I'm sure that some have seen this, but for those that haven't, this is an excellent video that shows the power of persuasion and power of a type of 'self-hypnosis' when a student WANTS to believe that something works so very badly.
It's an even better example of how is DOESN'T work on those who don't believe and call bullshit. Then, the instructor looks to make excuses as to why it doesn't work. Watch the BJJ guys carefully and you'll notice Stephen Bonner in there as well.
That's why I hate Black Belt Magazine that perpetuates that garbage with no kind of editorial control of what gets in whatsoever.
I met the publisher once in LA and after we talked for a while I joked about editing the magazine. And she was like, "Yeah, but you're sooo biased towards thai boxing, brazilian jiu-jitsu, and wrestling" and I was like yes, I'm biased towards things that work.
I remember an old tape I have of George Dillman (pressure point guy) saying that a certain pressure point doesn't work on black people since they have an extra muscle or something like that on some part of their anatomy! A better explaination is that maybe the black people Dillman was trying his moves on were less susceptible to his bullshit?
"a certain pressure point doesn't work on black people since they have an extra muscle or something like that on some part of their anatomy!"
I'd rather train and develop my fouette, jab, destruct, and RNC, because I KNOW they work on all people of all types of all races...rather than train a technique that, for some reason or another, doesn't work on black people because they have extra muscle.
It's a racist technique!!
I spent 6 months studying pressure points in a semi-private class. The instructor was certified through Dillman, but his background was TKD followed by years of Qigong, Chin-na, and acupuncture/acupressure healing.
My personal take on it was that a lot of it is hooey. However, there were a couple important things I learned from it:
1) Some of it really does work. Not all of it, not all the time, and not on everybody, BUT some of it DOES work, and sometimes very effectively. I even did a couple KOs back then, and only one "victim" was also a student. My training partner was known for knocking out skeptics on our floor in college (only the willing ones, of course). :)
2) When attacking any part of the body, consider the organism as a whole. When you watch a KO in any sport (boxing, Muay Thai, Savate, MMA, etc) look at what caused it. Was it a single blow? Was it a series of blows?
A good example of the "PP KO" is Pedro Rizzo vs Tra Telligman. Rizzo throws the leg kick, and Tra visibly winces and his body reacts to the kick. Rizzo follows it with a right to the jaw that puts Tra down. If you watch his eyes in the replay, they glass over and he looks GONE until his butt hits the mat, which wakes him up.
This is the same effect that the "PP KOs" achieve. They hit multiple areas of the body to overload the nervous system and cause a shutdown. Was Rizzo/Telligman a PP KO, or just a good right to the jaw? Nobody can really say, I suppose. The PP folks will claim that it was PPs, others will dispute it. I only mention it because the effect is real, if the practice isn't.
Do they work without sparring or alive training? No. Many PP practitioners can only do them when their partner is standing still, waiting for it. However, the effect that they are trying to discuss and employ is not ALL bunk.
When we trained, our instructor made sure we learned both the healing side and the hurting side of PP study. His massages were AWESOME. I also learned a lot of acupressure remedies that worked very well for an assortment of things, like back pain or headaches.
The bottom line: it's not something that I would ever try to depend on, but sometimes PPs lend an ancillary benefit to what you are already doing (BJJ, Savate, etc)
~Chris
I also recall Dillman mentioning that certain pressure points didn't work on black people, but I don't know if it was because of the extra musculature. Especially since he claimed that extremely muscular people were even MORE susceptible to pressure point attacks because the pressure points were closer to the surface due to all the extra muscle.
Just to follow-up on what Twinkletoes said, I too trained with some pressure point experts WAY back when. They would have me writhing in pain easily with just a simple touch. It was like magic! Then I went and practiced bjj for a while. When I went back to them and we rolled, they attacked my pressure points and were amazed at my ability to continue fighting unfazed. (I've also had this happen recently when rolling with a wing chun guy who tried the same kind of thing.)
My conclusion at the time was that this pressure point stuff only seemed to work when the opponent doesn't resist. As time went by and my muay thai and bjj improved, I found that I was able to make effective use of those "useless" pressure points after all! By using muay thai and bjj as the "launching platform" (or delivery system as Matt would say) I was able to increase the effectiveness of what was already very effective. Trying to poke pressure points without using muay thai or bjj in a fight would result in minor irritation to my opponent at best, for the most part.
As Chris said, pressure point attacks help to some degree, but they need to be backed up by what we KNOW will work.
Lautaro
I know a krav maga/shooto based bouncer in my hometown, whose knocked out tens of people with a pressurepoint strike. He strikes the "mental -something..5?" point in the jaw with an open hand..Then again, hes strong, fast and trained in real fighting.Im sure that most guys would drop even if he just whacks them with a palm heel anywhere on the jawline....
