6 Hard Truths About How To Win A Street Fight
Author: Pendekar Hussein, Founder of TotalUrbanSurvival.com
A lot of the information put out on martial arts and self-defense sites about how to win a street fight is oftentimes misleading and gives people a false sense of security. The entire question of “how to win a street fight” is itself ridiculous because nobody can give a surefire answer to it and guarantee you victory in something that has as many x-factors as violent combat in an uncontrolled environment. Some of the wild answers we’ve seen to the “how to win a street fight“ question include making the practitioners think that they’re trained with techniques too deadly to be practiced. Or that no one can beat them because they have “technique superiority”. And others claim they come from a better martial arts lineage. Or from a military/police background, hence the methods are guaranteed to make you DESTROY ALL ATTACKERS! You’ve seen the bullshit marketing, it reeks like day-old fish. Some of this nonsense talk comes from instructors who are too afraid to tell the truth because they’re A. incompetent or B. afraid to lose their students or C. accepting the marketing Kool-aid to make money quickly, etc. There are a plethora of reasons why people sell their souls to the devil in exchange for golden trinkets or other temporary benefits.
At Total Urban Survival, our motto has always been education first, marketing never. So we let the high quality of our research and training offerings do the marketing for us, hence, no need for Rambo advertising or tricking people with fake information. That being said, we’ve distilled the 6 hard truths to the question, “how to win a street fight”, and we assure you one thing, when you finish this list you’ll understand what it really takes to win.
#1 Understanding there is a PRE, DURING, and AFTER phase to every conflict
Regardless of the adversary you face in a street fight, the reality is that you will be dealing with a pre, during, and post-conflict reality. Whether you identify them or, to your detriment, you don’t. And the key thing is to understand the threats you face in each phase of a problem. This applies to your business and professional life just as much as it does on the street, so pay attention and apply the principles in all aspects of life, not just violent ones and you’ll come out on top of the competition most of the time, hopefully. That being said, a pre-conflict situation has key indicators you need to look for: eye contact, no eye contact, following, bunched up fists, yelling sometimes, etc. All these things can be called the “pre phase” and they happen before a problem hits you. Your job is to understand what those pre-conflict indicators are and to identify them before a problem happens. The value in identification is that you can then make a decision, consciously and without duress, to either pre-emptively attack the problem or make a slick exit and not engage. When you don’t identify what the problems are you’re basically leaving things up to chance and hoping to wing it when somebody is already on top of you, that’s a terrible strategy, and more correctly, no strategy.
The “during phase” is when the problem is happening, and that’s probably the highest part of danger in a street fight because there is literally a whirlwind happening around you and you’ll have little to no time to think. It’ll be reaction and training coming out, not any superhero stuff you imagined on your sofa. The during phase is what you trained for years previously. As Sun Tzu said, “All battles are won before they are fought.” And the meaning of that is the decisions you took years before the problem happened will now come out and present themselves, for you or against you, in this moment of truth. So if you trained like a beast and hardened yourself mentally and physically to accept pain, accept death, accept killing, accept being a survivor (yes you need to), accept the challenges that life has thrown at you, then your chances to prevail will have dramatically increased. And if not, well then, misery will prevail just as quickly.
The “post phase” of a street fight is after the problem has occurred, and in many instances, that’s when the real fighting starts because you have to face the law, tribe, cartel, gang, family, or whoever else feels they need to take a bite out of you for the actions you took. Nothing happens in a vacuum and nothing happens without consequences (mostly), so you need to realize that and prepare for it. So when you ask the question, “how to win a street fight” all these phases of a street fight need to be considered, not just punching a guy and running away. He might just hit his head and die and his family comes looking for you because his dad is a member of the local mafia crew you never heard of. Think it’s a joke? Think again. A certain Pendekar got arrested in a former life with the son of a local mafia guy he never heard about also, thankfully, he was a juvenile. Life takes a shit on you when you least expect it, so as the old saying goes, chance favors the prepared. Always consider the post-conflict implications of a street fight, or any problem you face, prior to pulling the trigger or pulling the knife.
