Attack The Eyes!
February 26, 2008 by Bob Patterson
My March video stream will be featuring some of my favorite eye and throat attacks. Since I’m giving back to my taekwondo instructor by teaching her some of these, I thought I’d share them with my audience as well.
I could not find a suitable spear-hand strike from karate or taekwondo. This video appears to be kung-fu. However, you get the idea what would happen if applied to an eye. In taekwondo we practice a vertical spear-hand. In the video you see a horizontal strike. Personally I do not care for the spear-hand and this is coming from a guy who really likes to break.
The finger strike that I was taught came from a very Americanized version of Wing Chun. These two videos capture two of the basic drills and concepts that I learned:
I was taught to snap the finger strike out like a jab and take care to let your fingers flex upon hitting a solid target. This way you won’t break them. You can keep the fingers close together and aim for one eye. Or, you can split the difference by letting your middle two fingers split along their nose. This in turn ensures you hit at least one eye. In the conditioning video he does do the flex but he also does a claw hand which I was not taught.
A heavy bag or piece of pine board mounted to a garage wall makes a really good target for conditioning and practice. Again: The key here is not to hit ridged like a karate or taekwondo spear hand. Rather, let your fingers bend a little when they hit solid. All you are looking for is that 2-3 second delay that you are going to get if you actually hit someone’s eye. If you know what you are doing that’s all you’ll need.
While we are on the topic I also found some very good eye gouges from Streetfightsecrets.com. Here you can see two very basic eye gouges that I was taught in the Army. Nothing fancy here but they work.
I’m going to close with their video on throat attacks. This is another of my favorite areas to attack. I was told it only takes 4 lbs of force to collapse a windpipe.
At 3:19 you can see a variation of the horizontal knife strike my sifu taught me. You need good wrist flexibility and conditioning to make it effective. However, it’s very effective when thrown like a jab. Once again this is a good one to practice on a heavy bag. He also adds some other throat strikes that are worth a look, too.
One of the first throat attacks he talks about is something he calls a yoke-hand strike. In taekwondo we call it an arc-hand strike and it shows up in the black belt form, Koryo.
Some people might call this dirty fighting. However, is it a fair fight if I go up against someone who outweighs me by 50 or more pounds of muscle? I’ll let you be the judge on that.
~BCP
This is all very gruesome stuff, but that’s martial arts in its truest form. Obviously you can’t use these moves in sparring, and they’re not really found in traditional forms applications. It’s a different dimension to training altogether.
I’ve never been a big fan of the spear-hand strikes. In fact, some of the Isshinryu basics that were originally taught with a spear-hand have been changed to show a reverse punch. But those hand techniques to the eyes and throat can be highly effective. A punch to the throat could easily prove to be fatal.
Yes these are very dangerous for sure and certainly not suited for the sport side of martial arts.
Our spear-hand shows up in one of our forms. I personally think it’s a waste of time. If memory serves me, traditional karate stylists had to make the spear-hand effective by also practicing certain conditioning drills. Things like jamming their spear-hand into a bundle of bamboo sticks, etc. So, doing it in the air is a hold over waste of time.
~BCP