The amazing part is, that he consistently makes people piss their pants with a knee/uppercut to another point around the bladder. People sometimes pretend they have passed out when they feel the warm piss running down their leg...:):):) THAT I cant explain!
ttt lol
I think Chris and Lautaro make good points. I have a story that accentuates it:
So Paulson is doing a seminar for us, and he's teaching details on how to maintain control of half-plum.
He says "use your middle finger to press into a nerve in the neck, to move him closer to you."
We all try it, and of course it works, bingo!
He says "it's a nice trick I got from George Dillman."
The seminar breaks out LAUGHING!!
Paulson says "....don't laugh. Dillman's got good stuff."
Everyone shuts up.
To this day, I don't know if he was serious or putting us on, which makes me laugh even more when I think about the idea of him being one or the other.
Finnfighter-
stomach 5, exit point of the 3rd branch of the trigeminal nerve, basically the 'sweet spot' for a boxing ko, 'cos it's on the short arm of an axis of rotation with the brainstem on the long arm.
Generally, on the pressure-point thing- I did my first 4 years of martial arts training in DKI with the folks in Virginia before hitting med school and then residency, during which I spent a lot of time corresponding with some senior folks into the whole tuite/tien hsueh (sp?) thing. There is decent anatomic/physiologic basis for some of the things taught under this rubric, and there are some effective tricks that stem from it in both grappling and striking contexts (grind towards the hand up the inside of the wrist to weaken a grip, press on the side over the floating ribs- liver 13 if I remember right- to weaken the shoulder girdle, hit mid thigh and a ko on the jaw on the other side may be easier).
If collecting these sorts of tricks amuses you, or you find them especially useful, there is some stuff there to chase, amidst the bullshit and delusion.
Personally, I don't think knowing this stuff is that high percentage, and my favorite quote on the matter comes from a member of the Uechi family regarding point hitting-
'Hit hard enough, whole body vital point'.
FWIW,
Andrew
"'Hit hard enough, whole body vital point'."
Exactly.
We know that certain points of the body are more vulnerable than others. We also know that's it's RARELY ever a point that can be hit easily or without a decent amount of force to cause the desired effect.
Most all of the 'points' that do work are simple anatomical weakness or 'trigger points' in western medicine.
So many TMA's have an incessant desire to make everything mystical. Hit a guy on the sweet spot and they go down. It's not because of chi or any other crap like that. Unfortunately, they sell this line of snake oil to the unwitting and they buy it hook, line and sinker, in hopes of finding the 'secret' to defending themselves against a superior attacker.
Think about it, here is a 7th degree black belt...SEVENTH DEGREE, that can't make his technique work against the lowly BJJ students that aren't even 1st Dan. As a matter of fact, he can't even do it on the little female reporter. In defending his method, he says that this is effective on 40% of the people, but not athletes. So, do you want to rely on a technique that only works on 4 out of 10 people AND only people that aren't athletic? I'm sorry, but I don't need martial arts to defend myself against little, unathletic, weak people.
I don't think that anyone would say that it's not possible, but it is such a low percentage long shot that it is ignorant and unethical to teach these methods in favor of the much higher percentage training methods. I view this area of martial arts about the same as I do wrist locks and other lower percentage techniques: Reserve most of this training for after you have developed a good base in the proven methods of boxing, kickboxing, grappling, etc. Then, if your technique fails, you have something to fall back on.
"As for the comment only jj/mt/etc. works, that is kind of closed minded ignorance wouldnt you say?"
No one said that ONLY those things work, but they are definitely the much higher percentage arts to a much larger degree. As soon as we see tai chi guys beat real fighters and actually USE tai chi, will take a better look at it.
"there are plenty of obscure and effective styles like yi quan who dont like to compete or popularize themselves"
Total typical martial arts garbage and propaganda. It's the same line of crap that has been spewed by every other art as to why they don't step in the ring and prove their art.
"So, do you want to rely on a technique that only works on 4 out of 10 people AND only people that aren't athletic? I'm sorry, but I don't need martial arts to defend myself against little, unathletic, weak people." - lol, great quote Scott
A&B: like Scott said I never said only those arts work. But it is logical to spend your time training in arts that have been proven to work with resistance. I do think it is possible that some of the more obscure arts that have not been popularized MAY be functional. But there has to be some kind of testing ground for an art. If not, you get lost into training things based on blind faith.
"Most all of the 'points' that do work are simple anatomical weakness or 'trigger points' in western medicine."
I think straying from this obvious truth is what gets the PP people in trouble to begin with.
