Sport vs Street

Most of my disagreements with people over technique have boiled down to fighting stance. I prefer a short stance with my hips facing my opponent, but originally in the karate of my youth I was taught a longer stance, where I stood more sideways. When it comes to kicking, on one hand standing in my more "square" stance lead to the kicks I prefer - round kicks and front kicks with an occasional back/side kick. On the other hand standing sideways leads to the kicking practices I am critical of, such as the "snapping roundhouse" kick, heavy reliance on the stepping side kick, and relying on a hook kick as a basic KO strategy.

Something I have been acutely aware of for some time is that many styles of martial arts have BOTH sets of techniques. In fact, both strategies are used in Boxing:

And two of the biggest household names in Boxing epitomize these rival strategies. Mike Tyson was the ultimate square stance fist fighter, and Floyd Mayweather the ultimate long stance fist fighter. And Mayweather remains undefeated. In Full Contact Karate/American Kickboxing, Bill Wallace pulled off an similar undefeated status using a very similar strategy. So that means since this stance works to win matches in Combat Sports, we should use it to defend ourselves on the street, right?

In the above video it makes it clear: Square stance for power, long stance to score points. But what strategy should you be using for self defense on the street, a Tyson strategy or a Mayweather strategy? Every time you throw a punch, you take a significant risk on the street:

1. You could injure your hand in some horrible fight ending way.
2. You take one step closer towards being legally liable for the injuries in the fight.

If you are going to hit on the street, you need to make those risky punches count. But isn't the long stance better for moving in and out of range? Maybe, but if it is the square stance is much better for moving around the opponent to the left and right, which is considerably more important in self defense (since if the opponent is bigger, stronger or faster than you they will run you over if you can't move sideways around their charge, and because moving backwards away from your opponent in a street fight is moving blindly outside of your own field of vision.)

My question for you: why would you want to throw strikes with less power in a self defense situation? Your answer: you wouldn't. This is the difference between sport and the street, there are hacks in sport that score points but which are less effective on the street. Muay Thai is the most self defense related striking sport because it allows most of the strikes the human body can deliver. There are no rules against the long stance in Muay Thai, yet the long stance has never caught on in that sport.

"There's more to self defense than fighting skills" we hear constantly from the self defense industry, and that is so true. Useful non-fighting self defense skills include:

• Situational awareness: staying alert and being aware of your surroundings, actively changing your plans when something doesn't look right.
• Confident appearance: don't look like an easy target; stand up straight, keep your head up, look where you are going, and move swiftly. Don't make your whole neighborhood more dangerous by making it look like a neighborhood full of easy victims.
• Safety oriented commute: choosing to walk through safe (well populated and well lit) areas. Randomizing your commute, being harder to predict what route you will take.
• Exodus 12 v 20: Actively avoid problematic situations. Don't hang out at place where people like to get drunk and get into fights. In those situations you aren't defending yourself, you are just being a dick.
• Surveillance Detection: 1. Take a look around and make a list of what spots would be best to spy on you from. 2. Look around and make second list of  list of spots that would be best to spy on that first list. 3. Use the second list of spots to spy on the first list of spots to see who's spying on you or others.

Then we have self defense fighting tactics that are different from sport tactics:

1. The ultimate goal is escape, not knock out, not submission, not judge's decision and not points. Escaping with your life is priority 1.
2. The secondary goal is to avoid legal consequences to yourself from having the encounter. You want to minimize how much hostility you demonstrate in front of witnesses to the encounter.
3. A final third goal is justice: when you are attacked it is nice if you can make the world a safer place by in some way making it harder for the attacker to try the same thing again in the future.
4. The basic fundamental strategy is to use highly active footwork, so that you A) have to make physical contact with as few attackers as possible at any one moment and B) maximize your opportunities to escape. I don't know of anyone who is good at this that doesn't occasionally spar multiple opponents. It's not good enough to talk about the strategy, you must spar with the strategy.
5. Weapon deployment: so many people carry this or that self defense tool, and never practice deploying it while others are attacking them. Again you must spar multiple opponents, trying to deploy your weapon in order to get good at really deploying your weapon.
6. Weapon retention: there seems to be a very poor understanding of how easy it is to get disarmed. To avoid this you must spar with people trying to grab your weapon or knock it out of your hand.
7. Fighting techniques: the fact is most eye gouges and groin shots are not reliable enough to land in a fight. So what moves ARE you going to do? You need to figure this out in advance, and spar with those moves. They need to be practical movements you can do without warming up first. This IS were combat sports are important, because the best unarmed self defense fighting techniques ARE seen in the MMA ring! Until you get your weapon deployed, assuming you even have one, these techniques are all you will have.

There is a dangerous myth out there that to defend yourself, you need to have nerves of steel, and a killer instinct mindset that you will "do whatever it takes" to protect yourself, in order to avoid a "fight, flight or freeze" reaction. In my experience this is 100% wrong.

When you are attacked, you don't have time to get scared. All that happens is you do whatever it is you do when you are attacked in sparring. I once heard a story by a Muay Thai instructor about a female student who was attacked in the parking lot. They both lamented that she did not beat the attacker into oblivion. However she was not seriously hurt, she was not killed, she was not raped, the attacker who was larger than her didn't even manage to knock her down. Her Muay Thai training served her well indeed!

I personally have found myself dodging head buts or punches before I even realized I was being attacked, sometimes continuing a conversation with the attacker before I realized the conversation was very over. The one time I had a knife pulled on me, it took a few days for me to internalize how dangerous the situation had actually been.

Nothing messes with your nerves more than preparing to fight in a match or tournament, typically in very revealing clothes in front of a large audience. Competing in matches or tournaments is having to confront a challenger who is far more competent than the average attacker on the street, but instead of on the street on a stage where your humiliation can be far more widely publicized. The fear you have to deal with preparing to fight in a match or tournament is far more extreme and tangible than just getting really worried about a potential attacker situation. If training your nerves or natural ferocity is important, there is no better way to train for that than combat sports. Talking about what a solemn and serious danger a self defense situation is, in my view, is a total and complete waste of time. It's generally done by people both in and out of combat sports who don't want to spar with an appropriate range of techniques for the situation they are talking about.