#2 Technical skills are less important than committed violence
One of the great fabrications of the Martial Arts world is the promise that technical skill will overcome an adversary in a street fight simply due to its superiority in execution. I, Pendekar Hussein, wish today to posit that this is not just a fabrication but a form of psychological warfare directed against innocent Martial Arts students all over the world. Technical skills are a product that Martial Arts instructors sell and take payment for, hence they must, like any good salesman, convince the buyer of the superiority of the product they sell. The main problem with this approach to teaching is that the consequences of the product’s failure can be someone’s life. In a street fight, technical skills are a secondary component to victory, not the primary component. And the reason for this is simple: physiology. If you’re physically incapable of doing something it doesn’t matter how good your execution of that specific technique is, your physiology will not allow you to perform it. When a person who has never fought anybody in their entire lives comes up against a criminal in a street fight who literally fights, kills, cheats, steals, threatens, and uses force as their means of livelihood, the chances of being able to pull off any technique under that stress is almost zero. Does that mean he has no chance to win a street fight? No. It means that he has to prepare physically with the technical skills we spoke of earlier and mentally with the right mix of mind tricks to psych himself up for the reality of combat. And don’t fool yourself into thinking that criminals, even those from prison, are any different. They also had to psych themselves up and push themselves mentally in order to survive on the street. Nobody is born with this (usually), it’s a learned behavior and you can do it as well as they can, the key is to understand it and bloody well prioritize it. I was abused like hell when I was a kid going through school and I never told my family. I learned to gear up that mental aggression and channel it so I could muster the courage to fight, later on, I was the predator, not the prey.
#3 Street fights are not all created equal
To answer the question, “how to win a street fight”, we need to understand that street fights are not created equal. The misconception that you can just power your way out of a situation is just that, a misconception. And the disinformation that you can simply talk your way out of any situation, is just that, disinformation. The problems that you could face in a street fight come in all shapes and sizes: ex-military officer gone crazy, hardened street criminal, teenager showing off in front of friends, angry father who lost his job, drug addict looking for cash to get his next hit, cartel hitman assigned to get rid of you but his gun jammed. The possibilities of what a street fight could be and who you could face are endless, so it’s really up to you, the Martial Arts expert, to try and identify what it is in front of you and why they are there as quickly as your brain can process it. This is what you should be doing in the pre-phase part of the problem, identifying your adversary and understanding their motives. I quote Sun Tzu again, “Know your enemy as you know yourself”. As soon as you’re able to identify their motives you have a pretty clear view if walking away will work, if fighting will work, if killing the guy will work. If you choose the wrong solution for the equation, you can end up with a much bigger dilemma than you had initially. Therefore, listen, learn, and think about these things before you ever get into the situation, and you’re doing that right now by reading this article, Smart! Let me give you a real-life lesson here. Several years ago a friend of mine who liked to drink too much mouthed off to a group of bedouins we stumbled upon on a night out around our neighborhood. He insulted them so badly attacking their masculinity, their tribe, their families, etc. If you understand anything about Bedouin Arab culture in general you know what this will lead to. These guys were ready to gut my stupid friend and he was ready to fight them all at once, all while being insanely drunk. Bad idea. I probably could have drawn my weapon and fought it out and killed at least two of them on the spot, I have the skill for it, but what would have been the result afterward? They knew who we were, and our house, and our families. Even if we won that fight, their tribesmen would have hunted us down and tried to kill us or our families in vendetta for killing their tribe member. There’s no winner in the game only losers. So I slapped up my friend and apologized to the Bedouins (that time) so we could all walk away without bloodshed. I won those battle years before I fought it simply because I did what you’re doing now, learning from experience, and thinking about these kinds of situations before they ever happen.
