In pure technical terms, the most elite form of defense in striking is evasion, that is, not getting hit at all, i.e., no contact between you and your opponent whatsoever. Think of slipping, bobbing, weaving, ducking, elusive footwork, anything and everything that causes your opponent to bite nothing but air where he thought he was going to get a big ol' piece of you. Evasion is slick, beautiful stuff. Evasion is also one of the hardest skill-sets for fighters to develop (we expand on evasion drills ad nauseam in our upcoming book on Counter-Boxing).
Elite evasion skills develop (if they ever do) after years of hardcore, deliberate drilling. The stop-gap or stepping stone between getting hit and genuine evasive skills is contact-defense, that is defense where some form of contact between you and your opponent is demanded in order to insure that you don't eat the full fury of the intended blow. Contact-defense comes in two broad categories: Blocking and Parrying.
Blocking, as the name implies, involves placing a portion of your anatomy (preferably a less vulnerable portion) between your opponent's punch and his intended target. Blocking strikes to the head usually involves absorbing punches with the palms, forearms, and/or upper arms. Strikes to the body are usually blocked with the forearms or upper arms.
Blocking has a lot to recommend it; most important being that it is the easiest of defensive skills to learn. If you have a modicum of discipline, holding a decent defensive shell is not that difficult-your blocking will come out of that shell. Blocking as a defense comes naturally to our species, just think of winging a punch at an untrained fighter (don't do this by the way, OK, it's just a thought experiment) and picture how those arms will fly up to cover and protect the head. Bingo, that fighter is blocking and never even had a lesson.
There are some drawbacks to blocking; these drawbacks do not mean that you should not use blocking as a defensive tactic I merely offer the drawbacks for your consideration.
Drawback Numero Uno: Every time you block you are essentially a one-armed fighter. A limb used in a defensive capacity, for that fraction of a second, cannot be used to launch offense. Sure, you can fire that limb right after you have used it to defend, I'm just saying if we add up all the fractions of a second spent on a defensive strategy centered around blocking we come up with a significant portion of your time being a one-armed fighter.
Drawback Numero Dos: Blocking is still getting hit. Taking punches off of the arms is waaaaaaaaaay better than blocking with your jaw, your nose, your ribs, or your liver, but offensive contact to the body is still offensive contact. Blocking in early rounds can feel okey-doke, but ask those arms how they feel in later rounds, check their responsiveness, are they still as fast as they could be before they accrued more than a few direct hits?
If blocking is the primitive, albeit effective, primary defensive skill and evasion the ne plus ultra, that puts parrying smack dab in the middle of this little hierarchy. Parrying is essentially a re-direct of your opponent's punches. The parry takes incoming fire and diverts it away from the designated target, or at the very least dissipates the power. Parrying is still a contact-defense in that to parry one must get one's hand(s) on a portion of the incoming limb to do the job. Parrying is superior to blocking in that, although there is contact, this contact is mitigated by how the parry interacts with the offensive limb.
If parrying does have a drawback it is that it relies on being slightly out of position, that is being cheated a little out of good defensive guard and that means being a little vulnerable to attack. Think of it this way, here comes that speedy jab at your face, if your rear hand is in good guard position, a little tuck and you have successfully blocked. To parry that same jab (to the inside or outside) you have to open that incoming jab line and then get your hand on either side of that punch to apply the re-direct. Too slow? Uh-oh.
With the aforementioned pluses and minuses of blocking and parrying in mind I suggest the following approach to building superior defensive skill.
- Drill good guard position and do not deviate. Sure, its fun to watch elite fighters play the game with their hands low and tempting fate, but let's make sure you've mastered the rules before you break them.
- From good guard position overlay your blocking skill-set.
- Drill parries for when you are cheated out of position. That is for those times when you must defend when your own hand is en route for a punch or returning from a punch and are not in guard position. Save opening up lines to force a parry (drawing and the like) for later-trust me we'll cover it.
- From day one, all the while you are drilling guard position, your blocking, and parrying you will always have an eye on how to become evasive in both senses: upper-body movement and footwork. Try to be evasive before you actually are, try slipping that cross but let's not get over-confident-put a block up ready to cover just in case we're not as good as we need to be yet. Work your bob and weave but don't go all Pernell Whitaker with your hands down while you do it-you ain't Pernell Whitaker. Let's be safe while we try to emulate our betters.
So, there you go, four pragmatic steps to get you from flailing and flinching when someone swings at you to being evasive as smoke.
