Anyone who’s been around the martial arts long enough no doubt has heard a certain boxing maxim: Make him miss and make him pay. That’s all well and good, but what if there was a way to just make him pay and immediately reverse the momentum of the fight?
It just so happens that there is.
The Filipino martial arts teach a strategy called “defanging the snake.” It has you literally attacking your opponent’s incoming limb before it can do any damage. While this fighting tactic clearly stems from the influence that armed combat in the Philippines has had on the greater martial arts community, one should not think for a moment that it doesn’t apply equally well to empty-hand skills.
In the empty-hand training sessions I organize for my arnis students, we refer to this category of techniques as limb destructions. Their role in armed combat is the same as it is in unarmed combat: to exploit the fact that the opponent is reaching toward the defender. Because all martial artists intuitively understand where their body is in space relative to their opponent, this path to victory is clear: Deny him his target and replace it with your weapon so that it’s the opponent, and not you, who is injured.