Adapting Combatives for Women’s Self-Defense

ON AVERAGE, women are smaller than men, weigh less, and have less upper-body strength. This does not mean that women are unable to protect themselves from a male attacker, it means that women need to use specific self-defense skills to compensate for their physical limitations. Fortunately, the Combatives system we teach was already designed under the assumption that the user is the smallest person in the room thus making much of the system readily accessible for Women’s Self-defense. While the skills are similar, some adjustments were warranted due to different attacker motives, the necessity for counter-grappling, and the necessity for maximum force generation.

Attacker motives:

The Combatives system was designed to be used to defend from trained aggressors aiming to INJURE or even kill you. A Women’s self-defense system, however, needs to be designed to defend against an aggressor aiming to CONTROL you. There is an enormous distinction requiring some some significant restructuring of the Combatives system.

The easiest way to illustrate this is that military and S.W.A.T. units train in combative systems like Krav Maga and Systema where the goal is to debilitate or kill. Police, however, are trained in Jiu jitsu or Judo where the goal is to subdue but not seriously injure. Injure vs Control. They require different techniques to use and thus, require different techniques to protect against. However, this is also good news. If an attacker is trying to control you and does not have the intention to seriously injure you, but you, as the defender, are willing to seriously injure them, you are at a significant advantage, an advantage that we teach you to exploit.

For example, when a man attacks a woman, he is most likely to attack in one of three different ways.

  1. Throw a huge haymaker punch in an attempt to knock the woman out.

  2. Grab the woman by the arm to drag her away.

  3. Grab the woman by the shoulders or throat to bring her to the ground.

We teach you how to protect yourself from these in the first two sessions. All the other sessions are about training you to prevent your opponent from getting to these attacks, to defend from other types of attacks, and to react if their initial attacks succeed.

Joint locks and counter-grappling:

Another way that our Combatives system was repurposed for Women’s Self-defense is introducing joint locks and joint strikes almost immediately. Joint locks/strikes, when applied quickly and correctly, can easily disable an aggressor long enough to make an escape. Joint locks/strikes are not taught immediately in Combatives as the first goal in Combatives is to maintain your distance at all times and avoid going to the ground. In Women’s Self-defense, however, the major goal of the attacker is to get close and to take you to the ground, therefore requiring us to place greater emphasis on short-range grapple and joint attacks. Naturally, the goal is still to avoid going to the ground at all costs, but we must accept that grappling and ground fighting is a significant reality.

Power-generation:

While the self-defense skills between Combatives and Women’s self-defense are largely the same, the technique used to deliver them is sometimes different. The easiest way to explain this is looking at the roundhouse kick. There are two main schools of thought when it comes to kicking: Tae Kwon Do and Muay Thai. In Tae Kwon Do, all kicks require you first chamber the kick, then release it in a controlled manner, largely using the muscles of the leg. In Muay Thai, the kick is not so much thrown with the leg, but rather with the hip, forcing the leg to move in a more whip-like fashion. The Muay Thai kick is significantly more powerful because, when performed correctly, you engage more muscle groups throughout your body and throw more of your body weight into the strike. For this reason, it is the style we teach. It is not as controlled as Tae Kwon Do, however, and takes some getting used to in order to perform correctly. It is also a bit slower, though, with training, the action times can be diminished.

This idea permeates much of the Women’s self-defense style. If there is more than one way to throw a technique, we use the one that generates the maximum amount of force possible so that a smaller defender can bridge the gap against a larger aggressor. This requires training and time to master.