You see it all the time in movies and TV shows – a large, very strong antagonist is picking on the hero of the tale, who is much smaller. The diminutive hero finds an even smaller martial arts master who teaches him a serious set of beat-down techniques for a few months, after which the hero unleashes this beat down against the resident hulk. Can this really happen? Sure it can. You can also win the lottery and be instantly rich, but the likeliness of each is about the same.

I’m not a very big guy, so this is a topic I spent a lot of time on. I stand an entire 5′ 8″ tall, hardly an imposing height. Can I beat a hulking brute? I can, and I have. However, I have trained extensively for many years in both martial arts and weight lifting, and have developed both fighting ability and a fairly thick set of muscles. Also, I know several cool “secrets” that I’ll be sharing here on my blog. Can’t wait to hear what they are? Too bad! Suffer! Just kidding. I’ll tell you all about it in posts under “Practical Combat”. In any case, I’m not very large, but I’m certainly not small, either, and I’ve built up some serious strength from my years of training, which helps greatly in laying the hulking brute low. But technique is supposed to beat brute strength, you say? Dream on.

Well, that’s not quite true, but let’s get a bit of perspective. If you are not as strong as your opponent, but you have really good martial arts on your side (good meaning practical and useful), you’re probably going to hand your attacker their ass. But there’s a limit. There’s only so much of a power gap you can make up for with technique. If you have outstanding technique, but you don’t really have much strength, well… it’s near to certain that the ass-handing isn’t going to go the way you want it to. Even if you execute spectacular moves, you have to do a few things in order to win.

• Get to the gym. If you don’t have much strength, your strikes are going to suffer. Badly.
• Expect to get hit. Expect to bleed. You’ll lose if you are scared of being hit, and your fear will make your strikes slower and weaker.
• If you don’t have any fighting skills, get some. I hightly recommend kickboxing, boxing and Wing Tsun for practical combat training.
• Full-contact sparring. Use protective gear, but do it. If you’re not prepared for getting hit, the shock of it will stop you in your tracks.
• Use anything and everything you’ve got. I’ll address so-called “dirty fighting” in my next post.
• Get the correct mindset. When you fight, you have to forget about embarrassment over possible loss or fear of injury. Think only about winning.

A tip about the sparring: Don’t go all-out, but hit hard enough to hurt. It’s not in your best interest, or your training partner(s), to injure each other. It’s also not in anyone’s best interest to go too lightly, and thus not be prepared to take a hit when the time to fight arrives. Most kickboxing schools allow for full-contact, medium strength sparring, which is perfect. Your marbles will continue to roll in the proper direction, but you’ll get the experience you need.

If you can do these things, you’ll be much closer to achieving the goal people like us are striving for: Fearless Fighting!