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First time ive heard of this system. Would be interested to see some more about it before passing judgment. But for what its worth when it comes to armed attacks/defense the best material i have found to date comes from 3 sources: Senshido:http://www.senshido.com/ CFA:http://www.sammyfranco.com/ FFS:http://www.florofightingsystems.com/ Each one has slightly different approaches to dealing with various weapons, but combining the information from each has given me a fairly well rounded set of drills/techniques to work with.

I train at a bjj/kickboxing/mma club so self defense isnt covered specifically. I supplement this with rbsd on weekends with a couple of friends. Ive found the only real "self defense" training you need is something to bridge the gap between the first few moments of a confrontation(the part usually not covered in a normal class) and the start of the fight.

For me i think most people recognize traditional martial arts to be those with an eastern background, i.e karate, tkd, kung fu etc. It seems that the length of time the art has been around isnt really taken into consideration.

I agree with everything you have said tallgeese. I used to train in traditional karate and to be honest, the time spent practicing kata could have been much better put to use doing far more productive things.

For me RBSD is a bridge from the first moments of a confrontation, to your martial arts skillset. So id say its more-so a strategy than a style.

Firstly, welcome to the forum. People often confuse martial arts training with self defense training. If you ask most people where they would go to learn self defense, most would say a martial arts school. In reality if self defense is all you want to learn you would be better off going to a running coach and someone who can teach you people skills. With that said, any martial art you do will only help your ability to defense yourself. But martial arts on its own probably wont give you everything you need. If you consider there are 3 stages of a self defense situation, pre-fight, fight, and post-fight.... martial arts helps you during the fight stage, but you need something else for the pre/post fight which is often the most important part of any situation. Thats where specific self defense programs come in.. some material i would recommend for this come from Richard Dimitri @ https://www.senshido.com , Tony Blauer, Sammy Franco. Personally, i come from a traditional karate background, but i now train in mma/kickboxing/bjj 4 times per week, and work on the self defense specific stuff with a training partner on weekends. Just some thoughts.

This might be of interest: http://www.hockscqc.com/articles/headbutts.htm

Flying armbar: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8_FevrLdaw Flying triangle choke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipb899h3w54

Very true. Its funny though, that the training methods of alot of martial arts classes are: 1. Static 2. pre-defined.

There are no guarantees, but some of the better material i have seen in regards to this topic comes from these guys:

Spot on. The only 2 safe assumptions you can make in a self defense situation is that: 1. the other person is armed, and 2. the other person has friends Assume anything else and you leave your self vulnerable to several problems.

Ive always followed the idea Richard Dimitri at senshido uses. A fight has 3 key elements that a self defense situation doesn't. These are: 1. Consent - Both parties agree to a fight, in a self defense situation, the attacker chooses you. 2. Awareness- In a fight you are aware that it is going to happen i.e. you both square off, or meet at a certain time/place etc. In a self defense situation you can be ambushed, or a person might be aggressive towards you but you cant always tell for sure if things will go physical. 3. Preparation- Even if you agree to a fight a few moments beforehand there is some time to prepare. Self defense situations often go from 0 to 100 in a matter of seconds.

Like most things within the martial arts... it depends... The ideal position to throw your punches from, in my opinion, is around about chin height. From this position offensively you general have less distance to cover to reach the other persons face, and defensively your hand is up to protect your own face. That being said, things arnt always ideal, so being able to throw your punches from whatever position your hand might be in (including hanging down by your side) is a good idea. In regards to punching from the hip in basics, we do this in karate for a few reasons(most have already been explained), it is useful in achieving certain goals, but in my opinion is not a requirement for learning good punching technique.

On the surface, most of the the techniques are so different they appear to contradict each other in terms of application. However if you look at the principles, there is alot of common ground and you should be able to pick up some useful skills from both.

Chucks seemingly open guard is not a mistake, but part of the pits training method i believe. At times though chuck leaves himself far more open than most people could get away with. To check out a demo/explanation of the pits approach to their fighting stance check out: http://www.crossfit.com/cf-info/excercise.html#Combatives Its titled "stance demo".

