Remember that I told you that all good martial artists don't just study their primary martial art to learn to fight?

They study several different martial arts taking from each what works for them and develop their own fighting system. This is why there are so many different martial arts today, many of which use many of the same techniques.

So, how do you use science to create your own fighting system?

Let me give you a brief example of how I learned to fight to show how you can learn to fight. It started when I was about a year old and my country family began teaching me the basics for boxing and wrestling so that I never threw haymakers or what we called round house punches. I started living in transient trailer parks when I was about two or three, where construction people pulled their trailers around behind their cars when they moved and it was normal for us to move 10 to 12 times per year following the job circuit, much like today's immigrant harvesters do only without the trailers.

Those old trailer parks were home to very rough and tough construction people who often fought and the police stayed away except to escort ambulances to pick up dead bodies so we had our own law. We were American gypsies were called gypsies, transients, trailer trash, and poor white trash and I saw dead bodies carried out of those trailer parks under sheets when I was very young. I saw my father fight on those streets and I had plenty of fights on those streets starting when I was about 7 or 8.

Then I lived in the City of Industry in East LA for three years as a teenager, which was very violent with a lot of gang fights with various weapons, before finally returning to New Mexico and settling down in a small quiet military town which had more churches than bars.

Until 9th grade, I was a runt, which meant bully bait so I fought more than most and I thank God for bullies because they taught me to fight, especially against two or more people. I also learned young that most bullies came from liberal families, you know, like Obama.

When I was 12, I had already resigned myself to the fact that, because I was a runt, I was going to have to fight a lot and decided that I should study fighting as much as possible to learn to better defend myself. I remember reading about an ancient Asian doctor thousands of years ago returning from seeing a patient who was jumped, beat up, and robbed. He went home and used his knowledge of the human body to develop an ancient fighting system to defend himself.

I thought, if he can do it, so can I, after all, we know more about science today than they did thousands of years ago and we have so many martial arts to learn from today, which he didn't have. Therefore, it was just common sense to me that, if he could do it, I could do it.

The problem was that we were poor and I couldn't afford to take classes on martial arts. My dad had studied some Judo and Jiu Jitsu and taught me some of it along with the boxing. The only martial arts they had on TV at the time were boxing and free style wrestling but it was at a time when Muhammad Ali was boxing as Cassius Clay. When I was watching boxing, I didn't just watch it the way most people watch it for entertainment. For very personal reasons, you know, survival, I really studied the boxing and I didn't just study how and why the winner won, the way most people do, but I also studied what the loser did wrong, which caused them to lose, because, to me, it was just common sense you didn't want to do those things in a fight because they would cause you to lose. Then I took what I learned out on the street and found out the hard way what works and what doesn't work. It didn't take long to be able to tell by watching what would and wouldn't work on the street.

When I got into college, I took a self defense course from a retired Navy SEAL combatives instructor, William Bynum, Ph.D., who was better known by the SEALs he taught to fight as Wild Bill Bynum. He was a no-nonsense kind of guy and graded us very hard. He was teaching two classes per semester and had only give one A in the last two semesters and you were graded for the routine you and a partner developed and demonstrated at the end of the class based on what he taught. My partner, a Marine who had just returned from fighting in Nam, and I got the next A because we literally used our routine to fight each other.

When I started the class, I expected the instructor to prove much of what I had learned on the street to be wrong and to teach me better. I was absolutely amazed that he confirmed EVERYTHING I had learned street fighting, added to it, and built on it. My street fighting was good fighting.

I also studied up to premed in biology and all of the sports sciences. Out of habit, I continued developing my own fighting system, even in college. I quickly learned that human anatomy, the coaching sciences, especially for safety, kinesiology, and sports medicine helped me refine my fighting system even better.

Why sports medicine?

Because in sports medicine, you study injuries caused by sports and how they were caused so you can help prevent injuries.

It is only common sense that, if you can accidentally cause an injury, you can intentionally cause the same injury and how to cause that injury. To believe otherwise is like believing you can accidentally crash a car but can't intentionally crash the same car.

For example, the most common injury in football is a blown out knee. This is usually caused by the athlete having his weight on that foot with the cleats firmly holding in the grass so his foot won't move when someone falls on either side of the knee blowing the knee out to one side. This is partly because the knees are weakest from both sides.

So, how do you intentionally cause that injury?

You would be standing and grappling with the person, notice they have their weight on a foot, quickly place your foot alongside the inside or outside of that knee, and kick/stomp to the other side of that knee AND slightly down.

Why down?

To make sure his foot doesn't move because, if his foot moves, his knee won't blow out.

Kinesiology is a great science for improving fighting techniques because it is a combination of human anatomy and physics where you learn the structure and functions of the human body, its mechanics, and also its strengths and weaknesses. You quickly learn to attack joints instead of bones because bones are stronger than joints and joints are much easier to damage or destroy. You also learn that the body is incredibly well designed with the muscles protecting those joints and how they protect the joints.

