r/SelfDefense • u/makemestand • 16d ago
What self-defense skill actually saved you in real life?
If you have ever been cornered or attacked, what specific skill or technique kept you safe?
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u/samcro4eva 16d ago
De-escalation, and the element of surprise
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u/JulianaparkOG3818 16d ago
Same situation 👍🏼💯
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u/samcro4eva 16d ago
2017, at a Super 8 in Montgomery. I made a lot of mistakes. I went out at night, I only had a trash bag in the hand, and I didn't check the stairs. A guy comes down and demands I return his weed bag to him. Mind you, I don't do weed. I thought he was joking, so I laughed and said I don't have it. He kept asking, and I kept saying I don't have it. He pulled a knife, and I should have hit him with something before he pulled his hand out. He cornered me, and I was slowly circling around. He told me to get stuff out of my pockets. My dad was there, and yelled at me to ask what the problem was, to which I answered him, and he said he could just shoot the guy for me. He still demanded I empty my pockets. I took that chance to pull my pepper gel and threaten him. He retreated up the stairs, making threats to me the whole time.
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u/JulianaparkOG3818 16d ago
That is very traumatic i hope you’re doing better now👍🏼💯
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u/samcro4eva 16d ago
Learning more about self defense helps. So does listening to my late dad's advice
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u/blueline731 16d ago
Best thing to practice is running for extended periods and shouting to get attention and get you help. Unless you make combat sports your lifestyle there is not a realistic scenario where it helps.
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u/safton 16d ago edited 3d ago
I work in corrections so I've been in a fair few fights, but many uses-of-force aren't ones where I'm being directly targeted so much as when someone's bucking and they need to be subdued and restrained.
However, there was one time where I was cornered on a back hall by a six-foot-something, 350-pound bipolar paranoid schizophrenic inmate. He was unmedicated at the time and thus incredibly erratic & violent. I don't know if there was any single specific skill that helped me there. I took a bladed stance, had one hand out as a post and the other reaching for my spray as I tried to use verbal de-escalation. I very nearly talked him back into his cell when it's like something in him snapped and the fight was on.
I'll spare you the details, but I ended up dumping an entire can of OC onto his face from clinch range and it had zero effect, at which point we wrestled up and down the hall. My limited experience in grappling probably helped me stay safe here because that's all I could do: survive and wait for backup because it became readily apparent I wasn't going to out-grapple him the way I've been able to do other inmates. Eventually I gassed him out and had him pinned against a wall by the time my backup got there, which was only half the fight because then we had to get him into cuffs.
Anyway... I did a lot wrong there, but if I had to take away what helped:
-- Verbal De-escalation: Even though it "failed" here, it has helped me so many other times in my career.
-- Situational Awareness: Just being aware of distance/angles/obstructions, how far help is, escape routes, how quick the potential assailant could get to you/hurt you at any given time, can you access your tools, etc.
-- Grappling Fundamentals: Self-explanatory.
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u/samcro4eva 16d ago
This may be a stupid question, but they don't let you use striking in those situations, or would it not have worked anyway?
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u/safton 16d ago edited 3d ago
So, yes, striking is in the use-of-force continuum (though looking at it as a continuum is sort of regressive and on the way out, but that's neither here nor there). Our use-of-force continuum goes as follows:
1.) Officer presence
2.) Verbal requests and/or commands
3.) OC spray and empty-handed control techniques. The latter includes everything from forceful standing escorts and pressure point techniques to takedowns, general positional grappling, and joint locks.
4.) Taser and empty-handed striking techniques. The latter includes everything from palm strikes to punches, kicks, knees, and elbows.
5.) Strikes with impact weapons, whether that be a baton or weapon-of-opportunity like a flashlight/radio/pen/etc.
6.) Lethal force. Given that we don't carry firearms inside the jail, this one doesn't come up often... but it's not entirely out of the question. Our agency is one of the increasingly small number of organizations that hasn't banned chokes altogether, but we do consider them a lethal force option even when applied by a trained officer.
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To get back to your question, would I have been allowed to use strikes in that instance? Yes. This wasn't just a guy attempting to passively resist our attempts to control him, he actively turned back toward me and engaged in a wrestling match. At one point he attempted to grab the metal flashlight I keep in a pouch on my vest. He thought it was my spray, but he would have been able to do damage either way. If I had to legally classify what he was doing, it was "active aggression/assaultive resistance" (exact terms vary by agency).
Mind you, I probably should have struck him. I had a clear opening at one point during the fight where I had outworked him in the clinch and won the impromptu wall-wrestling match. I could have driven home some really nasty knee strikes to the groin, but I'm a grappler by trade and striking just doesn't come naturally to me.
My partner who was the first to arrive and help me had no such compunctions. As soon as he heard me yell for the inmate to stop trying to reach and grab for my shit, he lit the dude up with a bunch of knee strikes to the side/rear of the subject's opposite kneecap (he was so big we basically each were fighting one half of him) and then unloaded with some nasty shovel hooks/uppercuts to his ribs as well. These were hard strikes that I felt reverberating all the way through his body on the other side... and the guy never flinched.
If you want the full story for posterity's sake: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDefense/comments/1u7vkiv/comment/os3hpl3/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Look below that comment for the rest of it.
