by Rory Miller
Damage is breaking something to the extent that the threat loses ability. Break a leg, the threat usually has trouble standing, running or kicking. Break the elbow, the threat can’t punch. But you must understand it is not automatic. Break a rib and it hurts to breathe but, until you get to a flail chest or punctured lung, the threat can still fight. I’ve known threats to keep punching with a shattered (not merely broken) hand. In the end, most threats give up taking damage not because they were unable to fight but because the stakes are now raised too high to make it worthwhile to stay in the game.
Shock: This is shutting down the system, essentially shutting off the brainstem or severing the upper spinal cord. A bullet to the back of the head, strangulation and smothering, even a rib punch that lacerates the liver and causes internal bleeding. Except for massive trauma to the brainstem or upper cervical spine, none of these are instantaneous.
There is an old gunfighter saying about the “Dead Man’s ten” which are the ten seconds that someone can stay in the fight to kill you after being shot in the heart. A good blood strangle takes a minimum of seven seconds. An air choke takes a minute or more. Bleeding out takes as long as it takes.
Stacy Lim's story/ Marcus Young's story
http://www.lapdonline.org/inside_the_lapd/content_basic_view/27327#Stacy%20Lim
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BTT/is_171_28/ai_n6123156/
You can also break down combat training by technique. Most systems will have a mix of what follows. Few have all of them, even fewer have only one. Almost all specialize in a few and this becomes the core of their strategy.
Hand strikes: almost every surface of your hand, wrist, and arm can be used to strike. Some styles emphasize closed-fist punches, others feel it will do more damage to your hand than to the threat. Some target critical areas like the throat and cervical vertebrae, others count on massive damage to the head.
Kicks: can be delivered with the foot, knee or shin. They have a lot of power but pin your mobility on one foot for long enough to be dangerous. Kicking in boots is entirely different than kicking barefoot.
Throws: range through flipping someone over your hip, sweeping out his legs and twisting his spine to break his connection with the ground to simply getting out of his way and letting his own momentum drive him into the floor. A good thrower can make them work against much bigger, stronger people and it is easier to do in a real fight than in a martial arts setting. Many throwing styles combine with locking. The modern reason is to try to limit damage and not injure the opponent but the historical reason is that locks and throws work on armored opponents.
Gouges: Some styles actively work causing pain (and occasionally tearing muscle) through gouges, pokes and pinches. Some systems have elaborate mythologies of why they work and what amazing things can be done with them—at least one system ties their pressure points to acupuncture and teaches that if you hit five points in the right sequence, it will kill. Might be good for a fantasy setting.
Strangles: I differentiate strangles (cutting off blood to the brain) from chokes (cutting off air). Both have similar effects, but chokes take longer and are more likely to trigger a panic response. Sometimes a strangle will put the person unconscious and they won’t even know it is happening. A strong neck helps fight them, but these are the only techniques that work on everyone despite insanity, drugs or rage. They can be done with bare hands, a tool (like a rope or garrote) or using the threat’s own clothes.
Pins: Moving someone on the ground is an art form and grapplers play at it like chess masters. Pins are holding someone down. Generally in sport pins the opponent is face-up, to make the contest more challenging. In reality pins are face down, to make restraining or executing easier. Going for a pin makes you vulnerable to a third party. The usual winner in a groundfight is NOT the best grappler but whoever has friends who show up first and start kicking.
Locks: Locks are attacking a joint in a way it was never intended to move, or too far in a way it was intended. They can be used standing or on the ground. Locks can be used to force movement, to immobilize, to cause pain or to dislocate the joint (damage). Some can be modified into takedowns and throws.
Miscellaneous: Don’t forget head butts; shoulder and hip slams (not much damage, but they also cause movement and tend to cause surprise) and using the environment. Those are the things that make a fight so dynamic.
Head butts are AWESOME. They deliver tremendous power with a big bone at close range and usually too fast to evade, as well as being a surprise (except in the UK where they are very common and they used to be common in Korea, for some reason.) But they require technique. Your head has flat places and corners. You hit the threat's flat places with your corners. Far more concussion to him than to you. They go much better with some neck strength and when someone tries to thrust or spear with the head, (like driving your character's head into a bad guy's stomach) it tends to strain the neck severely. You can do it to the nose, which hurts a lot, makes the eyes water, and gets blood everywhere. I don't recommend the mouth or jaw. It does a lot of damage but teeth break and broken or not, teeth cut. The character who does it will get somebody else's blood and saliva in fresh cuts, and that makes for some nasty infections and disease possibilities.
Stacking: A skilled fighter will use many of these things in combination. Strikes and gouges can both set up a throw and do damage during the execution. You can lock a limb while sweeping a leg. You can use a lock to slam the threat into a corner or over a coffee table. It’s all good.
