A Multiple Attacker Drill for Boxing?
I recently watched a couple YouTube videos that got me thinking. In one video, Rokas and Icy Mike talk about boxing being the best martial art for dealing with multiple attackers. They make a really good point — boxing is the only martial art where there are multiple videos of it being used successfully against multiple attackers in real-world scenarios. In another video, Icy Mike talks about the usefulness of board breaking for self-defense. A lot of times, it’s hard to be certain that you are actually punching hard enough to hurt somebody in a real fight. A good way to develop the ability to really punch through a target and know you’re actually punching sufficiently hard is board breaking. It occurred to me that maybe these two things could be combined in one drill.
Typically, multiple attacker drills are done with a focus on grappling or throwing, which isn’t really where you want to be in a real multiple-attacker scenario since there’s a pretty good chance that you would end up being taken down to the ground. Nevertheless, there are good principles there. You want to try to keep the opponents lined up, which is definitely going to be impossible as a long-term tactic, so you really need to knock the closest guy out or disable him as quickly as possible. You need to keep them from circling you and rushing in but you also have to be aggressive and end it quickly or bail fast. The best way to do this is with boxing — one-punch knockouts in succession, if possible. But it’s really hard to train with the realism of striking hard, going for a one-punch knockout, in the gym or dojo. You need to train it to be able to pull it off in real life but knocking out your sparring partners in a multiple-attacker randori drill isn’t good praxis. Maybe board breaking is the solution! You have to commit and punch hard, through the target, in order to break a board. If you don’t commit, the board won’t break and you’ll hurt your hand.
So, maybe, in addition to the typical multiple-attacker drills that you get in Krav Maga, Aikido, and aiki-jujutsu, where you focus on keeping the attackers lined up and try to deal with them one at a time, we need to incorporate multiple-attacker board breaking drills too, where you have multiple opponents trying to circle around you while holding a board at face height. If you punch hard enough to break the board, we count it as a knockout and that “attacker” is eliminated. However, if any of the “attackers” manages to close the distance before you get the knockout, they drop the board and immediately go into grappling mode, trying to take you down. From there, you have to hope that you can defeat the attackers with your wrestling/judo/jiu-jitsu skills.