When street fighting as a kid, I had already learned that most, if not all, of what you are taught about self defense by the media and Hollywood is pure bull crap that doesn't work on the street. For example, the media teach you that all you need to learn for self defense is to kick the guy in the balls and run away.

I have seen guys who could take really good, hard multiple crotch kicks and laugh while they pound you to dust. Those people have either had a few too many crotch kicks and don't have any feeling left and/or they are on dope, you know, like Angel Dust, and don't have much, if any, feeling. If anything, you will just tick them off and they will kill you. You better learn to fight.

Also, the middle and upper class myth about bending fingers back to restrain or discourage an attacker is another dangerous myth. I have seen a number of guys who had their fingers broken so many times or they are so double jointed you can bend their fingers all of the way back against the back of their hand and they will laugh at you while beating your brains out with the other hand.

The primary targets to cripple or quickly kill someone in hand-to-hand fighting have to be the elbows, knees, neck at the base of the skull for the best quick kill, and the skull/brain. With a baseball bat, you can also break the head off of the humorous and femur to cripple the person and put them out of the fight. There are also ways to dislocate the hips and shoulders with your hands and feet.

Most street fighters' hands and feet have taken such a beating you might as well forget about attacking those; all you will do is tick them off.

Most mortal wounds take anywhere from minutes to hours for the person to bleed out enough to die, during which time they can kill dozens of people and military history is full of people who were mortally wounded and killed the person who killed them and, often, others before they finished dying.

For example, in some martial arts, you are taught to strike with a flat fist just below the sternum to break off a large piece of cartilage called the xiphoid process and drive it into the liver to cause excessive bleeding and to knock the breath out of them buuuuut it can take hours for the person to bleed to death and a few deep breaths will bring his wind back so he can quickly get back into the fight, you know, after you have turned your back on him to fight others.

Wow, that works really well, doesn't it?

Well, maybe in Queensbury Land against Queensbury warriors but not in real street fighting. In street fighting, you want to quickly put them out of the fight and want them to stay out of the fight.

The best and only target for a quick kill with your hands or feet is to break the neck at the base of the skull and sever the spinal cord causing instant death and there are a number of ways you can do this. The ways to achieve this are to 1) strike the front of the head very hard in an upward way with your hand or foot causing the head to rock back far enough and hard enough break the neck and sever the spinal cord, 2) attack the spinal cord directly at the base of the skull from the sides or back, and 3) rotate the head to either side hard enough and far enough to break the neck and spinal cord. If you achieve any of these, the person drops like a rock.

The best instant knockout attack is to attack the sides of the head hard enough to rotate the head far enough to cause enough contusion to the sides of the brain to cause loss of consciousness. You best do this by striking the temple or jaw on either side of the head very hard.

But you need to know that, if you strike the side of the head with really good hits two or more times and they don't go down, you better break something else to quickly put them out of the fight because their neck muscles are strong enough they won't permit you to move the head enough to cause the brain damage required to knock them out or kill them.

Contrary to what Hollywood and the media teach, the only other instant death is caused by destroying or severing the pituitary gland, which is directly behind the bridge of the nose between the eyes and behind one inch of bone, which requires some form of penetration such as a knife or projectile like a bullet or just having their brains completely blown out by something like a 50 caliber projectile.

If you place a 38 caliber pistol against the sternum and discharge the projectile directly through the heart, it will take that person 50 to 60 seconds to finish dying; during the first 10 to 20 seconds of which, they will still be able to kill you.

I heard of one British soldier who was using a sword when he got run through the heart by a spear and he lived long enough to decapitate the guy who killed him with the spear because the guy with the spear didn't finish the fight.

Killing and crippling humans is ABSOLUTELY nothing like you see on TV or out of Hollywood, nothing. The human body is much tougher than you have been taught. You have to finish the fight, even against a mortally wounded person, before they can kill you.

Did you know that better than 90% of people stabbed with a knife don't die and better than 80% of the people shot with a gun don't die? Did you know that most people who are shot in the head don't die?

Go to a VA hospital and look at all of the incredibly maimed human bodies that survived the maiming; look at all of the people who were shot in the head, and listen to all of the war stories about soldiers who were seriously wounded and even mortally wounded who continued to fight and kill for some time.

When fighting street, you have to finish the fight to put them out of the fight before they can kill you. You can't stop fighting just because you scored a good hit, knocked them to the ground, or even mortally wounded them.

Those are just a few of the things you will learn from studying science and history that will help you better develop and refine your fighting.

DO NOT develop or refine your fighting based on what you have seen in the movies or on TV shows...unless you want to die.

John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

You better....