Boxing for self defense
Is Boxing a good art to learn for self- defense? What about “dirty boxing”? Boxing, one of the very oldest of all martial arts (along with wrestling, going back to ancient Greece) standing alone is a decent art for self defense but far from ideal. Boxing has just too many rules, too many limitations. In boxing kicks, knees, elbows, head butts, throws, sweeps, joint locks, chokes, grabbing and hitting, hitting the back of the head, and hitting the groin are all prohibited. Also, the gloves make all open hand strikes and finger jabs impossible. While it is possible to use the thumb of a boxing glove to attack the eye, this is against the rules and is much less effective than a similar strike delivered without gloves.
Don’t get me wrong, a good boxer doesn’t need any of these prohibited techniques to mess someone up. Boxing consists of super powerful punches which come at the opponent from all possible directions. A good boxer has a fast and fluid attack and also a fluid defense based upon footwork and mobility. Many people believe that boxing punches are the most powerful punches of all hand strikes. But because boxers don’t train against techniques such as kicks and throws they are vulnerable against them. A pure boxer is particularly vulnerable to wrestling takedowns and thai style leg kicks. Youtube is replete with videos of matches between boxers and muay thai fighters and the thai fighters almost always won using the leg kick to destroy the boxer’s stance and even knock him out.
A pure boxer has no ground game whatsoever and has also never learned how to fall without getting hurt.
So- called “dirty boxing” refers to various illegal techniques which are nevertheless sometimes used in the boxing ring. A crafty fighter can sometimes take advantage of the fact that the referee’s vision may be temporarily obstructed, enabling the fighter to throw an elbow, headbut, a punch to the groin, or a thumb to the eye. It is also sometimes possible to get away with a momentary grab and hit. So dirty boxing is more realistic than boxing by the rules and experienced boxers do occasionally have to deal with these techniques.
But if boxing (or dirty boxing) is added to another martial art, it can contribute in a big way to effective self defense. This is because a good boxer has the ability to knock his opponent down with just 1 punch. This ability is particularly valuable in a multiple attacker scenario. The ideal way to handle multiple attackers is to knock each one out as fast as possible. Contrast this with the way I was taught in Wing Tsun to handle multiple attackers- using multiple punches (“chain punches”) combined with flanking footwork and strategy, augmented by “hitting the opponent away” using two handed strikes, ideally hitting one opponent back into another. In Wing Tsun you try to move to the outside of the attacking group so that you are actually fighting only one opponent at a time. All of this requies an extremely high level of coordination. It is quite difficult to focus on both the flanking footwork and fighting an opponent at the same time.
The 1 punch knockout is also valuable when defending against weapons. If the opponent has a club, or even worse, a knife, you don’t want to hit him 4 times for his 1 because his 1 hit is likely to be a “kill”. You need to make your 1 hit a “kill” as well.
The clip below shows the beautiful defense and awesome speed of a 112 pound olympic boxer. Does anyone have any doubt that this would be effective in self- defense?
