BEST PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKES AND PALMS VS. FISTS, PART 3

Palm-strike detractors like to point out that fingers are vulnerable to fracture because they stick out when making contact. This definitely can happen, but no one I know personally who has used palms — including Bas Rutten — has ever fractured a finger in barehanded combat.

- LITO ANGELES

This doesn’t mean it has never happened or can’t happen; I just don’t know of anyone it’s happened to. In all my full-contact, all-out, barehanded fights in training and real life, I’ve never hurt my hands. Likewise, none of my training partners or students has, even when delivering palm strikes to a motorcycle-helmet-clad head, which is our headgear of choice in training fights.

There are two aspects of using palms that I’ve found advantageous in barehanded fighting, street or sport. The first involves the palm hook. With this strike, you don’t have to be perfectly accurate with your targeting to effect a one-shot knockout, certainly less accurate than you need to be when using a fist. If you have sufficient power, you can hit an adversary anywhere on the side of the head or neck with a palm hook and produce a one-shot knockout.

Let’s isolate the side of the head for a moment. When you hit it with the entirety of the palm, it not only rattles the brain violently but also shocks the facial nerves. This is devastating. When you blast the side of the neck with this shot, it not only jars the brain but also shocks the carotid artery and jugular vein, which helps facilitate brain shutdown. This is just one of the reasons I consider it the premier pre-emptive strike for proactive self-defense. I can attest to its potency and so can my friends, renowned self-defense experts Dave Briggs, Peter Consterdine and John Skillen.