All the time, people would ask  "what do you do if the guy is really big ?"  or " man he's huge, I wouldn't want to fight that guy" . Well , I think before we can get into the physcial tactics and techniques that may help in defeating a bigger attacker, we first have to deal with the mental aspect of this issue because the truth is, no amount of physical techniques can help if one lacks the mental clarity and emotional confidence to pull the trigger. 

   Over 65% of communication is non-verbal so when people ask " what do you do if the guy is really big ?" what I hear in the tone besides the words is a lot of fear so I think we first have to deal with the fear inside. Fear is natural and healthy but in this issue, what are people really afraid off when facing a large attacker? What is the actual reason if we got down to the essential specifics? When I ask people what are they actually scare off, their answers are usually:

         1) the inability to hurt the larger opponent and

         2) the inability to stop his attack.  

    OK then I would ask the small guy if he would still be scare if he had a shotgun in his hand. Most of the time, the answer is no. Hmm it becomes obvious to the small guy that if he can develop weapons that can cause heavy damage his fear of not being able to hurt or stop the the big guy naturally disappears. 

    So the first step in reducing ones fear is first to develop weapons that can cause heavy damage ( punches, kicks, elbows , locks , chokes etc ). To develop strong attacks , some key ideas are: make sure your stuff have FULL weight transference, make sure the program works on explosiveness, only work on a few things at a time , do it as much as possible, apply overload principle, learn to target vital weak areas, learn to bomb in combinations, develop a functional amount of density in the bones...etc     

   Actually it doesn't take long to develop these things but a lot of martial artist still can't do it after years of "training". The major problem with this area is that most people do not wanna do the grunt work of developing the basics. The students wanna skip it cause its boring and the teachers wanna skip it cause its bad to chase customers away. A quick solution to that is to get people to do the samething over and over again but in so many different ways that they don't even realize they are doing the same moves!   

    Here's the second most common statement that I hear when coaching : " man he's huge, I wouldn't want to fight that guy". To me the real problem and therefore solution is the word WANT. He's big so you don't WANT to fight him? What makes anyone think that it is a matter of "want to " and choice when it comes to self defence? People that say that usually frame conflict in a way that contains a choice. However, if there ever was a choice, then ethically we shouldn't fight in the first place, why choose violence over peace? And if there's no choice, then we HAVE TO fight. The problem is MA as a whole promotes violence by choice - choose violence consciously over peace, fight to show off,  pick your battles and only fight when you know you can win for sure.....how small, sad and pathetic is that? But if you realize there is no choice, if you realize that's the only time you should fight, then you have just tap into a part of you which can endure things and do things that you never thought possible, especially if its to save a love one....    

    The above suggestions to develop confidence is based on the understanding of oneself and now we are going to look at the development of confidence through the understanding of the enemy. Let's try to understand the average attacker by looking at some facts:

1 Generally, most people don't train and  

2 the ones that do train in our society rarely train more than 12 hours a week, most quite after 3 years or less. Your      chances of running into a bully that train 40 hours a week for over 5 years is very rare

3 Therefore,  99.9999% of the time, the  guy you are facing is just a beginner no matter how ugly or big he is - thats the physcial.

4 Psychologically, a bully that needs to act tough and have to  beat someone up in order to feel like a man is a very    small person inside, I  don't think you need to have a PHD to figure that one out. So to summarize: mentally, there's every  chance that he doesn't have  a strong spirit and physcially, he is probably not a professional .

 The above facts are common sense if you think about it, so why are a lot of students still scare once they have devellop strong weapons? The reason is because of conditioning - if you hear something enough times, you will believe it. Even though, most guys can't fight well (see fact 1 to 4), the truth of that does not stop 99% of dudes to stop telling war stories and brag about how tough they are ( if you are new to MA, just drop by a MA forum to see for yourself, most of them will brag all day long but generally can't move very well). Therefore, in order for you to stick to facts and avoid the dumb habit of believing in fiction, you must develop the habit of using a filter - the next time someone tells you how tough they are  or how many people their teacher have kill or any other war stories, simple turn your hearing off, let it in one ear and out the other. This is a simple habit but man does it help to delete all hesitation when you have to move in on them. 

    I hope you have a better understanding in how to develop confidence when facing a bigger attacker. Now that we have discuss the mental aspect, in a future blog, we can start to discuss the physical tactics and techniques ( there will be a video clip on this soon). The most important thing about this is to develop the positive self belief when facing anything "big"  in your daily life.