Article 3/5 of FWC Wing Chun Versus Krav Maga

How Many Techniques Does a Civilian Really Need?

Self-defense can present an almost unlimited number of situations. Does that mean we should prepare by learning an equally large number of techniques, or should training focus on developing a smaller set of skills that can work across situations we have never practiced before?

In the previous articles, we looked at Krav Maga's military origins and how a relatively compact military method developed into a much broader civilian self-defense system. That led to an interesting question about techniques. Modern Krav Maga can include striking, kicking, grappling, defenses against grabs and chokes, ground situations, knives, sticks, guns and many other scenarios, with techniques and tactics drawn from or influenced by established fighting systems such as boxing, wrestling, judo and kickboxing.

There is nothing inherently wrong with borrowing techniques, and there is nothing inherently wrong with practicing scenarios. The more interesting question is how much of our limited training time should be spent learning solutions to particular situations, and how much should be spent developing a smaller number of skills deeply enough that we can use them when the situation is unfamiliar.

For civilian self-defense, I think that distinction matters enormously.

The more specific the threat, the more useful specific training becomes

There are situations where highly specific scenario training makes perfect sense.

A prison officer operates in an environment where certain types of physical confrontation are more likely than others. Police officers may have to restrain someone rather than simply escape, while security personnel may regularly deal with particular forms of aggression at close range. Someone facing a credible threat from a stalker may reasonably spend time preparing for situations involving their home, workplace or vehicle.

In these cases, the threat profile has narrowed.

The practitioner is no longer asking only:

“What could theoretically happen to me?”

They have information about what they are more likely to encounter, and that makes specialization valuable.

An ordinary civilian usually has the opposite problem. They may never experience serious violence at all, and if they do, they generally cannot know whether it will begin with a punch, shove, grab, choke, weapon, tackle or something they have never considered.

Trying to prepare for that uncertainty by continually expanding the number of specific scenarios creates an obvious problem.

There is always another “what if?”

The endless “what if?”

What if someone grabs both wrists?

What if they grab only one?

What if they grab from behind?

What if they choke from the front?

What if the choke comes from behind?

What if you are against a wall?

What if you are sitting down?

What if their other hand is holding something?

Every one of those questions is legitimate.

And that is precisely the problem.

Self-defense has no fixed rules, so the number of possible scenarios has no natural endpoint. Every new situation can justify another variation, and every variation can potentially justify another technique.

At some point we have to ask whether increasing coverage is really the best way to prepare a civilian for something fundamentally unpredictable.

A civilian cannot realistically prepare for the unknown by learning every possible version of it.

Training therefore needs to develop abilities that can transfer to situations the student has never seen.

Five choke defenses or an understanding of choking?

Consider something as apparently simple as a choke.

We could teach one defense against a front choke, another against a rear choke, another against a wall choke, another from the ground and perhaps another when one of the defender's arms is trapped.

The student now knows five choke defenses.

But there is another way of approaching the same subject.

What actually makes a choke work? Where is pressure being applied? What gives the attacker leverage and structure? Which positions make the choke strong, and which make it weak? What can prevent the attacker from establishing those conditions in the first place, and what can we change once they have?

The student still needs physical tools. Intellectual understanding alone will not escape a choke.

But instead of treating every variation as an entirely new problem, we can begin looking for the similarities underneath the different scenarios.

Perhaps several apparently different attacks are mechanically variations of the same problem.

If so, we may not need five separate answers.

We may need a deeper understanding of the problem and a smaller number of adaptable tools.

How long does one technique actually take to learn?

This becomes particularly important because learning a fighting technique takes much longer than simply learning its movement.

A basic punch can be demonstrated in minutes, and a beginner may reproduce its general shape during the first lesson. But being able to perform the movement does not mean being able to fight with it.

Can the student recognize the correct distance without being told? Can they create an opportunity rather than waiting for one? Can they use the technique against someone who knows what is coming and actively tries to prevent it? Can they recover when it misses, adjust it for different opponents and connect it naturally to whatever happens next?

Those abilities take considerably longer to develop.

A boxer may technically learn a jab during the first few lessons and then spend years improving that same jab, because eventually the technique is no longer merely the movement. It includes timing, distance, positioning, setup, perception, recovery and adaptation.