Specific styles:
I’m not going into this here because there are thousands of styles and systems and most are searchable on Google. If you emphasize that your character studied a system, spend a little time with an instructor from that system and let them double-check your scenes. That’s more important in the training scenes than the fight scenes. Fights are messy and should be messy and won’t look like it is supposed to look.
That’s cool.
Self-Defense Schools and Instruction
There are some pretty definite gender differences in fighting. That affects how self-defense is taught greatly.
First of all, a lot of SD instructors have little or no experience with violence. Those who have none tend to make stuff up, and it winds up being more about the instructor's fantasy life than anything else. Some have limited experience and too often try to cram all violence into their single focus. Others are teaching as part of their own therapy, trying to get control of their lives and identity.
Remember that people with only a single experience of violence learn what is false and never learn what is true? Some dedicate themselves, subconsciously, to creating a story that satisfies their need to believe that they understand what happened well enough to be in control... and the students are then pawns in the instructor's fantasy. This isn't true for all, but it is definitely something to be leery of. Part of the problem is that almost everyone is a "naive consumer" and doesn't have any way to tell a good instructor from a bad instructor.
Generally, self-defense instructors or schools have an orientation. I consider that there are three essential elements to self-defense: Awareness, Initiative and Permission.
Some schools focus intently on awareness-- how to recognize and avoid bad people and how to stay alert. If the instructor knows what he or she is teaching, that's fine. Few really go much deeper than "Check the back seat and under your car before you get in" or similar trite (to me) advice.
Some focus on what I consider initiative or technique, trying to get the students to act. Hitting becomes more important than how you hit. If the techniques taught actually reflect real crime, they can be useful. Otherwise not so much. Some of these also completely gloss over the legal aspects.
Some classes, especially Women’s Self-Defense (WSD) focus entirely on the Permission aspect. The big thing in model mugging and similar programs is to get the students to let go, unleash themselves and really whale on an armored "bad guy" role-play
er.
All three of these are necessary, but some completely miss parts or don't understand them. Many male instructors are particularly bad at realizing that permission to act and hurt someone is a very serious problem with many women.
There is another dynamic that you should be aware of, and that is gender politics in self-defense. When I tell someone that the most important thing a young woman can do to avoid being raped is to avoid places with lots of young men (and if you absolutely have to go to such a place don't drink.) The dumb responses range from, "Girls have a right to have fun" to "You're just blaming the victim" all the way up to the ludicrous, "A woman should have the right to walk naked into a biker bar and not be bothered." These are political ideals. They might even be the way the world should work. They are not the way the world actually works.
The responsibility for self-protection has to rest with the potential victim because the potential rapist has no interest whatsoever in her safety or rights. The potential victim is the one who cares. Counting on the people who don't care to do the right thing makes no sense at all. I have seen some very, very bad advice given to support an ideal of the world, even if it endangered the student.
Women are often reluctant to ask men for advice and sometimes it is because they wisely understand that the men don't get it. Most have never dealt with the psychological blocks and conditioning. Too many SD instructors are fit young men and can make bad techniques work. I prefer female, small and even old or crippled instructors because if they can put me down it is skill. 300 pounds of steroidal muscle putting me down means nothing. There's also the factor that most instructors will try to teach what they would do, and there are often profound differences between how and why men and women fight. A successful woman has a huge advantage in mentoring another woman to be successful.
A lot of people (this is definitely not a male/female thing) want multiple things and sometimes multiple incompatible things. I want to run, but I want to do it in shoes that were not designed for running. I want to battle at close quarters but look cool. I want to break bones and rupture livers without any twinge of conscience. In the end, I want to be able to go through the most intense, dangerous ten seconds of my life where everything I counted on about human interaction is revealed to be a lie and I want to do it without changing who I am. I want the experience without sacrificing any illusions...
Recap:
-The classic ‘fight’ is a stupid game, played by amateurs
-People learn to fight by studying martial arts, getting police or military training, by experience, or by some combination
-Fight effects break down to movement, pain, damage and shock
-Fight techniques break down to striking, takedowns, locks, gouges, pins and strangles
-Self-defense schools have different focuses
-The instructor will make or break the skills
Chapter 9: Impact Weapons
The chapters on weapons and unarmed fighting will never be detailed enough. There are thousands of things that can be used as weapons. A friend said, "anything longer than it is wide, which includes people" but billiard balls work fine and they are exactly round. And there are lots of ways to use them.
Impact weapons are the notorious ‘blunt objects’: the candlestick in the library; the ASP expandable baton; the bo staff; the quarter staff … on and on. Even the lowly brick can be a fight-changer.
Why use a blunt object? There are a bunch of potential reasons.
You can find a serviceable one almost anywhere. A piece of kindling. A rock. A vase.
I tried to find a link to a crime that happened near where I grew up in the early nineties. I found the memorial, but not a good article. The officer was called to a domestic. He had history with the threat and evidently decided he could handle him with OC (pepper spray). The threat yanked the waist of the officer's zippered jacket up over his head, blinding him and pinning his arms (a very common move in a fight in that region) and then beat the officer to death with a piece of firewood. It took a while.