Whether you discuss PP's from a Chi/Qi/Ki perspective, or whether you discuss them as points at which the nervous system is most "accessible", they are just locations that allow you to affect the entire body through contact. Period. I like "simple anatomical weakness" as a term for discussing them ("pressure point" sounds hokey, like they were just poking spots until someone felt something).
And I'm sorry A&B, even though we don't tend to agree on things, I think you're being purposely provocative on this thread. While I normally just feel that our opinions differ, this is fairly obvious trolling in my book.
If we can say it once, we can say it a million times: the training methods employed by sport arts make them effective by developing important attributes and helping them to weed out ineffective techniques.
Arts that lack these training methods do not foster these attributes, and lack the "quality control" that having to apply the techniques brings. YES, there are techniques not seen in the ring, the mat, and the octagon that are also effective; HOWEVER, without ever applying them, they will never BE effective or ineffective--they will merely be irrelevant.
~Chris
'Hit hard enough, whole body vital point'.
Word!
'Hit hard enough, whole body vital point'.
That's a beautiful quote :).
This thread reminds me of an old UFC restriction that I always thought was very silly (do they still have it?). One of the restrictions, along with no biting, eye gouging, etc, was NO PRESSURE POINTS. When I saw that I thought, "WTF? Are they serious?". As mentioned on this thread, there are structural weak points along the jaw, for example, that are included in pressure point training that can lead to knock outs. How are they going to tell fighters not to hit those weak points? It's pretty dumb.
Just remembered that, so I thought I'd mention it.
Lautaro
Deleted more A&B crap...
The UFC's "no pressure points" rule goes back to the time Dan Severn went to a Dillman seminar. It was between UFC's 4 and 5, when Dan realized he needed striking skills to go with his wrestling.
The funny part to the story, as it is told, is that when Dan returned to the UFC, he was on top of someone, and he looked at their head and thought "well, the points are in there somewhere" and just started smashing. :)
I hear Dillman did the usual:
stand still, and let me whack you in the head.
Hell, Dillman did that to me once at his seminar. And yep, it sucks. :) :)
NOTE: That does not mean that I endorse (A) Dillman's theory, (B) Dillman himself, or (C) participating in a seminar that involved the old "stand still, and let me whack you in the head routine". Though I sure have fallen for it a number of times.....
::::scratches head::::
::::finds lump::::
A&B:The problem isnt that pressure points dont work at all, but that they dont work as effectively against a resisting opponent. Gee, havent we heard that line about a MILLION times on this forum? As I said before, I myself have been able to use pressure points with success against resisting opponents ONLY WHEN used in conjunction with bjj and muay thai.
Let me give you some examples. If my opponent doesnt have a clue about groundfighting (like yourself, A&B) then Ill easily attain a top dominant position from which I can attack and my opponent cant. From here, I can punch, eye gouge, bite, tickle, spit, and attack his pressure points at will. My opponent doesnt know how to escape from the bottom and is therefore helpless, relatively speaking.
From a stand-up perspective, my muay thai training allows me to defend, attack and clinch. I can kick, punch, knee and elbow areas which are known as pressure points (on the leg, along the jaw, on the body, etc). If I can hurt him more by hitting a pressure point, so much the better. But I`m not relying on that to win. I KNOW from experience that with or without pressure points I can knock him out just by hitting him hard enough.
The problem, as I see it, is how people are led to believe that pressure points work REALLY WELL by demonstrating its effectiveness on an unresisting partner. People see that and buy into the mystique, just like they buy into the whole "oriental martial arts" mystique (levitating, chi blasts, taking on a dozen armed goons, etc).
Did you know that most people who teach pressure points forbid sparring? Oh sure, theyll explain the dangers of striking these deadly pressure points and therefore the need to avoid sparring. So theyll teach forms and have people practice on a willing, unresisting partner. And guess what? Pressure points work great under those circumstances! So these people think, "Wow! This stuff really works! I`m a trained killer now! But I have to be careful never to actually use this in sparring or fighting lest I kill the poor soul." And so it goes...
A&B, weve said this to you MANY times before. If you were to train properly, you would realize all of these wonderful revelations for yourself. A lot of people on this forum, including myself, believed in the whole asian mystique before we woke up and smelled the coffee. I can understand where youre coming from. But if you train properly instead of theorizing from the comfort of your computer, things will start to fall into place. And hey, if you find that you CAN levitate, shoot chi blasts and take on a dozen armed guys single-handedly, more power to you!
Lautaro
AAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Lautaro, you gotten suckered in to answering A&B!!! AAAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Nyah, nyah!!! That's probably a good 15-20 minutes of your life that you'll never get back!! You might as well have tried to explain that to your cat or something!