This changes how we should think about large self-defense curricula.

Every additional technique does not merely require enough training time for the student to remember its shape.

It competes for the time required to make all the other techniques functional.

The real question therefore isn't how many techniques someone can remember.

It is how many they can develop deeply enough to rely on when another person is actively making the situation difficult.

Fewer techniques are not automatically better

There is an important danger in taking this argument too far.

Having fewer techniques is not a virtue by itself.

If I try to use the same solution regardless of distance, position, direction or resistance, I have not created an efficient system. I am simply trying to force a square peg through a round hole.

And when a technique does not naturally fit the situation, force often becomes the easiest way to compensate.

This is why a small technical arsenal needs something else:

the ability to shape the fight.

A wrestler can become extraordinarily effective with a relatively small family of takedowns because the wrestler does not wait passively for the perfect takedown position to appear. Footwork, pressure, hand fighting, previous attacks and positioning help create the conditions in which those techniques work.

A boxer does something similar. The boxer does not simply wait for the opponent to accidentally present the perfect opening for the cross. Movement, pressure, the jab and previous attacks help create that opening.

A small arsenal becomes powerful when the practitioner can make different situations increasingly fit the tools they possess.

Find the similarities before adding another answer

This suggests a different way of using scenarios.

Change the attack.

Change the opponent.

Change the distance.

Use a wall.

Start seated.

Introduce a weapon.

Change the timing.

Let the original technique fail.

But when something stops working, do not automatically respond by adding another technique.

First ask:

What is actually different?

Perhaps the scenario looks different while the underlying physical problem remains almost identical. If an existing tool can solve it after reasonable adaptation, there may be no reason to add another one.

If it cannot, the scenario has taught us something valuable. We may have discovered a genuinely different problem that requires another tool.

The principle becomes:

Expand the situations. Do not expand the system unless the situations force you to.

This allows scenarios to increase experience without automatically increasing the size of the technical curriculum.

Scenarios can have different purposes

I think it is useful to distinguish three ways scenario training can be used.

The first is exposure. A civilian should experience unfamiliar problems. What does it feel like when someone actually tries to choke you? What changes when a wall prevents you from moving backwards? How does the problem change if someone is holding a training knife?

The second is testing. Put the skills we already possess into a different situation and see whether they still work. Instead of beginning with the assumption that a new scenario requires a new answer, use the scenario to discover the limitations of the existing method.

The third is specialization. Develop specific solutions to particular situations because the practitioner has a meaningful reason to expect them.

All three have value, but they do not necessarily deserve equal emphasis for everyone.

For professionals or people facing identifiable threats, specialization can be extremely important.

For the ordinary civilian facing broad uncertainty, I would put much more emphasis on exposure and testing, while spending most training time developing prevention skills, fighting ability and adaptability.

Specific threats justify specific training. General uncertainty demands general capability.

The problem with predetermined sequences

There is another form of scenario training that concerns me much more.

Sometimes what is presented as a self-defense technique is actually a chain of techniques in which several actions from both people have already been decided.

The attacker performs A.

The defender responds with B.

The attacker is expected to react with C.

The defender performs D.

Perhaps another expected reaction leads to E and eventually F.

The longer this sequence becomes, the more assumptions we are making about the future behavior of another human being.

After our first action, however, the attacker might respond in many different ways. Our movement changes their position, their response changes ours, and every physical interaction creates another branching point.

We might reasonably recognize the initial problem.

We cannot reasonably know several exchanges into the future.

The longer the predetermined sequence, the more of the fight we are pretending to know in advance.

Combinations are not the same as choreography

This does not mean training combinations is useless.

Boxers practice combinations constantly.

A jab-cross-hook is also a sequence, but its purpose does not have to be predicting that the opponent will react in one exact way to every strike. The combination develops the ability to connect compatible movements fluently.

Live training then teaches the boxer when to continue and when to abandon the sequence.

The jab lands differently than expected.

The opponent moves.

The cross is blocked.

The distance changes.

Another opportunity appears.

The practiced combination gives the fighter somewhere to begin, but the interaction determines whether it should continue.

That is very different from a scenario where the training partner has to provide the correct next reaction so that the defender can complete the technique.

