Are pressure point strikes practical?

[JBrainard]

I'm sure many people on MT practice the application of pressure point strikes, but how practical are they in a real fight? I'm not questioning whether they work or not. What I'm questioning is the chance that you could hit a spot on your oponent's body that is only a little bigger than the size of a quarter while they are moving around. Even if you have them in a hold they are going to be slipping around as much as they can.
Thoughts?

 

[Kwan Jang]

I have friends who are very good at using them effectively for strikes even under adrenal stress. For myself, I use them primarily to enhance and create openings in my grappling. They are the "poison on my arrow", meaning that I don't depend on them to win the fight, but rather to make my techniques more effective.

 

[tellner]

A lot of times it's putting the cart before the horse. They can augment your skills, but they are among the least reliable and most finicky weapons in the martial arts arsenal.

Some of them work really, really well. Hit someone really hard on the base of the skull or crush the vagus nerve and you'll take the starch right out of him. The combat acupuncture is a lot less reliable. The acupuncture points aren't in exactly the same place on everyone. Sometimes a nerve strike that works like a charm on one person is completely ineffective on another. And pain-compliance is always chancy. It only works because people are reasonable enough to stop hitting you when they feel an unpleasant sensation. If they were reasonable they wouldn't be doing it in the first place.

 

[Twin Fist]

i teach my students pressure point stuff, but i teach them NOT to rely on it. Mostly because i learned the hard way that some pressure points dont work on some people.

 

[DavidCC]

"aim small, miss small"

you aim for "the ribs" you hit "the ribs"

aim for a pressure point on the ribs, sometimes you will miss and just hit "the ribs" and sometimes you will not miss the point.

It's not as hard as some make it out to be.

 

[jks9199]

There are already a lot of good points, and to use Tellner's post as a bit of a starting point... it often depends on the pressure point. And the person, almost as much. You won't find lots of the pressure points & nerves in my forearms; I've had lots of people try. Sure they exist... but my anatomy just buries them too deeply to reach easily. Note that I'm more skeptical on the pressure point knockout type stuff; I've never seen those work on a non-believer. The nerves? Yeah, they can work! So can crushing anatomical structures. The more finicky a target is, the less likely it is to work in my own opinion and experience. So, strike the back of the head doing trauma to the medula oblongata... yeah, that'll work. So will catching someone on the button, at the point of the chin (either side or straight in, though the mechanism is different), pretty reliably. But trying to catch, in the heat of a fight, the temporo-mandibular nerve junction? That's a bit less reliable.

I've used some of the more general ones under pressure situations. Sometimes, they work. Sometimes, they don't. A lot depends on how much the subject is feeling in the first place...

And, while aim small-miss small is a very sound principle, you also have to be able to function well enough under pressure to aim at all! That's why I think Tellner put it well when he said it's often putting the cart before the horse.

 

[Xue Sheng]

Are pressure point strikes practical?

Yes if you want to take the time...lots of time.. to train them.

My wife is real good at them but she is a TCM OMD from China and her intire adult life has been looking at acupuncture points. My Yang Sifu is pretty good at them too but he has been training over 50 years and is an old school acupuncturist from China and a western

But there are points that are much easier to get, mostly around joins. Why go for a forearm when on either side of the elbow joint there are 2 that are, by comparison to others, rather easy to find. But not that easy in a fight unless you have trained them, my Yang sifu, my wife and Dr Yang have all dropped me with those points.

I was told by my last Xingyiquan sifu that his sifu was pretty good at hitting them but again you are talking an old Chinese guy who has trained nothing by CMA his entire life.

So practicality comes down to how much time you want to put into training them.

If you do, go for the ones that are easy and close to the surface otherwise without lots and lots of training in being able to locate them at a moments notice and learning how hard you need to hit each point, they are not the same, it would be fairly useless and rather impractical.

 

[JadecloudAlchemist]

As Xue said if you train in it for quite a while you may be able to pull it off.

But when the stuff hits the fan you are mostly going to take what is available or create an opening.

Some points like near the jaw,back of neck,between the eyes make sense in anatomy.

Going after things that require precise execution,proper depth in hitting or pressing is not practical in fighting which is a stressful,chaotic field.

Even Acupuncturist they need a steady hand to hit the point and if you seen a needle they are pretty thin!!

 

[exile]

I think context is important here (as elsewhere, lol). If a fight is carried out as a pure exchange of strikes, the way a lot of people (though increasingly less than a few years ago) think of as the basic premise of arts such as karate and TKD, then pressure point attacks are indeed really chancy, at least if you rely on bullseye accuracy in going after very small, elusive places on the body. But in the context of a very different view of such arts—that a lot of their tactical arsenal includes controlling and manipulation, the 'locks, pins and throws' that we're hearing more and more about from a new generation of thinkers in both karate and TKD—the idea is that the defender will be cashing out these controlling moves in various ways, one of which is to force the controlled attacker into body attitudes where valuable pressure point targets can be exploited.

One of the pioneers of this view of pressure point use is the wonderful Rick Clark, he of 75 Down Blocks, which emphasizes the use of controlling techs, latent in familiar kihon movements, to set up strikes at the discretion of the defender. His own book on this, Pressure Point Fighting, integrates the use of pressure points with a view of kata and hyungs which we're increasingly familiar with from his work, Iain Abernethy's, Simon O'Neil's, Stuart Anslow's and a number of others who have tried to recover the holistic application of the karate based arts from the information concealed in their formal patterns. My feeling is that the use of pressure points makes far less sense on the (increasingly discredited) view of these arts as simple punch-kick-block systems than the far more rounded and versatile systems they originally were. So my own best guess to the answer to the OP question is, yes, pressure point tactics can be very useful, if you use the setups for them that are implicit in the kata, but much less so, if you see these arts in a far more limited way as just blocking and counterstriking.

