Prevent the Tackle
Stay on your feet! Worried that an aggressive attacker will rush / tackle / charge in and barrel right over you? You won’t be after you follow these tips to stay on your feet during a fight.
Stay On Your Feet in a Fight
The primary reason people get knocked over is that they have no mental or physical composure during a fight.
Mental composure means having control of your emotions and ego. More could be said and will be in a future article.
Physical composure means simply maintaining a structurally sound stance.
In the case of stopping an aggressive rush it means a stance that can dig in and resist your opponent’s mass and energy.
Key Pointers
- Widen your feet
- Lower your body
- Get your butt back and chest forward
- Extend your arms out
- Contact the middle of your forearm against the base of their neck
- Keep your forearm angle perpendicular to your attacker
Common Problems
If you are having any of these problems here is how you fix them.
- Getting knocked over? You are standing too tall. Get low and widen your feet. Angle your body forward aggressively like you were going to push a car.
- Is your opponent muscling their way in? You are compressing your arms. Keep your arms extended out greater than a 90° angle. That is where your extensor strength is the greatest.
- Is your opponent sliding under your arms? Then you are too extended out and/or you are contacting with your elbow. Both of those things make it easy for your opponent to slide under your arms. Maintaining a perpendicular forearm angle and contacting with the middle of your forearm is key.
- Getting punched in the face? You are opening your arms or even dropping the non-contacting arm down. The solution is simple, keep both hands up and close the center gait by slightly overlapping your hands.
Stay on Your Feet Against a Bag
I love this drill because it provides amazing feedback if you do things correctly or incorrectly.
- Simply get into your tackle stopping stance.
- Make contact with the bag before you push it away.
- Now give it a shove (this is a great way to shove someone in a fight by the way).
- When the bag swings back stop it dead in its tracks.
- Add a little pop to it but don’t overcommit or you could lose your balance.
- If you don’t keep a perpendicular forearm angle the bag will either spin off to the side (over extended) or it will crash through and hit you (arms too compressed).
Stay on Your Feet Against Your Training Partner
Ok time to apply what you have learned.
Grab a partner and have them aggressively rush in to tackle you.
Sometimes do it from a defusing stance where you are trying to calm someone down and other times have your partner moving around throwing punches and then suddenly rush in. Either could happen in a fight after all.
Now be careful with your partner because we are contacting the brachial nerve cluster at the base of the neck and that can knock someone out or very loose.
The good news is that you might just score a knockout on accident or rather your attacker might knock them self out on your forearm.
If they don’t get knocked out, and I wouldn’t assume they would, go ahead and transition to a Thai clench to terminate them.
Final Thoughts
This drill goes hand in hand with the Survive the Shit Storm drill.
The aggressive rush, tackle or whatever you want to call it happens in so many street fights that you absolutely MUST be prepared for it.
Go get those reps so it is automatic.
Until next time,
Brian
