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By Bradley J. Steiner, American Combato
A quick answer to that question is “Yes, there is a best style of self-defense.” But clarifying what that “best style” is will certainly leave a lot of individuals disappointed. That’s because the question is something like asking “Is there a best language?” The answer depends upon what is not answerable for everyone in every case.
The truth is that there are objectively best techniques and “tools” to be used in self-defense and close combat; however, every individual who learns those techniques and who acquires those tools must formulate a method and a style of employing them that best fits himself.
Physique, athletic acumen or lack thereof, height, weight, degree of strength, gender, age, psychology, and personal inclinations all play a part in what will ultimately prove to be the best style for any given individual.
Here is a very simple example: The chinjab smash and the handaxe chop are very probably the two finest and most important basic hand techniques for individual combat. However, each person who learns these two methods of striking will adopt the best ways to employ them, for himself. He will cultivate his own “style” of utilizing the two tools of close combat.
In a properly taught program of instruction the student will learn how to deliver the various basic strike variations with those two tools. He will then be given representative examples of attack combinations in which those blows are utilized. And he will learn counterattacks (or “self-defense” techniques) in which those two blows are used in application against common forms of violent attack.
All of this practice and drill will eventually result in the student acquiring both an intellectual and an intuitive grasp of how best to use those skills for himself. Thus, three different students starting training at the same time and having about the same dedication to practice each, will discover after, say, four months of hard practice, that they each prefer a different style of using the skills they have been taught—even though they have each been taught exactly the same skills.
To use an example from popular sports: every boxer, wrestler, and judo student is taught his respective art and sport in a similar manner. However, as each individual learns and then develops that which he is learning, his unique style emerges.
Boxing is perhaps the simplest combat sport. It utilizes but one weapon—the fists—and fundamentally four key ways in which blows are struck with the fists. Yet no two boxers have the same style of boxing. And that is a sport.
Because of the enormous number of variables, and the inherent chaos of actual hand-to-hand combat, it is essential that the student of self-defense build and cultivate a style that is his and his alone; a style that provides him the most effective and—for him—natural ways in which he makes use of the proper techniques and tools of close combat.
When a serious, hard-training student begins to discover this “personal style” he is beginning to discover and to master the “Best Style” of self-defense.