When escape is the aim, the humble shove is right up there with the best 'hidden secrets' of martial arts.

Let me present you with a challenge: you are a self-defence instructor. You are approached by a young female with a particular problem. She has a somewhat violent partner who is presently serving time for a variety of crimes, including attempting to shoot Special Operations police as they entered their house to arrest him. Luckily for the lead police officer in the entry team, the gun of the subject in question, acquired through the black market, misfired.

The young female, who is relatively small in build, has just learned that her now ex-partner is being released in the coming days. She feels sure he will attempt to come to her residence despite her having a court restraining order in place to prevent him contacting her at all. He has already managed to call her several times from jail. So much for jail security.

She has invested in an elaborate security system and has two large guard dogs but wants some basic training in how to defend herself against him should he become violent. He is at least six feet tall and, you guess, probably strong. She only has a few hours available for training. What do you teach her?

The story is real and that self-defence instructor was me.

So, I certainly wasn’t going to waste the precious few hours with an elaborate set of techniques to use against all manner of attacks, of the ‘he does this, then you do that’ variety. The focus was on simple striking to vulnerable points to distract, then creating the opportunity to escape by performing a very hard shove. That’s all there was time for, but that’s all that was required.

It was this and several other incidents that caused me to develop a ‘push subsystem’ as a component of my Tactical Approach. It is a ‘system’ because it is a relatively tight package of related actions for the specific purpose of creating a time and/or space opportunity to escape from your opponent. Pushing or shoving someone is the most natural and instinctual of physically aggressive actions by humans, even from a very young age. But it is not something that you will likely see featured on the technique list of most self-defence systems.

I feel that, primed as we are by great spectacles such as the UFC, we don’t appreciate how our thinking has been conditioned and constrained to think ‘strike, grapple or throw’ when it comes to dealing with an opponent. That unconscious conditioning blinds us to other simpler and often more effective ways to defend ourselves.

This conditioning also arises from misconceptions about self-defence such as:

•             The principal aim is to extricate yourself from a confrontation by doing damage to an opponent, because escape is best effected by leaving your opponent in a heap on the ground.

•             The prime if not sole focus of training is to defend yourself against strangers who intend to do you grave physical harm, which therefore warrants a violent response on your part.

•             Such incidents occur in isolated locations where there are no witnesses to your actions, no mobile phone cameras or security cameras.

•             Considerations about the law, dealing with violence in a work context or involving family and friends is for you to worry about and adjust your actions accordingly, and is not the concern of your instructor or system.

Yet a strong push or shove is very functional, being both simple and adaptable to a variety of situations, and to a variety of people differing in size, skill and temperament. And, should greater force be necessary, it even has the potential to do great physical damage to an opponent. And if you find that surprising, you’re probably thinking no further than the shove that might occur in the school yard. Effective self-defence revolves around how you shove, where you shove and what you shove your opponent into, combined with a variety of lead-ins and follow-ups.

There is enough material to write a whole book about this subsystem of shove-based responses. In fact, I am. It will take that to get past the overly simplistic notions about this tactic among instructors and show just how useful its application can be.

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