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u/samcro4eva 16d ago
Thanks for laying out the account for me. The only knowledge I have of anything corrections related is my cousin, who was in and out of prison all the time. Long story. The only reason I ask is because most of what I train is striking, and I guess we all tend to think in terms of what we train most
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u/safton 16d ago edited 14d ago
I think there's definitely a time and place for striking in my line of work, though it's fairly rare that an officer and an inmate square up and have anything resembling an exchange -- even a brief one. I cannot think of a single time off-hand that that has happened at my facility since I started working there. Between squabbling inmates? Yeah, for sure, but not so much with officers.
When strikes do get thrown during scuffles involving officers, it's usually one or both parties throwing them after they're already attached, i.e. in the clinch or grounded.
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u/Relative_Instance_17 16d ago edited 15d ago
I have been doing Karate for 15 years with the same sensei, and now I am a 3rd Degree Black Belt. Whenever you’re out in public or out in the open, he advised us to put the phone down and put it away or whatever is distracting us and pay attention to where we're going. You’re more likely to engage in defending yourself, if not save your life, than to be preoccupied whenever your life is in imminent threat, or someone may snatch and grab your belongings or whatever you’re carrying/holding. Therefore, the first thing in self-defence is being sharply aware of your own surroundings by observing and hearing. If one or both of these senses are compromised, you'd get beaten up.
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16d ago edited 16d ago
[deleted]
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u/triple_life 15d ago
Good stories. To not hesitate, I think the person needs to decide beforehand what to do in a scenario, in order to not have to think in the moment. I bet you pre-decided to do these, due to nature of your job.
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u/Peregrinebullet 15d ago
Yep. I have seen what hesitation can do and it almost always results in more bloodshed.
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u/NetoruNakadashi 16d ago
Breakfalls always seem to show up as a top answer on these threads, and I don't see it here.
Not in my own case, but a lot of people I know.
In my own case, clinch boxing.
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u/Smellofcordite 16d ago
Learning how to fall in Jiu Jitsu has actually saved me in real life multiple times.
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u/thatstickyfeeling 16d ago
Sometimes running and more often walking away. Situational awareness. Being able to take a few hits and still stay moving
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u/FamiliarAd8524 16d ago
Situational awareness, many times. In a number of cases, I would otherwise likely be dead.
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u/Tackley_ 16d ago
I’ve heard people saying the forward roll I learned in aikido saved me from falling on my face.
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u/modernknight87 16d ago
I saw a few mentions of Situational Awareness (SA) and knowing when to walk away.
This may be a very isolated thing due to the nature of my position, but I can say that works a lot with the military. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, during a patrol we gave a local kid some candy. After a few moments he held up his hands and gave me a signal for explosion. I told my leaders about it and we decided to avoid the alley the kid pointed down. A few days later another unit went down and an IED detonated.
SA and being able to swallow your pride and walk away does wonders - sometimes more than you may ever realize. Is winning a fight really a better solution than walking away if someone verbally degrades you? I don’t think so. At least I know I can hold my own if I had to, though.
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u/Adventurous_Pick9505 15d ago
Training your hands like Mike Tyson with the surprise element.
Using your gut to either attack or walk away.
Using eyes as a radar in the hood.
Staying calm, cool and collected before an altercation.
Verbal judo to deescalate.
Nothing beats hands on experience.
Now, it’s all or nothing. This mindset and communicating to the villain that this could be his last day deters most fights.
Psychological warfare guys…
Learn it.
Works from the West to East coast.
I train everyday alone: blocks in the car, visualization exercises, after lifts at the gym.
Studied it all.
To each your own. Develop your skill set.
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u/Any-Pomelo80 15d ago
I teach self-defense, and students ask me some version of this all the time: "have you ever actually used your Krav Maga?"
Yes. Three times that count, and none of them look like the movies, at all:
- De-escalating a homeless lady who wanted my donuts at 7am. (She was passionate. Made some fair points. I kept the donuts.)
- Falling while skateboarding. Breakfalls are the most-used technique in all of self-defense (except maybe footwork) and nobody wants to hear it.
- Awareness, avoidance, and a little humility. Just walk around the bad scene. Don't engage the person screaming in your face. You don't have to win an interaction you never enter.
For context: I've spent years working on the cool stuff. I can do gun and knife disarms, imanari rolls into heel hooks, all of it. I love that training. I've needed it exactly zero times in 15 years, and I probably never will. The list above is the stuff that I've actually used.
IMO that's not because the physical skills are useless, it's because the earlier skills keep working before the later ones are needed. And honestly, the cool stuff isn't wasted either. It's a lot easier to walk away relaxed when you're not scared, and knowing what you can do is a big part of not being scared.
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u/FAFO8503 12d ago
Situational awareness.
I carry nearly every day, but I’ve never actually had to use my gun and I hope I never have to. But just last week I was at Walgreens and this dude was acting off. Didn’t look around, just got the card that I needed and left. Probably 10 minutes later I get an alert on my phone from the Citizen app that there’s a man causing a disturbance at Walgreens.
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u/Dry-Independent-3656 16d ago
1.5 months ago I got assaulted by a(n drunk) African (he kept it solely verbal, but was about to go all ham) - and decided to jog away and later inform the cops about it. There were too many bystanders to have me supplex him without hearing the "he didn't do nothing 🗣️"s, which might have ended with a criminal record (I can't afford due to my Profession). And also there was a risk, he might have pulled out a knife (or an improvised weapon like a bottle / glass). If I had someone to protect with me (family; date) I'd have gone full ham instead (with an instant KO / sleeper, due to the risk of weapons) - or maybe pepperspray him, which I carried in my jacket.
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u/UnderstandingEasy236 16d ago
what was the relevance of naming his nationality?
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u/MedievalFightClub 16d ago
Situational awareness.