In this article, Hank Hayes of No Lie Blades explains that in this day an age your best defense is a strong offense.
When you hear the words “defensive tactics” what do they mean to you? Many can easily assume it’s how you protect yourself against an attack. Striking or maneuvering only after someone has made the first move towards you. While this may be true conversationally I never want to see any of my brothers or sisters on the front line wait for some idiot to start attacking them and then go through the process of gaining mental and physical recovery to then go to work on the guy. To me that’s ridiculous! Not to mention with all the layoffs happening these days you’re going to have to be extra vigilant, most of you NJ cops do not have the same backup advantage that you once had.
Fights are not won by waiting for the bad guy to move first, so to speak, fights are won by being ready to attack the attack using the right tools, at the right time and on the right targets.
This is what we call situational readiness and patterns of attacks. Combatively speaking imagine trying to launch an attack on someone while lounging back in a lawn chair, you can bet that’s going to be a ground fight and that your going to have to work from behind the power curve to win. Now visualize having your field interview card in hand or your report clip board at the ready to be used as a distraction entry tool to the eye region while standing in a forward aggressive stance, ready to launch mentally and physically like a hungry bobcat on a rabbit.
Hopefully that picture gives you a good visual of what a situational ready stance is. When speaking of patterns of attacks we are going to explore faking to the open area to distract and soften. The idea of the fake is to get a reaction, whatever the bad guys does your going to follow up to an empty target region and then destroy to the finish. The fake can be anything from utilizing your clip board thrown in their face to a low line kick to a shin, anything to get them off balance or interrupt their pattern.
What I mean by empty target region is this; you’ve got high, middle and low regions of the body. High would be the head region, middle would be from the solar plexus region to groin and low would be from the groin to ankle region. Once you’ve softened his attack with your distraction you strike for the “empty” region of his body. This is your opening.
Remember there’s always an opening, you may have to create one yourself, but there’s ALWAYS an opening. Just keep that Bobcat readiness at hand and remember to maintain a positional advantage.
Top 3 things to remember:
Your best defense is a strong offense.
Destroy the attack with an attack.
Go home, no matter what!
