy think you are going to close with him, and when he is confused you can easily win.
Real fighting on the street is nothing like practice in the