This is a fairly open ended question. Do you need and instructor.... for what? To learn self defense, to achieve black belt in a particular system, have a reasonable amount of skill in a certain system? I continue to train under instructors and with a group of likeminded friends, both ways work for different reasons, it all depends on your goals.

few variations of the ridge hand being thrown around here:

I tend to agree with your thoughts bushido_man96. Variety is the spice of life and you can pick up alot of applicable skills from studying multiple arts, perhaps a total beginner to the martial arts would struggle if they tried to learn several arts at once, but after a certain amount of time training you begin to look beyond specific techniques and find that the principles and concepts of all arts are often quiet similar, or at the very least they compliment each other. I continue to train in my "base" art of karate and also train kickboxing/bjj and RBSD concepts, at first glance these systems seem worlds apart, but below the surface they have alot more in common than most people might think. Its all well and good to be a master at one aspect of the arts, but you should be able to function in other areas also.

Definitely, once you work out all the ways in which to manipulate the arm/wrist of your partner from a wrist grab you can work the same principles from a number of positions and they dont really need to grab your wrist at all for the movement to be applicable.

I also wondered this for a long time, until like you i found abernethy's material. The problem with most wrist grab defenses is the context in which they are taught. Usually its something like "when someone grabs your wrist, you do this". But as its already been stated, people dont just walk up to people, grab them on the wrist and say "yeah, take that". This "myth of the first event"(hock concept) causes problems with alot of people, because to isolate a skill(e.g. wrist grab defense) you have to focus specifically on that, but then people mistake the way its trained for the context its actually supposed to be applied in.

Those are good principles tallgeese, i follow a similar approach. A copy/paste from this thread: http://www.karateforums.com/knife-attackers-vt31738.html?highlight=neutralize Those 3 principles are the same for defense against any weapon, but obviously these is some things you do that are specific to the kind of weapon, e.g, baseball bats you understand where the weakest part of the swing is going to be(the handle) and attack that. But with those 3 principles basically everything is covered.

Which 2 did you order? "Throws for strikers" makes reference to many taekwondo forms and where you can find the throwing techniques within them. But im sure you would have noticed that you can find many of the movements that are shown from karate forms within your own forms already.

I have seen the majority of Abernethy's material and it has more in common with alot of RBSD stuff than most might think, its also what got me back into karate. Its very good stuff.

Most RBSD groups use some variation of the startle-to-flinch response, its the basis of Tony Blauers S.P.E.A.R system. This is what most instructors of the flinch teach, the flinch happens due to the initial shock i.e. a punch flying at your head 2 quickly for you to cognitively respond(generally peoples hands with orientate to the general direction of the threat, some close their eyes, turn away, move backwards etc), from the flinch you attach a more combative strategy such as jamming or covering and then transition to your trained skills. I like to equate it to catching a baseball thats flying towards you. In the initial moment you realise the ball is coming your hands naturally move into the path of the ball, this is your flinch or reflexive response. Its only the actual act of catching the ball that is the trained part.(notice you often see the ball hit peoples hands and they drop it, the flinch rarely fails to put your hands in the right position, its the trained catching technique that fails and causes you to drop the ball). This transition from flinch to trained response all happens very rapidly. Its the same in combat, look at coroner reports from murders and you will very often find the victim has defensive stab wounds or bullet wounds on the forearms and hands, this is the flinch response throwing the hands in the way of the threat in an attempt to protect the body/head. the flinch is a hard-wired evolutionary protective mechanism that doesnt fail, its what you do after it that can get you hurt.

Regardless of if its martial arts or self defense my approach to defense is similar, in principle anyway. Rather than focusing on defending against specific techniques i look more-so at the direction of the attack in relation to the centerline. For hand techniques they can basically go straight down the centerline(jabs, crosses etc), around it(hooks, haymakers, hammerfists etc), or rise along it(uppercuts). So that means you really only need 3 different defensive motions to cover basically all hand strikes. This is a slight over simplification, but you get the idea. So to me regardless of if its a technically correct hook, or a swinging haymaker the defense is the same, and if anything the haymaker is easier to defend against because its generally more telegraphed and has a wider arc.