- 32 minutes ago
- 3 min read
One thing people routinely fail to incorporate into their training is what to do when they’re hurt. It’s probably because we’re all invincible and immortal, right? I mean, we’re doing the hurting, not the other way around… aren’t we?
Two small words that say so much will answer those questions best: “If only.” If only we never got hit hard, never got staggered, never had to take a knee. Obviously, we all want to train to succeed, but we’d be silly not to consider failure and develop skills for what we’re going to do in the event we zig when we should’ve zagged.
In combat sports—boxing, MMA, and muay Thai—a byproduct of hard training is the development of your “chin.” Hard sparring teaches you how to roll with a punch and adjust your range to mitigate strikes, and it helps you identify where the holes are in your defense. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about practice sessions in which sparring stops when blood is drawn and complete finishes aren’t encouraged.
So how are you supposed to react when your bell is rung? What does it feel like? What will it do to your ability to fight? Until it happens to you, you can’t really learn how to deal with it. Continuous aggressive pressure teaches you that a good defense isn’t complete unless you can make your attacker step back. If all you’re doing is covering up to protect yourself—or worse, turning your back—I’ve got some really bad news for you…
YOUR TRAINING SHOULD INCLUDE simple combinations that you grind into your motor memory. When you catch a good shot, it’s apparent to whoever threw it. If he’s aggressive enough to be fighting with you in the first place, he’s likely smart enough to know when and how to close the deal. You want to ruin his intention.
Glove up with a training partner and have him fire off a few shots. Block and defend, but immediately fire back—not exactly blindly but certainly directly. Make him feel at risk. Do this over and over until your shots are literally following his retracting hands back to him.
Once you’ve got the hang of it, add this: immediately sit down, step out to the side, and punch again from a new angle. Drill this simple response until you can get it done consistently and reliably—even if you're a little rocked.
Defend, hit back, change levels, be somewhere new, hit back again.
If you get hit square and you're suddenly tasting blood in the back of your throat, don't freak out. You can certainly spit it out, but don't hang your mouth open to gasp for air. Just breathe through and around your teeth. Keep biting down—you don't want to sustain another hit with your mouth open. Don't blow your nose, either; just let it drip.
PERHAPS THE HARDEST THING about all this for most people is fighting through pain and adversity, knowing that you're hurt and not 100 percent. Take heart! Many boxing coaches have told their pupils, "The most dangerous fighter can be the one you've hurt." There's a reason for that admonishment. When you suddenly understand the gravity of the situation, you can leverage the adrenaline dump to your advantage—if you have the skills and the training.
When you train, make every effort not to just participate but to dominate the range inside which you're both at risk. Remember that in order to hit, you've got to be within range to be hit. Being able to take a heavy shot while staying focused is essential to dominating that space. The only way to learn how to do that is to experience it. You have to learn that a heavy-handed hit alone doesn't mean you can't still prevail—experientially, not theoretically.
You've undoubtedly seen it during combat sports events. Tim Bradley vs. Ruslan Provodnikov comes to mind—Bradley's determination and instincts to survive were so strong he weathered a terrible beating and still managed to step off a powerful and aggressive Provodnikov.
Developing that in yourself doesn't come easily or cheaply; it takes committed training with the potential for injury. If you're serious about self-defense, you have to subject yourself to increasingly harder training in which there's an element of real risk—controlled and safe, of course, but risk nonetheless. There's no substitute for inuring yourself to the presence of risk and learning to deal with the possible consequences, especially when you've sustained some damage.
