If you missed Part 1 or Part 2 of this series, be sure to check these out before continuing below…
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When the five guys pulled up to go after Will, they tried to limit his options by coming up onto the sidewalk and hemming him in between the car and the building behind him. Will failed to see that as a problem.
As the car door snapped open, Will was already in charge of the situation. He knew it was impossible to fight off five men at once — and since it was a two-door, there’d be a natural bottleneck he could take advantage of…
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We’ve seen how “going on the hunt” dramatically shifts the tempo of the engagement in your favor.
Becoming the attacker, the assailant in a target-rich environment, is vastly superior to trying to defend yourself from multiple attackers at the same time.
It’s one thing to go on the hunt and know how to hurt people; what about the issues of being vulnerable and surrounded?
That’s where movement comes in. Lots of it.
You must coordinate your hunting, injury and movement such that you get the full advantage of all three at the same time.
Taking the fight to them gives you the initiative and injury reduces the number of people you need to worry about one-by-one.
But it’s movement that lets you combine these ideas and, most importantly, buys you the space and time within which to work.
This is why I like the boxer’s video so much — he refuses to let them surround him. Not only does he control the tempo, but he stays on the outside of the group the whole time. (Though I have issues with moving backwards — too easy to trip and fall or run into unseen foes — he makes it work and it all ended in his favor so it’s a moot point.)
He uses movement to keep them stringing along, leaving them incapable of surrounding him while simultaneously allowing him to work on taking them out one at a time.
The answer to the problem of self defense against multiple attackers then is to:
- Go on the attack
- Injure them one-by-one
- MOVE
This last one is what ties it all together. If you stop, they’ll dog-pile you. Move wrong — or not enough — and they’ll get you before you can finish all of them.
Going on the attack is initiating that movement.
Injury is you throwing yourself through a single square inch of that guy that can’t take it.
But it’s how you move next that determines whether or not you’re successful.
- If you did these things to get to the outside of the group and simultaneously put the injured man between you and his friends, you’re on your way. Go around the injured man and take out the guy who will be coming around him from the other side.
- If you stay in the middle and try to go back and forth, you’re the baby gazelle in the hyena pack. Everybody’s gonna get a piece.
- If you hurt somebody, go to the outside and dump the screaming man into the middle, now you’re the loose cannon bouncing around the deck giving everyone peg legs.
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As the first guy started to clamber out of the car, Will met him halfway and kept him going and put his head into the wall of the building behind him. He continued to “help them out” one-by-one, reaching into the car as needed and dropping them in the process. Once the 5-on-1 had been reduced to a mere 2-on-1, morale on the part of the badasses collapsed.
It was over and he didn’t have a mark on him.
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He was successful because he didn’t adopt a defensive posture and he used all of the supposed disadvantages (being outnumbered, close-quarters) as advantages for himself. The outcome would have been very different if he’d waited to see how it developed, let them all get out of the car, or been deluded into thinking he could “fight five guys at once.” No one can.
But we can all hurt one person at a time and use movement to create the time and space to keep it that way.
We just have to be smart about it. And train for it properly.
-Chris Ranck-Buhr