Blunt weapons, even good ones, are significantly cheaper and easier to make than edged weapons. There may be concerns about killing or doing too much damage. Or your protagonist may live in a society where weapons are restricted to certain castes.
How are impact weapons used? You smack people with them. You can spend years learning nuances of jo staff or bo fighting or try to recreate quarterstaff technique from old manuals, but the basics aren’t that hard. You hit people.
Now the details. Blunt weapons can be swung, thrust or flailed.
When you swing a club, the faster the impact end goes, the harder it hits. The heavier the impact end is, the harder it hits. Unfortunately, those same two factors slow you down when you need to recover after a swing, whether you hit or missed.
The best targets for a swing with a club, unlike a blade, are bones. You can bruise muscle with a club or staff and even get a ‘charley horse’ but for the most part an adrenalized threat won’t feel the pain, won’t notice immediately and it won’t swell up until long after the fight is over. Smash his finger bones, however and he loses the ability to hold his sword immediately.
The other primary targets are the head (going for a concussion) and the muscles at the base/sides of the neck (especially with a sap--this is what police DT trainers call a “brachial stun”).
Most blunt weapons (but not flexible weapons, like saps or flails) can also be used to thrust. This is the one really dangerous application of most staff work. Except for the brainstem/neck/head hits, which are relatively tough to get, most of the swing targets don’t do lethal damage. The thrust can, and it tends to be slow and sneaky damage.
A thrust, particularly over the liver (your own right side, extending to below the lowest ribs) can cause internal bleeding. Kidneys, spleen … lots of ugly ways to bleed. The hollow organs (bladder with some frequency, I haven’t heard of a stomach rupture) can be popped, flooding the peritoneal sac with fluids and gunk that were never designed to be in there—a very, very painful death from infection. Even a strike that penetrates the abdominal muscles without damaging the organ can result in a hernia.
Flailing applies to weapons that are swung, like a medieval flail, nunchakus, or the manriki-gusari. A length of chain works here as well.
They develop a hideous amount of power, have a tendency to go around shields and blocks (and that wrap-around speeds their rotation and increases damage). They are relatively cheap and easy to make, but tend to break. All that torque works on the weapon as well.
Some specialty flail weapons with a longer chain, like the manriki-gusari (a weight on each end of a three-foot chain) or the kusarigama (about a thirty foot chain with a weight on one end and a stabbing sickle on the other) are used to entangle the opponent as well as to bludgeon.
You can often disrupt a flexible weapon by attacking (preferably with a thrown object) the controlling hand or the chain.
Note: when you think of martial artists getting all crazy with nunchakus, ignore it. Those drills are for practice and coordination. When a weapon is used to fight, it is snapped out to do damage and snapped back in to guard. Swinging things around in complex patterns not only invites the person to disrupt the pattern but frequently results in hitting yourself. Controlling a flexible weapon, like a flail, takes a lot more skill than just swinging it.
Last note: sticks, including batons, canes (canes are a great potential weapon for your character and can even be taken on airplanes) and staffs can be used for locking and sweeping. So can chain weapons. It’s a rare skill but can be impressive.
Knockouts
There are three basic kinds of shock. Shock is "inadequate perfusion of tissues with blood and oxygen" and it is what causes organs and people to shut down, to die. A paramedic will argue that shock is the only thing that can kill you--everything else are the mechanisms to get to that state. Hypovolemic shock means inadequate fluids in the blood stream for whatever reason (dehydration or hemorrhage).
Cardiogenic shock means the heart isn't pumping hard enough; Anoxic shock means the blood is getting there, but it is out of oxygen. Neurogenic shock means the brain has done something, usually dilating the blood vessels faster than the heart can compensate (this is basically what happens when you stand up and get a 'head rush'). One of the subcategories of neurogenic shock is psychogenic--nothing went wrong in the brain but following a psychological or emotional trigger, the person faints.
If someone passed out without neurological trauma, they didn't get knocked out. They fainted.
It probably won't make much difference in writing, but people get immediately knocked out one of two ways--either the weapon overcomes the structure of bone so that it either compresses the skull or damages the skull and part of the bone and/or weapon intrudes on the brain, or the weapon (falls can do this as well, of course) moves the skull so fast that the brain slams into the inside of the skull and bounces, called a contra coup injury.
Those are the only MOI (Mechanisms of Injury) I know of that can cause enough brain trauma to turn someone off ... and most don't. Most pass out later as part of the brain swells like any other bruise and pieces get squeezed. Any injury that can cause even a temporary loss of consciousness will involve this swelling, hence the standard protocol to hold for 24 hours for observation. If the swelling is not too severe it will go down on it's own. If it is, the pressure will have to be released.
