When you are doing Self Defense focused Jujitsu, you should always remember that every technique you do has a combat reason. This means there should be no techniques that are “just good for competition.” I cringe when I hear instructors say “I would never do this in real life, but lets practice it.” If that is the case – then why bother. Unless you are working out with your cadre of blackbelts, and you just feel like playing around, there is no excuse to ever teach a student something you would never use in real life. Self Defense should ONLY be focused on what your WOULD use in real life. More importantly – HOW you would use it in real life.
As an instructor I am always careful to set the stage for why and how a technique should be used, because not every technique is appropriate for every situation. When I am teaching, or practicing a technique I keep in mind its true purpose. I ask myself, why does this technique even exist? How did someone come up with this in combat? What was the situation that made this technique a valid self defense technique. The answer should be obvious – if not – you might not be thinking about it correctly.
Lets take the technique UDE GARAMI (as pictured above). This technique whose name translates as “entangled arm,” and is also called Figure 4 or Kimura, or other names, is a technique you often see in Jujitsu. There have been many MMA fights that have been won with this technique. When done correctly it puts a lot of pressure on the shoulder and elbow and can cause enough pain to make your opponent submit. But we are talking about self defense – so who cares if they submit. I am not stopping my technique because someone says “uncle.” As a matter of fact, there is really only one reason I would do the technique at all.
There is ZERO chance that I will (or you should be) in an unarmed altercation that I will use UDE GARAMI. It doesn’t matter how effective it is, it has no place in unarmed combat. There is NO situation where I will throw a person to the ground, or end up on the ground where I will decide to stay there, grasp the attacker’s wrist, drop my elbow to the ground hear his head, slide my other arm under his arm and grasp my own wrist, slide the arm down toward his body to decrease muscular slack, and lift the elbow to dislocate the shoulder – if the attacker is unarmed. But….
If the attacker is armed with a knife or hatchet or broken bottle – well THEN Ude Garami is a perfect technique to execute – because THAT is what it was created for. When someone has attacked you with a weapon, and you have isolated the arm, kept the weapon outside your “circle of death,” take the opponent to the ground, and now must remove the weapon from him mechanically – well now you are using the technique the way it was meant to be used.
You see, techniques in the right context work exactly as they are supposed to, and for the reasons they were created. The next time you do Ude Garami – put a knife in your opponents hand (I suggest a rubber training knife) and see how much more intense the technique becomes. You will quickly understand the reason for its existence.
Now use this same thinking on the rest of your self defense techniques. Question the why and the how – from a combat point of view and see how much your Self Defense improves!
Recent Comments