Martial Arts pretend to attack in their training drills.

The martial artist expects that the attacker will fight like a martial artist. When martial artists practice self-defence, they do it against attacks from their type of martial art or style. Actual attacks will come as a barrage rather than just one nicely choreographed movement. These types of choreographed movements are sometimes known as ‘feeds’.

A feed is when you give your training partner something that looks like an attack but is designed so that they get to practice the technique. It is a technique designed to be defeated. People who have practised against feeds are often entirely blown away by the intensity, speed, ferocity and pain of an actual ‘simple’ attack. 

People ‘pretend’, but you will rarely see this mentioned in martial arts classes. If someone swings a stick at your head full power and you mess up the defence in any way, one of two things happens: you get badly injured, or the person manages to control themselves at the last second to protect you. Both are problems—severely injured students mean the martial arts club disappears, whilst being able to pull the technique means that the intent and commitment weren’t there to begin with. If the intent was not there, then what the student was training against did not have the same intensity, feel or timing as the real thing.

This is possibly the hardest concept to train in a martial arts club environment, and is possibly the hardest ‘problem’ to overcome in a self-defence strategy, but it can be helped by adjusting your timing.

You hit what you can when you can and keep hitting until the attacker is no longer a danger to you, regardless of incoming damage, whether it is a ‘scoring’ target or whether you can hit it with a proper technique.

If you see an opening – hit it until you can safely escape.