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Teaching the Principles of Self-Defense Techniques

Learning or training for self-defense can teach you many different practical physical techniques to protect and defend yourself. For example, learning a joint lock can be damaging if applied in your self-defense suddenly, leaving your assaulter vulnerable to attack. Teaching the principles of how and why such physical techniques (joint lock) can be a very effective caution to a student attempting its application for the first time. Once the student understands how efficiently such physical techniques can be applied successfully, he or she can be easily taught to quickly adapt the principle to be effective in many similar situations and a self-defense situation. Using physical self-defense techniques can help you adapt to what your attacker is doing, becoming your greatest asset.

Able to Counter an Unusual or Unorthodox Attack
Learning or training in self-defense classes can also help you adopt a principle to counter an unusual or unorthodox attack, which can be the difference between the success or failure of the defense technique. The following principle is the timing of the defense technique and its application and effectiveness if it is not done at the right movement. However, with repetitive learning and self-defense techniques, the defense can always be executed after the prompting attack. Such self-defense techniques can also turn the odds in your favor to fend off the attack. This means that a defender has to wait for an attack before using their training. There is also a chance that the defense is mistimed and rendered ineffective. If this happens, then the only options available are repeating the defensive movement and repeating it until it works perfectly, which would mean either fighting back or give in. From a martial art, a practitioner learns the timing required for each technique in the same way as a self-defense course. The difference is the broad range of possible applications of a principle of defense, which gives the martial artist the option of executing single or even multiple defensive techniques during the confrontation, from a pre-emptive strike to a defense against the attack once it is made. If the martial artist mistimes a defense, the options can be similar. The difference is the ability to fight back, which is more significant due to the martial art training. If a defense can be redone, it can be adapted to ensure its success, based on the theoretical knowledge learned in a self-defense class of how it works. Any Self-defense class would provide both physical and theoretical learning and knowledge about how to successfully apply self-defensive techniques and their principles of how to time it and reapply if the technique application fails in the first attempt against the attacker. The timing to execute a self-defense technique should always be perfect to surprise the attacker, as they would not be expecting it.

Learning the Principles of Focus and Control
Through the teaching of the principles of focus and control, a martial artist also learns that a strike can be executed to do minimal damage and be used as a deterrent or warning to the attacker to back off or suffer the consequences, as the attacker would know that the person who he or she is attacking, can defend themselves. If a self-defense technique is executed with maximum efficiency, then the attacker can judge that it would be a mistake to continue the attack any further. Thus it can cause more substantial damage. This focus, timing, and control, along with the knowledge of vital spots, and the self-defense techniques used to strike them, can form a formidable arsenal for the person to draw on and be able to defend themselves. This arsenal can also allow the person to know how and where to strike for the most desirable effect, from creating an opening to escape and ensuring that the attacker cannot give chase. Learning and training for self-defense can also teach the person the ability to be more proactive in their defense, as they can no longer need to wait for an attack to come to defend themselves. They can then be made fully aware of themselves for any possible dangers and to be able to protect themselves against any attacker, no matter how big or strong they might be.

Using Self-defense Tricks
Any student can learn the use of other tricks such as feints and distractions. However, this ability can be used as an opening and can be understood better in martial art. A distraction of any sort will be reacted in different ways by different people. The martial art gives the ability to adapt the learned principles to take advantage of this. Training in martial arts uses sparring as one of its core methods of teaching. Sparring teaches the basic principles of timing a defense. A self-defense course teaches useful and effective techniques in a way very similar to sparring. It does not teach sparring as a free-flowing controlled fight. This is the area where a martial artist gains proficiency in timing. The ability to defend and counterstrike are taught by sparring, as it is the timing of any technique to use as an opening created by a distraction.

James Bentley, the author of the book ‘Wing Chun- The Evolutionary Science of Advanced Self-Defense, Combat, and Human Performance,’ explains in his book that teaching self-defense in a similar way can teach a student to visualize the situation and analyze how quickly the same situation can be changed to something more, or even less dangerous, thus requiring a different response and the effectiveness of the self-defense technique used with perfect timing.