Someone asked, “How would you define effective self defense?”

The short answer is “hurting people.” Much in the same way that using a firearm for self-defense is really shooting to kill. Trick shooting, like shooting to wound or trying to shoot the gun out of his hand are not seriously considered when training to use a firearm for self-defense. It’s just straight-up center of mass and keep shooting until he stops moving.

And so it must be when all we have are fists and boots. We need to have a direct one-for-one correlation between action and results.

Strike him through the side of the neck to knock him unconscious. Gouge his eye to blind him. Crush his throat to make him asphyxiate. We have actions that directly result in debilitating injury. They’re the hand-to-hand version of shoot center of mass.

The easy way to judge any approach or system of hand-to-hand self-defense is to look for that one-to-one correlation. The more steps there are between the action and the result, the worse it is. The more things between whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing and the man catching a serious injury, the more it is like trick shooting.

This is where things like gun disarms and submission holds get you killed. Neither one results directly in a debilitating injury and both take several steps to set up and execute. While they may be appropriate in certain situations, life-or-death self-defense is not one of them.

Joint breaks and throws — excellent ways to cause serious injury — suffer from the same problem. Both take one or more extra steps to set up and execute. Done in isolation, that is, outside of that one-for-one correlation between action and injury, it’s just wrestling. In order to pull it off you’ll need to be bigger, faster, stronger and more skilled than your opponent.

But not if you start with an injury first.

An injury — like the gouged eye, say — gives you the time and space to do those extra set-up moves to tear out that shoulder or throw him and bounce his head off the sidewalk. Just as shooting center of mass gives you the opportunity to close distance and put one through the brain.

If you look at what shooting center of mass does — opening up the circulatory system and/or severing the spine — both results are aimed at either shutting off the brain (depriving it of oxygen) or disrupting the brain’s ability to operate the body. There’s your one-for-one correlation between action and results. In terms of gun disarms or submission, it’s much easier to take a gun away from or restrain a man suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. Again, injury making easy work.

Effective self-defense — with any tool — must adhere to this base principle. The further the distance, whether in space or time, between what you’re doing and crippling injury, the less likely you are to be successful. The closer you hew to action-injury, the more whatever you do is like pulling the trigger on center of mass.

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