Why those crazy strikes?
You can learn this more indepth with our video Combative Striking:
https://pramek.com/p-shop/product/combative-striking-series-four-hours-of-instruction/
I often have people ask me, lately, ‘Why are you showing a strike with your arm up like that? Why don’t you just punch the guy straight in the nose?’
Good question.
A simple punch to the nose, eye gouge would do and is preferable. Most of what you people have seen me do are basic strikes to the face to get to my mechanics. I actually use mostly cupped hand blows, chin jabs, and strikes to the eyes as my mainstays because they work.
I don’t jab or cross as those mark territory…they don’t take territory and hold it. Years ago we were much more prone to end up in striking matches, instead of ending the fight with effective strikes. Strikes are not punches…they are mechanically different. Strikes seek a purpose while punches seek positioning for more punches in the traditional sense of the word. Over time we adapted to look at striking for a purpose instead of boxing or fisticuffs.
But, in this video we were working on this spiral movement in the class, so we turned the movement into strikes.
One note about the elbow…a simple linear punch wouldn’t allow that elbow. That elbow is a linear favorite of mine and it hurts, as you can see from the impact. It is achieved through angular strikes that position for a linear, straight line elbow.
When clinched, we should pummel, rotate on a fulcrum on the arms to a superior position, grab your hand and rotate around that point and scrape this elbow down the eye, nose, and into the sternum, or target it to them.
In this video, you can see me graze him on the second one I do. Luckily, Walter is a very seasoned student so he’s ok with these types of impacts and the control behind them – miss by an inch, miss by a mile. This time the miss is on purpose. I will rotate up and reinforce a strike and pull my striking hand with my free hand when in CQ and drive the bone vector into the face (i didn’t show this in the video). But, sometimes, I might decide not to use the elbow or reinforced strike and strike, so when my arm is up for the elbow, I will instead strike out. This weekend we are finishing the upper body movement video and it will cover strikes, so once that is done our repertoire will be open to the public, like equilibrium and the wedge are now.
Also blocking or grabbing these strikes is like trying to block or grab a whip. They are very fast and deflect deflections, in that when someone tries to side block while I’m rotating so much that the rotation tends to create a fulcrum over their blocks because my bone vectors and trajectory are shifting (think of an up-jab in boxing).
Lastly, I also posted that because I’ve have a lot of people say, ‘Oh, with all that combatives stuff, you probably can’t move and flow anymore with your strikes like you did in the K-Sys days when I saw you in _insert state_.’
I move about 20x better now and transition between strikes based on movement (as you can see from the one two, chop elbow). A deeper understanding the pulleys and levers (all that boring science crap) works. This just shows the evolution from K-Sys spiral strikes I used to do to a more combative method of an elbow and chop.
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