Sarah T: Hi, I’m Sarah T and today we are learning how to defend ourselves. Right now, we will talk about how to hit and what to hit with. Most people think that in order to defend ourselves, we need to be karate fighters or kung fu fighters or that we need to be bigger and stronger than a potential assault but neither of those things were true. We need to think about self-defense in terms of what’s weak on the attacker and what’s strong on you or what’s exposed on an attacker and what’s free on you. For these reasons, we think about self-defense in terms of targets on an assault and weapons available on our body. Today I’m going to use Lauren to demonstrate some of the targets on a potential assault and weapons of opportunity or weapons on my own body that I would use to defend myself in the case of an assault.
From the top-down, some of the most sensitive areas that you could target on an assault would be the eyes, the nose, the throat, the solar plexus, the groin, the knees, the shins and the top of the feet. From the side and the back, kidneys are good target, groin from the back and knees from the side. If I have my hands available they can be useful in several different ways. If I put my fingers together, I can go to the eyes or if I pull my hand back like this, I can go to the chin or turn to the side and go to the throat. I can use my hand like a hammerfist to hit to the groin, to the temples or to the throat.
Elbows are also good weapon. I can use my whole body to turn and to strike with the front of the lower part of my arm. I can pull my arm forward and come back and use my elbow in this way or in this way. I can use the top of my leg, I’ll call that a knee, but it’s not really the platelets, the top of the knee here to come up and under if the groin is available. Notice how I am pulling her forwarding doubling the force of my impact. If my arms already bent over, I can put my hands here to stabilize the technique, ground myself in a good stance and strike to the head with the knee, okay.
In the case of a sexual assault, especially, I could use the palm of my hand to come in between and pull the testicles. I could use my foot to break knee, notice how I pull my leg forward to maximize the distance in there - - for increase the force. I could use the inside of my foot to swing and scrape and I could pick up and I could stamp down on the foot. As lots of little bones in the foot that you could easily break if you step on one.
If I feel stronger I can use what we call the weapon of opportunity. Weapon of opportunity is anything that you could have handy that you feel would make a stronger impacts when you hit somebody with it, it could be a simple object like a book, your car keys, a stapler anything that you feel to cause damage. Remember when you are trying to defend yourself you are saving your own life, so it’s okay to hit hard. You could use a pen; you could use anything. That’s just a couple of things about how to hit and what to hit with. Next we learn about how to deal with the standing attack.
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