Advantage and Disadvantage
All Fighting is About Advantage and Disadvantage
When two highly skilled fighters engage in a competition they are usually matched by skill based upon their triumphs and defeats in their weight division. The purpose of a match is to decide who has trained the hardest (endurance and strength) and who has the greatest will to win. Competition also measures, given equal opportunity, who can get the advantage over the other using skill. Therefore, training includes not only skills but athletic ability and athletic attributes in which one tries to gain advantage in every possible way given equality of weight, competitive record and rules of the game.
A predator, and not a competitor, selects his prey based upon the belief that he has superior strength, size, or other advantage such as a weapon. Additionally, a predator has surprise and induces fear upon his prey. A larger adversary of superior strength, can injure another person more easily, as well as being less vulnerable himself. Experience and skills are also a reason in having and holding advantage. Being a criminal, his assault will most likely be just one in a series of similar assaults. Eighty percent of the time a recidivist is the one committing the crime. A recidivist is a criminal who has served time and who upon release from prison commits the very same crime again.
Since the criminal perceives himself to have advantage and acts to bias the advantage in his favor, the intended victim without a strategy and tactical training succumbs to the criminal. In all cases, fighting is about advantage and disadvantage, getting advantage, maintaining advantage and capitalizing upon one’s advantage is the formula for survival. You must come to understand the following concepts; “You do not need more strength than your adversary but you must have enough strength to get the job done”, and “It is possible to defeat the stronger and the larger but, one must know the ways and one must know that one can not always.” Unless you are physically superior to your assailant, you will need to find your advantage in other ways. Some advantages can only be achieved in certain circumstances or in one moment. Once an opportunity to take advantage is lost or an advantage itself lost, the opportunity or advantage may never be regained. Understanding advantage and disadvantage is what fighting is all about in a fight for survival.
In training to capture the advantage from a criminal in a violent criminal assault and survive, we must understand what are the conditions in which the criminal relies for his success. Street fight strategy and tactics in favor of the criminal’s success include: first action advantage with surprise, hard, and fast (shock and awe) and the attack is generally continuous and does not stop until he has dominance and cooperation. Further analysis reveals some of the important factors which make this method of assault work. When caught off guard one will have a reactionary response that must have built into the response some semblance of stalling his attack and preventing paralytic injury. Simultaneously, we must take into account his mass (weight), strength, and momentum. Trying to react to an attack with a technique which does not consider these three factors of mass, strength and momentum is to sacrifice advantage from the start. In addition, to avoiding an initial paralytic injury we must counter mass, strength and momentum and we must take the advantage using our own mass, momentum and strength to gain and keep the advantage. By ignoring such factors as: mass, momentum and strength most fighting techniques fail. Advantage and Disadvantage begin by learning how to control these three basic factors mass, momentum and strength. What are your thoughts?
