"Human Weapon" TV show

I watched an installment of a new "reality" series on TV last night, and came away impressed. The show "Human Weapon" (History Channel, Fridays, repeats at various times during the week) uses two martial-arts-trained hosts, and excellent computer graphics, to show the effect of various martial arts blows, in different disciplines.

Last night's show was about Muay Thai, known to most of us as Thai Kickboxing. What I didn't know is that the current ring styling of Muay Thai is NOT anything like the martial art it descended from. In the show last night, the two hosts toured all over Thailand, going to various kickboxing gyms, military academies, and even a religious compound, to see and try out the original forms of the hand-to-hand fighting art.

I learned what were known then simply as "Combatives" in the Air Force. We were told, at the start of the 16-week training program, that the fighting arts in Combatives were a mix of Karate, Judo, Aikido and a Philippine knife art. One thing that was emphasized, over and over, in my training was "get inside".

Getting Inside: when fighting, it is natural for all who fight to fight offensively and defensively at the same time. The defensive fight takes the form of defending your fighting space, usually defined by the reach of your arms. Of course, in any form of fighting, the winner of the fight is the one who can project force into the defensive space, and disable the opponent. Combatives taught me to blade my body in a half-sidestep, and close to the very center of the fight, the opponent's head. Blading the body is more difficult than it used to be for me (there is a lot more body now, so blading doesn't expose less body, it exposes more).

What interested me is a close strike that the original (not the ring-fighting) form of Muay Thai teaches. I didn't write down the name (it's Thai, and I can't begin to write the letters from how it sounds to me), but the strike is basically a two-fisted uppercut, effected by entering the opponent's defensive circle in a FORWARD (not bladed) crouch, and lunging upwards at the chin with both fists locked together, and the legs AND forearms uncoiling. The effect of the strike is to unleash (from a fit and trained person), a force of two and a half TONS on the lightly protected underside of the jaw, and/or the adam's apple area of the throat. A crushed glottis (the interior of the Adam's apple) ends the fight, because the bone fragments will sever arteries, and the opponent will drown in his own blood.

The difficult thing about this uppercut strike, and why you will need to practice it with a partner who holds the heavy bag for you, is that coiling and unleashing the power of the legs takes time, and it is hard NOT to telegraph this move, which is easily countered by a simple back-step. The move also leaves YOUR defensive space unguarded for a moment after you deliver the blow, and in range of the opponent's counter-strike. The magnificent thing about this move is that it is a fight-ender. Properly delivered, the blow will either break the jaw, result in the opponent severing his tongue, break the neck, or crush the glottis. It is not a move that many opponents would expect.

The show is breezy and informative. If every episode has at least one strike that a person could add to their inventory of moves, it WILL make a difference in one's level of success in unarmed combat.