continued from “Why MMA is NOT Street Self Defense! Part 1″

If someone steals your car (or any other personal possession) and they start driving it away right in front of you what is your best response. For a ring trained fighter the answer all to often has been to chase the criminal down. This has resulted in well known, respected and loved people being shot down by a criminal who was playing by street rules instead of sport rules. If someone commits road rage against you and after some sign language tries to get you to pull over and fight do you stop the car and jump out to go fight? There are famous ring fighters who have and even wrote about it like teaching the other person a lesson is the thing to do. This is all well and good if everyone is playing by ring rules. There are MMA fighters who have been shot to death when they thought they were about to engage in a lesson teaching street fight of this nature. In street/bar fights there are MMA and Jiu-jitsu stylists who have been stomped, gutted and shot because they made the mistake of confusing ring rules and sports with real street situations. Sports and street are not the same thing.

Street attacks involve brutal realities and call for intelligent responses starting with proper awareness, avoidance and deterrence skills and if all of this is appropriately applied in a situation and a physical answer is called for then the physical answer needs to be a response that will match the lethal nature of the situation and where safely exiting / leaving / getting away (ideally before force is needed) is always on the top of the list of priorities. Real street self defense is not as glamorous or exciting as the UFC and other sporting type events and I for one am glad they are not. Rape, murder, kidnapping etc are awful nasty and terrible (usually life changing) events for anyone and should not be acceptable under any circumstances. In real street oriented martial arts the training is geared around real street scenarios where avoiding and exiting at the first real opportunity is a critical and required part of the practice. In MMA and Jiu-jitsu sports training the critical part of practice is to work within a set of rules to pin or knockout the other person who is empty handed and fighting by themselves and whose only defense is that they have been training MMA, boxing and Jiu-jitsu so that they can have a match with / against another competitor. In real street attacks physical responses are mostly going to involve techniques that are brutal and illegal even in extreme sports competitions. The goal is to hurt them and get away. Some people call this an improper or inhumane response. I disagree. The criminal attacker is the one who committed the heinous act and is improper and inhumane and deserves anything they get.

To Be continued in “Why MMA is NOT Street Self Defense! Part 3”

-self defense master of the year 2007 usa martial arts hall of fame -sigung (senior teacher-red sash) old hand shao lin and internal kung fu -master practitioner of kun tao silat de thouars -master practitioner of pentjak silat -certified instructor of russian martial art systema as of may 2003 -www.clearsilat.com

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