All too often one of the most often disregarded side effcets of a violent altercation is the not immadiately obvious but very powerful “Shock based adrenal dump”. In a real life self defence situation you will tend to naturally go into our primitive “Run or Fight” state, part of this is what stress response experts call the adrenal dump.
The adrenaline rush ups your heart rate, increases your blood pressure, and is will take blood away from areas of your internal organs and brain and into your muscles. This can result in an increase in strength and speed and also a decrease in how much pain you experience. Extra strength and speed all sounds good from a street self defense perspective doesn’t it? Unfortunately this also comes with some negative effects, for example:
1. Shaky hands, arms and sometimes legs
2. A tendency to either freeze up or over react
3. Stress Related Vision Impairment (Seeing restricted to a tunnel)
4. Some difficulty thinking straight
5. Mild shock
Trying to eliminate the adrenaline of a street attack is unrealistic. Lessening the effects is however possible with a training regime that uses proper sparring & pressure drills in your training. Many martial arts tend to train only for great looking and powerful techniques and only rarely (if ever) really stress test their moves. Srom time to time everyone in training needs to get out of their comfort zone in order to actualize their self defence skills in a street fight.
One thing to realise is that in a truly pressurised situation you are highly unlikely to pull off any technique that requires a decent level of dexterity or calm for example ChiNa style knife taking techniques. The reason for this is that dexterous movement is one of the first victims of the adrenaline dump, precise positioning of hands or grips dissapears for most people and only your gross body movement is left intact.
This being the case it is also a wise idea to spend a decent amount of time on very basic punches, pushes and front kicks. These self defense techniques may be extremely simple and perhaps even seen as “boring””Too Easy”, but working hard on the basics to the point where they are completely natural could make all the difference. In a real life situation you want to keep everything as unsubtle but effective as possible.
