Krav Maga Bristol Instructor Jim Halton writes on the reality of defending yourself against a baseball attack on the street.

You hear a knock at the door and answer and someone stood there with a bat in their hand, it’s pulled back, chambered and about to swing at your head. You opened the door too wide to shut the door in time, if you turn to run you will get hit in the side or back of the head. You have a split second to react. What do you do?

An important part of any decent self defence system, maybe even the most important part is to first look at the nature of the attacks which are happening before we look at the solution.

Krav Maga vs Blunt Objects

The stick is probably the most common of the blunt object family objects such as the baseball bat, the crowbar, pool cue, car security devices (clubs) but other objects can also be used as a weapon eg rocks, hammers etc.

The stick (baseball bat/pool cue etc) has an added advantage to the attacker as it has extra range. To counter this, Krav Maga uses the bursting principle, where we drive towards the attacker to the arch of safety, control the weapon and then apply fast and aggressive counter attacks. Note it doesn’t need to be fancy, being fancy serves no purpose in self defence. We want something which is a) easy to remember b) works well. Thats it. Leave your fancy shit for the films. We don’t need it!

Krav Maga Stick Defence

Here we have a perfect example of the Krav Maga stick defence used in real life.

Now lets look at the nature of the attack – a big right handed dominant swing. The attacker isn’t expecting a counter. The attacker isn’t a trained stick fighter and chances are if someone tries to attack you with a weapon in the street, you would be very very unlucky to come across a trained stick fighter. And if you were that unlucky that you’ve got into an argument with someone who has spent years training with a stick, and they happen to have one on them, and they decide to fill you in with it, well you’ll probably fall down a open manhole during the fight too. It’s that unlikely. Next we’re going to look at what type of attacks actually happen with a stick.

Above: Another big right handed dominant swing.

Below – an interesting video, loads going on in this one, including a stick disarm. All attacks are really really simple though. One thing you will find with all of these attacks is that they are simple. No one tries for a superman stick attack, no one does a spinning 360 kick into bat swing. The attacks are simple yet brutal.

Training for a stick attack

Make sure when you are training this in class you run thought these stages:

1. Drill the technique and the defence. First before you pressure test anything, make sure you can do it correctly. If you can’t do it at half speed you wont be able to do it at full speed so first get your technique right!
2. Make it harder. Harder swing, full speed. BUT what I want you to do now is to make it more challenging for your partner. Now there are two ways of doing this. The martial arts way is to introduce the what if. What if they attacker does a spinning 360 bat attack? What if the attacker has two bats and one of them has nails in? What if he clenches the stick between his buttocks and attacks me with the fabled Kung Fu ass attack? Well, fact is most attacks are going to be simple, basic yet utterly scary and life threatening. So if we want to make it harder, instead of coming up with a million different ways to attack, lets keep the attack simple and then add these other elements:

Aggression

Swearing

Threats

Shouting

Attack to a 3rd party

Threats to a 3rd party

Pushing

Shoving

All of these will make the technique harder to perform but in a much more realistic way than coming up with a hundred different ways to attack and a different solution for each.

Below- so much happening in this video, again, note that the attacks are all really simple. But what else is going on? All of the stuff I just mentioned! So you need to make sure that the natural progression in class is 1. train the technique 2. increase the real life stuff that goes with it! Add shouting to the mix, add 3rd party intervention and attacks, add pushing, shoving. It’s what you are going to have to deal with on the street! If you were training as a boxer for a boxing match you wouldn’t train for kick defences right? But its possible that you might get kicked in a boxing match? But its unlikely as its against the rules so people don’t train it. The same way we don’t need to train for the unlikeliness that someone attacks you with a jumping superman stick poke, a boxer doesn’t train to defend takedowns. Use your training time wisely by training for something which is actually likely to happen!!

Here two women attacked by some scumbag with a bat. How effective would a bursting attack from one of the women to negate the range of the weapon followed with a savage reign of knees to the groin be? Would it be possible to of stopped this attacker? I think so.

Run Away!!

If I had a pound for every person who said that running away was a good defence *sighs. Its better to physically demonstrate this stuff, or maybe demonstrate why running away is a shit idea. Well, I mean its a great idea but its not really worked for solving many of the millions of violent crimes across the world. IF you can run away then yes, do so. However you might not always be able to run away, you could have your kids with you, you might not be fast or have an injury, you could be somewhere you can’t run such as somewhere indoors. Check this video out, a perfect demonstration of the effectiveness of running away from a shovel.

Anyway thats me all blogged out for the day, none of us get better at martial arts by blogging all day but there is merit in studying your opponent so have a look at these vidoes and add these elements into your training.

Have fun stay safe!

Jim Halton

Krav Maga Bristol

Keywords

Baseball bat attack, krav maga bristol, self defence,