 

[thetruth]

"aim small, miss small"

you aim for "the ribs" you hit "the ribs"

aim for a pressure point on the ribs, sometimes you will miss and just hit "the ribs" and sometimes you will not miss the point.

It's not as hard as some make it out to be.

Due to the amount of pressure points and the differing angles etc required to activate them it is best to target them if your normal rib strike is able to hit an area with pressure points without altering the strike. So I basically agree as long as the normal strikes do not change just to add the points in. I believe if your mind is preoccupied with pressure points then your self defense will suffer as you are thinking about to damn much. As for the way the likes of Dillman or Kyusho International teach the application well it's entirely up to you if you believe that but it is at your own risk that you try to apply it when you are being attacked.

Cheers
Sam:asian:

 

[Skpotamus]

On a passively resisting person (not fighting the applier or trying to pull away from them), I've seen them work maybe a little more than half the time. In all fairness, most were drunks or stoners needing escort out of somewhere. Some you could probably have set on fire and not got a reaction.

On an actively resisting person... I've yet to see anything besides a brachial plexus origin stun work (strike to the neck).

 

[Archangel M]

On a passively resisting person (not fighting the applier or trying to pull away from them), I've seen them work maybe a little more than half the time. In all fairness, most were drunks or stoners needing escort out of somewhere. Some you could probably have set on fire and not got a reaction.

On an actively resisting person... I've yet to see anything besides a brachial plexus origin stun work (strike to the neck).

I agree. Unless you are in the business of detaining, escorting or immobilizing people I dont see enough payday for the effort required, if self-defense is your goal. If you want to know them just to know them then more power to you. Seeing the percentage of "gorss motor" strikes that actually land in real fights makes me a doubter of how "fine motor" skills are going to work. Try a bit of boxing and tell me how easy it is to land a plain old punch on something as big as a head against someone who knows how to slip, bob and weave.

 

[championmarius]

I distantly echo Tellner and Xue's sentiments. They don't work on everyone, and the points do move around alot form body to body. It's worthwhile to know where the more common ones are, but don't put the cart before the horse.

If you happen to catch one, bonus! But don't hold out waiting for one, or put the entire encounter on it.

I don't implicitly aim for them, just the general area, they often are mechanically efficient targets anyways. If the point gets flipped, bonus. That being said, I like thinking if it like this.

I've heard it explained that the body is like a house, you have a structure, plumbing and power. the quickest way to make it uninhabitable is to destroy the structure, failing that, cut the power, and lastly go after the plumbing.

If I can knock out a wall, and cut the power to that section of the building, then more the better, but I'll take the wall and be happy with it.

 

[seasoned]

I'm sure many people on MT practice the application of pressure point strikes, but how practical are they in a real fight? I'm not questioning whether they work or not. What I'm questioning is the chance that you could hit a spot on your oponent's body that is only a little bigger than the size of a quarter while they are moving around. Even if you have them in a hold they are going to be slipping around as much as they can.
Thoughts?

I think if we look to our traditional kata, or drills, whether striking or grapping, they will show us pressure point areas. Pressure point areas, are meant to distract the aggressors mind for a split second while we apply our art. Do we need to understand them better, yes, do we need to spend a lot of time with them, I think not. I prefer to “cross read“, and have many books pertaining to a wide variety of MA, to see where other perspectives fit into my base art. In doing this I have found that my art contained much more then I originally thought. Look to where grapplers grab and strikers strike, and this will lead us to many of these PP areas. It is not a matter of discovering “new” but rediscovering the old. I feel PP blend with what we already have, within blocks, strikes, and grabs. Adherence to good techniques will point the way. :asian:

 

[Guardian]

I've always looked at things like this, if the opportunity is there, take it if your trained in it and use it. If not stick to what you know and if nothing else, go to the knees.

 

[Brian R. VanCise]

I have found professionally that pressure points used in conjunction with positioning, joint locks, limb immobilization, spine control, strikes, etc. can work generally when you utilize the large pressure nerve points on the human body. (ie: points utilized by most police organizations) However if someone is doped up or really drunk then utilization of joint locks, spine control and limb immobilization is a better route to go. Will they work all the time? Nope. Are they another tool to have in the tool box? Yep. Have I used them in restraining uncooperative people ranging from slightly uncompliant to really violent. Yes. Would I rely on them as my only course of control? Absolutely no way!

On a side note I do not in any way advocate the farce that is no touch knockouts, etc. That is more mental hypnosis of students than anything else.

 

[Phoenix44]

I think if your strategy is to specifically target pressure points in an emergency situation, when you're adrenalized, maybe off balance or you've had a couple of drinks, then I think it's a very unforgiving strategy. Very easy to miss, and you could just be wasting precious time. (I'm speaking from my medical viewpoint, and not strictly from a martial arts perspective.) Even if you're well trained in these strikes, you still have to consider your opponent's factors. He may be well "anesthetized," very muscular, or just wearing heavy clothing.

In my opinion, if you really, really want to hit pressure points, I'd suggest aiming for the neck. It's relatively exposed, there are massive plexes of nerves on either side extending down toward the clavicles, and you have the trachea in front. So even with so-so aim, a good shot will probably at least rattle the guy. If you're dealing with some muscular gorilla, all bets are off.

 

[Twin Fist]

does ANYONE fall for the no touch knockout stuff?


:BSmeter:

 

[Brian R. VanCise]

does ANYONE fall for the no touch knockout stuff?


:BSmeter:

Unfortunately their seem to be a plethora of people that do.

 

[Nolerama]

If I was in a fight, it would be nice for my opponent to believe in no touch KOs.

"Haiiiyah!... huh?"

WHACK. Game over.