Wushu Watch: How to Grapple Without Ever Grappling

Do you desperately want to get better at grappling without spending more time on the mats? Frankly there's only so much miscellaneous hair finding its way into your teeth that you can take each week. Mustache? Chest? Or… urgh. You could lift some weights or do some cardio or work your flexibility but each of those takes time and effort. If you are anything like me what you want is knowledge that can be acquired during the commute and instantly used to submit brown belts. Karate legend, Ticky Donovan once told me that anything you can master in five minutes is useless against trained opposition because everyone else can learn it in five minutes too, but I decided to go over Donovan's head on this one and consult my martial arts spirit animal, George Dillman.

Dillman is the yin to my yang, the cheese to my Branston pickle, and the gall bladder to my triple warmer. When I find myself caught up in the new and exciting, Dillman reminds me to revisit the old and disproved. When National Geographic debunked Dillman's no touch knockout on television in front of millions, Dillman shrugged (inspiring the title of my objectivist martial arts novel). The target had moved his toes said Dillman, and then he went back to the seminar circuit where he is still making thousands of dollars from believers. The fact that science demonstrated his method to be false doesn't matter, it is the belief of the masses which decides good fighting technique for him.

Unfortunately, Dillman has not touched much on the close range grappling that would help during a spirited rolling session. Though he did demonstrate a nice nose drill technique that apparently could be used from your back in a rape situation.

And Dillman can be heard admiring one of his students demonstrating an interesting anti-Gracie technique here:

So I consulted the work of Britain's Dillman, Paul Bowman. A student of G-Dilly, Bowman comes as a package with his uke, Graham, a sixth dan in kyusho who proves that the more adept you become in the art, the more vulnerable you are to it. This pressure point knockout is toe-tappingly tragic.

Bowman might not be Dill-man but he's a-man and I'll hear him out. As a big fan of the front headlock / chancery game and an avid user of guillotines I was pleased to see that Bowman had turned his mind to the snap down. Normally there is a lot of jostling for inside control and a collar tie when you're dealing with snap downs, and your man isn't going to come willingly, but it seems that by driving my thumbs down into stomach 9 I can get my opponent to his knees with half the effort. Stomach 9 is quickly becoming my favorite point for grappling, you will remember it from that anti-Gracie technique.

But Bowman didn't have enough. He mainly deals with the self defense aspects of kyusho, so he devotes more of his teaching to defending that terror of the streets, the stepping straight punch. I began searching around for former Dillman students. Surely one of them had broken off and started producing trained killers by now. Dillman himself asserted that if Tommy Hearns had worked with him, he'd have beaten Marvin Hagler. I want some of that but in grappling form.

It was then that I stumbled on the work of Evan Pantazi, reportedly a seventh dan under Dillman. Pantazi's DVDs are numerous and informative. The cover art alone promises more than your money's worth.

Pantazi's seventh volume, Kyusho Jitsu Grappling Methods is one of that strange batch of DVDs that assumes the opponent knows how to grapple but in a way which no experienced grappler would ever teach. So there's a lot of defending and applying armbars like this one:

But clearly this can't be exclusively for self defense because Pantazi deals with classical gi grips in the stand up and shows that one pressure point behind the elbow that every kyusho master falls back on constantly because it actually hurts a little.

And while almost a third of the instructional is devoted to the bottom of mount—a sensible place to start—Pantazi goes out of his way to find pressure points when his opponent has both of his lapels and has pulled himself down chest to chest with him. They're passing through upa town and Pantazi isn't even looking out of the windows.

However if your man does ever bury his head in your chest from mount or guard, consider using one knuckle into the top of the head. A powerful vital point which can lead to a reversal of the position or being called into the head teacher's office for 'excessive horseplay'.

Pantazi also has some interesting takes on leg locks. My karate days have left me with a desire to control the distance at all times and only engage when it is advantageous to me. So I always hated that fact that to attack my opponent's legs I invariably had to entangle them. Pantazi has shown me another way of attacking the foot from a tremendous distance. Add in the cobra vital point strike to underneath the knee and the traditional martial artist in me is more than satisfied.

Now I hear what you're saying: "What about the other leg? He's free to shrimp and push off and do whatever he wants." To which I say steady on there, smart arse, it's a demonstration. Pantazi goes on to show that in the real application of the technique you place your foot on the guy's leg rendering him completely immobile.

But this knee bar reminded me that I wasn't completely sold on Pantazi's techniques.

Most of Pantazi's techniques seem like questionable applications of joint locks or driving his finger tips into his opponent's neck from the bottom. There wasn't any sign of the stomach 9 point which other respected kyusho authorities used so extensively which was doubly disappointing because I'm getting really good at that one. But then Pantazi brought out two of his students to spar and I saw an effectiveness on defense that I could scarcely believed. Saulo Ribeiro has stated that the essence of Jiu Jitsu is to survive and escape, and these guys were working at a one hundred percent success rate.

Sure, I came looking for quick methods to submit guys who spend more time on the mats each week than I do and Pantazi probably didn't provide that. But his anti-grappling is as solid as you can get. High percentage escapes and sweeps that can be learned in five minutes or less are just as good to level the playing field, I'll just plug the holes in my offence with stuff that actually takes practice. And who knows… maybe with a bit of practice I can catch someone with a kyusho achilles lock from mount.