My wife and I were walking home with some friends in downtown Montreal one Friday evening when four drunken men came stumbling toward us, mouthing off aggressively. We ignored them and kept walking, but one of our friends stopped to exchange words. I grabbed my friend by the arm to lead him away, but he pulled back and kept arguing.
One of the men shoved that friend, then shoved another friend. I stepped between our group and the four men, and they rushed me from the front and the left. I hit the man in front with a knife hand strike to the jaw, but I was a little out of range and didn’t connect solidly. I turned left, planted my hand on the second man’s chest and shoved. That’s when perception started playing tricks on me.
It looked like the man and two of his associates suddenly started shrinking. They appeared like they were a couple of feet tall! Only later was I told that I’d sent the man flying into his friends and all three had fallen down.
But I just stared at the tiny men, bewildered, forgetting the fourth man. That’s when he punched me hard between the eyes. The rest was a blur. I was still standing with my arms up, but I couldn’t see. I ate some more shots before the police arrived.
The incident had a big impact on how I trained, pushing me to practice more intensely, with additional focus on power, speed and visualization of real-life self-defense applications. I also thought more about the importance of factors unrelated to technique — for example, avoiding confrontations in the first place; not giving up the initiative, especially when facing multiple opponents; and staying alert and aware of how perceptions can shift under duress.
I started thinking about reality-combat advice for martial arts instructors and wondered what other experienced martial artists have learned from their own close encounters. That prompted me to seek out several and pelt them with questions — so I would know and so teachers everywhere would be able to make their students’ training perhaps a bit more realistic.
“Sifu John” is a longtime kung fu teacher. He was giving a class one day when somebody punched the window of his school. John went outside and saw two large men acting aggressively. One of them tried to kick John. He caught the man’s leg and threw him to the ground. The other man took a swing, but John punched him first. However, he didn’t punch with full power because he didn’t want to severely hurt him. The two ran off into the mall in which the school is located.
John and one of his students chased the men and finally caught them. John applied a joint lock to one guy’s wrist to control him and guide him back to the school. John assumed his student would watch the second person, who was behind him, but that guy struck John in the back of the head. He and his accomplice got away.
John’s advice for instructors: Teach your students not to use excessive force, but make sure they don’t misinterpret that to mean they should hold back if the threat is real or drop their guard if they happen to land a good shot.
Pro tip: Tell students to never run after an assailant who’s fleeing. Catching the person is the job of the police, not the victim. Remind your students that they should avoid confrontation whenever possible. “If you fight, don’t hold back,” John says, “but if you don’t need to fight, don’t.”
Claude Aubin learned a similar lesson during his 32 years as a Montreal police officer. Aubin trained in judo, karate, aikido and boxing, and he was involved in more than 100 altercations while he wore the uniform, including being attacked by criminals with baseball bats, knives, broken bottles, guns and even a vat of acid.
Early in his career, Aubin and his partner, a veteran officer, had to disarm and subdue an elderly drunk who was waving a .22-caliber rifle on the street. Aubin’s partner told Aubin to take the man to their patrol car and handcuff him. The man started to cry. Feeling sorry for him, Aubin put him in the back of the car without cuffs. When Aubin sat in the driver’s seat and turned to talk to the guy, he punched Aubin in the face, breaking his jaw. Aubin’s partner, after subduing the suspect again, gave Aubin hell for not using cuffs.
Aubin’s advice for instructors: Teach your students to always remain alert, even when a situation appears to be under control. Attackers often try to trick their victims into lowering their guard.
“Sifu Steve” is an experienced teacher of wing chun kung fu. On New Year’s Eve, he and some colleagues were hailing a cab. A taxi stopped after passing by another man who was also looking for a cab.
As Steve and his associates got in, the man, visibly drunk, got in a tussle with one of them, then threw a haymaker punch at Steve. Steve dodged it and tried to do a technique called lap da, which entails catching the arm with one hand and punching with the other. However, his catching hand slipped because he was wearing gloves.
The man grabbed Steve and slammed him into a telephone pole several times. Then he started punching Steve, and although he was dazed, Steve managed to block the shots. The two men wrestled to a draw, looked at each other and agreed to stop fighting. Embarrassed that he didn’t do better, Steve proceeded to radically alter his training to make it more combative and more focused on real-life scenarios.
Steve’s advice for instructors: Use the same approach with your students. Constantly re-evaluate the material you teach to minimize complacency. Don’t fall into the trap of “comfort zone training.”
“Bob” has trained for more than 35 years in choy li fut, judo and escrima. One day, he was at his massage therapy practice when he noticed that one of his clients, a man with schizophrenia, was having a crisis outside. Hearing obscenities, Bob went out and found his client surrounded by three large men, who looked like they were about to get violent. Bob rushed over and led his client past the men.
The thugs, still upset, turned on Bob. One tried to push him. Bob sidestepped and kicked him in the groin, then punched the other two as hard as he could. The men, clearly hurt, left the area. When Bob told his teacher about the encounter, the teacher was angry. “He said, ‘Why didn’t you just call the cops or scream at them from the door of your clinic?’ And he was 100-percent right. I endangered my life and my patient’s,” Bob says.
Bob’s lesson for teachers: Yes, it’s essential to teach your students good technique, but it’s even more important to tell them to avoid fights in the first place and think beforehand about ways to defuse developing confrontations.
To make his point, Bob tells another story of walking with two friends into an alley, where they saw three men beating someone on the ground. One of the friends grabbed a garbage-can lid and threw it toward the men Captain America–style. It caused such a loud noise when it landed that the three guys ran off.
“What a genius!” Bob says. “The lesson is to be smart and use your head.” Conveying such practical wisdom to students should be the goal of every martial arts teacher.
Alex Roslin practices white-crane kung fu and is the award-winning author of Police Wife: The Secret Epidemic of Police Domestic Violence.