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FINISHING MOVES
The final stage of the fight is the point where you have control of the situation. Use of holds, chokes, and pressure points can immobilize your attacker, rendering him harmless until law enforcement arrives. Or, provided your strikes were effective enough, you could take the opportunity to escape from the situation. But remember, you may use reasonable force to protect yourself; if your “finishing move” is to stomp on your attacker’s head while he is lying on the ground that is beyond the bounds of “reasonable force and you will probably find yourself in trouble with the law.
It is often said that it is “better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.” A physical threat on you or your family justifies a reasonable use of force, even if it means striking first. Being capable of doing so forcefully and without fear will give you the edge, along with your martial arts skills, to protect yourself and your family from harm.
As we go through our martial arts training, we have mostly if not exclusively focused on the tools of unarmed combat – punches, kicks, blocks, throws, etc. But when confronted with a real life-or-death situation, we find that we are mentally unprepared. The flaw with many martial arts and combatives systems is that they only cover the physical side, and ignore or downplay the mental side of a fight situation. Fear enters the mind, causing us to think. We think back to our training, and how we should respond to a certain type of attack. Unfortunately, this causes us to freeze, thus losing any advantage from our training, and quite possibly leads to losing the fight, becoming seriously injured or killed in the process. |