#4 If you have a tribe, gang, or cartel supporting you, you’re stronger
“How to win a street fight”, is a question that is always answered as if it’s you vs the other guy….but many times it’s not. If you see the example I gave above, you’ll quickly understand the importance of the lesson presented here. In a street fight, the stronger group is the one who ultimately wins, not the stronger individual. Depending on who your adversary is, you might win temporarily, but you’ll lose in the long run because you’ll need to face them or their associates/family again in the future. And when they come the second time, they won’t come openly, they’ll come quietly. So, if you, like most regular people, don’t have a posse to support you after a street fight, it’s far better to try and extricate yourself from that problem without physical violence. Because if you train yourself well (you’re here at TUS so you probably do) and you use those skills to simply knock someone down over a petty argument, that could end up again in a vendetta situation that could lead to further violence down the line. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t defend yourself, your honor, or your family, on the contrary, it means what I said above, calculate the risks and know the steps you need to take depending on who you’re dealing with. And understand that if you have support from others you’re far safer than if you don’t. That’s why criminals form gangs, mafias, and cartels…strength in numbers. That’s why cops form teams and support each other. How well do you think a lone police officer would do on the street without back up on call and a partner next to them? Not too well either. This is one reason I teach all the brothers in TUS to stick together, support each other, and know one another as a family. When I was in the deepest shit in my life and on the lam from corrupt cops in Africa, it was those brothers from TUS who protected me and my family. Without that tribal support I’d probably be dead. This is the reality of a “street fight” the regular instructors never tell you about.
#5 Surprise attacks and deception are the soup of the day
A street fight is sometimes a man to man situation but many times it is not. If you’re lucky enough to have that man to man situation happen and you face the angry dad who lost his job, then congratulations! you’ve achieved gold status as a Martial Artist, the honorable street duelist rank. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen that very much nor do I expect to anytime soon. The truth is that a street fight is mostly made up of idiots who have little understanding of the word honor, let alone practice it. So as a smart Martial Artists with his wits about him you should definitely expect them to try and surprise attack you or use some sort of ruse to lull you into thinking everything is cool, then they can strike easily. As long as you’re vigilant and expect it, they can rarely take you unless they are really determined, and if you’re not on anybody’s vendetta list they’re probably not determined enough to go to extreme lengths to take you down. Stay cool, sip your Cappuccino.
#6 Even your best friend will watch you bleed
I had a very good friend when I was younger, a kickboxer. He was, in my mind at the time, one of the toughest guys I ever met. So when he watched me getting beaten to a pulp by a skinhead in a street fight while he stood by armed with a Glock and a knife, I wondered to myself after the incident, what the hell just happened to me? That’s when I realized what I mentioned to you in hard truth #2 above: technical skill will never conquer physiology. It doesn’t matter how good a friend they are, how well armed they are, or how tough they think they are, if the fight isn’t in them mentally they will falter when the shit hits the fan. This is one experience that solidified my opinion that I’d always prefer to enter a crackhouse at 3 am with a fat, old, veteran police officer or paramedic than with a black belt Martial Artist. It’s simply because I can’t be sure if the Martial Artist will back me up, but I can be sure the veteran cop or medic will. So when answering the question, “How to win a street fight”, brothers, I’ll tell you honestly, there’s a lot to be said about experience. Because the more exposure a person has to violence, the less they will be affected by the physiological response that will inhibit them from helping you when you need them the most. They will still have it, they are humans not robots, but they will have had abundant time to understand it, control it, and use it as fuel rather than fear. Now, does that mean the Martial Artist isn’t valuable in a street fight? Absolutely not. If he has trained properly with a good teacher who raised him with the mindset to win in combat, then I can probably trust him. But if he was raised to believe that technical skills will always win, his martial lineage is the best lineage, and that people will fall down after you shoot them, then I simply can’t trust him. And in my experience training with people all over the world, I can safely say, that type is the majority. My kickboxer friend was one of those latter types also, but I was too young and inexperienced to see that. I judged him by his style and not what he learned in it, and that cost me a brutal beating and pain in my body I still feel until today, 30 years later. I judged him by the weapons he wore with such pride and arrogance, rather than the practical question, “Have you ever used them?” Those were my mistakes in life and your lessons for today. I truly hope every one of you has learned something from that pain and can share the knowledge with your students so they don’t need to suffer it on their journey.