A lot of people get in touch with me about being involved in martial arts for so many years and what I think about MMA and if it is useful in a street fight situation. The answer is of course yes, if you are fighting someone else, for the sake of this article let’s just say it is a one on one fight. You will always have the advantage. You know how to strike properly, you know how to jab, cross, lead hook, rear hook, uppercut, elbow, knee, back fist correctly. The guy in front of you may just simply throw his arms around like an idiot doing swings after swings, you know if he grabs you to take control of his neck via a swan neck which can easily throw him to the floor and allow you to destroy him.
I always say to my clients that while we don’t want to “Kill them” we want to end the fight as soon as possible, I’d rather apply an armbar to someone and break his arm than ring for the police and explain the situation as we should then allow this would-be attacker the chance to get up. The reason for this is I know someone who came to one of the martial art schools I’d taught at, he’d been bottled.
While at a restaurant with his girlfriend someone had been “drinking too much” and became violent with the staff. Unfortunately, the staff at the restaurant were completely unprepared for the trouble and he began hitting staff members and throwing glass from the bar in the restaurant at numerous individuals. One of these went flying past the individual’s girlfriend who was now coming to our club he got up and began hitting the guy who threw the bottle and was drunk knocking him to the floor before the guy said he was sorry and begged for him to stop.
Of course, being a good citizen he did stop and warned him to get out, he turned and went towards his girlfriend to ask how she was doing before he fell to the floor. You see, after forgiving the guy and allowing him to get up he simply grabbed a bottle, smashed it, and stabbed him in the back of the head. Why? Because he wasn’t restrained properly, he was not incapacitated beyond the means to fight back and he had planned out through his humiliation a way to attack back.
Some of these things cannot even be learned through MMA fighting, but MMA will prepare you for real-life “situations” much better than no training at all. For example, in some of my training with MMA, I went for a takedown and it was blocked when the guy tried a swan neck before pushing me off but he lost his balance I simply charged into him similar to a shoulder bridge knocking him over before going on top and striking.
This was not a fancy move or one I learned often but I was capable of seeing he was off balance which led to me learning something “different”. If I had to pick some martial arts for self-defense that are easy to find, I usually pick boxing, BJJ, and Muay-Thai. However, things such as KRAV Maga, Kensai, Balintawak, dose pares, are fantastic styles for real-life fighting situations that I’ve done, I’ve also taken part in numerous other martial arts all have their positives and all have their negatives, it’s always worth doing weapon defense with guns, and knives, and other large objects that can take the place of “baseball bats” and other weapons such as this.
