There’s a good chance your ‘self-defence’ instructor doesn’t know what they’re talking about

The first time I got punched in the face in the street, I’d been diligently practising Japanese jiu-jitsu twice a week for about six months. I didn’t retaliate, but I did do a great job of post-rationalising why not: the guy had a bunch of friends with him, the attack didn’t continue beyond the first strike, I was drunk and taken by surprise. I carried on doing that useless style for another year or so, learning incredibly specific defences to extremely telegraphed attacks, until my instructor told me to choose between his style and Capoeira (I chose Capoeira). I got punched in the face again a few months later, under pretty similar circumstances. Obviously the Capoeira didn’t help, but at least I learned some sweet cartwheels.

There’s a fundamental problem with most self-defence classes: it’s functionally impossible to get a lot of practical experience in the thing you’re teaching. If you’re a competition-based fighter, you’re used to fighting other people with pre-determined rules, in situations where you both know when the fight starts, where you start across the ring/cage from each other and stop when one person says to. If you’re a doorman, or a corrections officer, you might get involved in a lot of violent altercations with people who don’t acknowledge any rules, but those are going to start, and develop differently, from the sort a lone woman or man might find themselves in. Even if you, personally, have been attacked, that’s only one experience to draw on (or, hopefully, not more than a handful). Plenty of people teach knife defence, but how many people have been in more than one situation that called for it, without dying? I’m guessing a lot less than one percent of them.

All of which, along with the impracticality of ‘testing’ fighting techniques that involve gouging eyes or twisting scrota, means that a huge amount of ‘self-defence’ advice/teaching is just straight-up fucking nonsense. I have to believe that the people perpetrating it mostly don’t realise this: that, even in a world where the UFC has been operating for almost three decades, there are people who genuinely think a heel-palm to the chin or a kick to the kneecap are possible, effective movements for a novice to pull off. I’ve tried out two Krav Maga organisations: one, a nationwide operation, I stuck with for a couple of months before they taught a ground escape that fundamentally would not work against someone who didn’t want to let it happen; the other had students who couldn’t punch or kick effectively after training for a year.

These days, I’m a brown belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I’ve done a fair bit of wrestling and boxing, trained Muay Thai in Thailand, and had four amateur MMA fights. One on one, with a bit of warning that a fight was about to start and a guarantee that no weapons would get involved, I’d fancy my chances against…a lot of people, I suppose. Take away any of those caveats and…not so much. Real self-defence, from what I understand, is multi-layered and messy and horrible: it starts with being aware of when an attack’s likely to take place, and might end with you needing to tear a chunk out of someone with your teeth. In a situation where you need it, you are going to be probably terrified and at the very least flushed with adrenaline, and any ‘self-defence instructor’ who doesn’t impress the seriousness of all this on you is doing you a disservice, and very possibly giving you a false sense of self-confidence.

What works? I’m honestly not sure. Here’s a bit of what I think:

• Anything anyone on Twitter/Reddit tells you that isn’t ‘don’t be there/run away’ will not work. If you haven’t practised it, if you have to remember it, it will be gone as soon as any kind of stressful situation starts. You’ll be running on instinct, and the person who attacked you will have the advantage, because they decided to start the attack.
• If something is legal in MMA but not used all the time, it probably doesn’t work that well. Professional fighters can sometimes hit the knee of a moving opponent. You probably can’t.
• There’s an argument to be made that training ‘competition’ styles (Muay Thai, judo, boxing, Brazilian jiu-jitsu) teaches you to think within the mindset of those styles (so you’ll grapple when you could punch, punch when you could gouge), but there are benefits to them that are hard to ignore. You learn to hit hard, gauge distance, make moves work on a fully-resisting opponent, move another person around in space, and to fight when you’re hurt. You do not want the first time you get hit in the head- with all the horrible shock and surprise that involves — to be a time your life depends on responding properly.
• Grappling is good because it’s applicable to lots of situations: if you’re cramped into a train seat or end up on the floor, it still works, in a way a really good left hook won’t. Striking is good because sometimes, landing one good shot is enough to get things under control. Learning bit of both is probably the best plan.
• There’s probably a lot to be said for practising getting your adrenaline under control when a person is getting in your face and saying unimaginably horrible things to you, or for getting into the headspace of permanently injuring another person who means you serious harm. I don’t know though, I’ve never seriously tried either of these or been in a high-stakes fight.
• It probably helps to have a basic legal knowledge of what you can call self-defence.

I don’t have a perfect plan for you, but I will say that any self-defence instructor who won’t acknowledge most of the above is not doing their job, and maybe making you less safe because of their incompetence. There’s no agreed-on standard for self-defence instructors: sometimes, you’re hiring a dinner-party planner who couldn’t rustle up an omelette. If you want to know where to start properly, you should probably read The Gift of Fear and a couple of books by Rory Miller: I also doubt you’d regret any time you spent learning boxing, Muay Thai, wrestling or Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Nobody should need to learn self-defence. Hopefully, you won’t ever use it. But please, please don’t kid yourself it’s as simple as ‘kick him in the groin’ or tell yourself it’s too complex and intimidating to learn. I was lucky: I got punched twice, but all those guys wanted to do was punch me. Some self-defence instructors are even luckier, in a way — they’ve never been punched in their lives.