A useful sequence connects movements. Choreography predicts the opponent.

The first can help us fight.

The second risks teaching us to remember what comes next rather than understand why it comes next.

Teach why the next action happens

This distinction becomes especially important as training progresses.

If students repeatedly practice:

A → B → C → D

they can become very good at remembering that B follows A and C follows B.

But what happens when the opponent produces something different after A?

The student may know the sequence without understanding the reason for it.

Instead, we can begin with the same first action and allow the opponent's response to determine what happens next.

If the original action still works, continue.

If something stops progress, identify what changed.

Then solve that problem.

The resulting exchange may sometimes look exactly like the predetermined sequence, but what the student has learned is completely different.

One student learned:

After A comes B.

The other learned:

B became useful because this particular condition appeared after A.

That difference is the beginning of adaptability.

Teach why one action leads to another, not simply which action comes next.

The first action has a special job

This leads to another important problem in civilian self-defense.

Something sudden happens.

The student has little time, incomplete information and perhaps no idea what the attacker intends to do next.

At that moment, demanding a highly precise diagnosis may create exactly the wrong kind of problem.

Is this a particular grab?

Which choke variation?

Which hand?

Which technique applies?

Perhaps the first action should not require us to answer all of those questions.

Instead of:

Identify the exact attack → select the correct solution → begin

we want something closer to:

Recognize danger → begin a broadly useful action → receive information → continue.

The first action does not have to solve the entire fight.

Its job is partly to get the practitioner into the familiar process they have trained.

Once movement begins, the situation changes. Contact may occur, the opponent reacts, positions change and new information becomes available. The next action can increasingly be based on what is actually happening rather than what we predicted would happen.

The first action bridges surprise and trained behavior.

From thinking about techniques to using trained behavior

This does not mean the conscious brain simply switches off and “the body takes over.”

The objective is to make the fundamental actions familiar enough that the practitioner does not have to consciously recall every technical detail while under pressure. Attention can increasingly move away from remembering the movement and toward perceiving what is actually happening.

This is another reason depth matters.

If a small group of interconnected movements has been practiced thousands of times under changing conditions, they can become the familiar language through which the practitioner deals with new problems.

The student is no longer trying to remember:

“Which technique did my instructor show me for this?”

They are increasingly recognizing position, pressure, resistance, openings and changes as they happen.

That is very different from memorizing more possible answers.

Prevention should receive the time it deserves

There is also a larger issue when thinking about civilian self-defense.

Every hour spent learning another physical scenario is an hour that cannot be spent somewhere else.

For a civilian, physical fighting is only one part of the problem.

Can we recognize trouble earlier?

Can we become ready without unnecessarily escalating the situation?

Can we maintain useful distance?

Can we position ourselves so an attack becomes more difficult?

Can we leave before physical engagement becomes necessary?

These skills are difficult to demonstrate dramatically because nothing spectacular happens when they work.

But that is exactly the point.

A successful choke defense begins after someone has already established a serious physical problem.

Good awareness, readiness and distance may prevent the choke from ever existing.

This does not make choke defense unnecessary.

It changes how much of our limited training time we should devote to it.

Perhaps civilians need the smallest core

There is an interesting paradox here.

The person who faces the widest range of possible threats may actually have the strongest reason to develop a relatively small core system.

At first, that sounds backwards.

If anything could happen, surely we should learn everything?

But we cannot.

The wider the possible problem space becomes, the less realistic complete technical coverage becomes. At some point, the attempt to prepare for everything through individual solutions becomes impossible.

The alternative is to develop general capabilities that remain useful across many uncertain situations:

Awareness. Readiness. Distance. Fighting ability. Initiative. Position. Adaptability.

Then use scenarios to expose those abilities to different problems and discover where they fail.

For a specialist, the equation changes.

If your profession repeatedly puts you into a small number of recognizable situations, investing deeply in specific solutions may be entirely rational.

For the civilian who does not know whether violence will happen at all, transferable ability becomes much more important.

What should progress look like?

Perhaps this is the real question.

After five years of self-defense training, should progress primarily mean:

“I know many more techniques than I knew in my first year”?

Or could it mean:

“The small number of things I learned in my first year now work in situations where they could not work before”?

Against stronger resistance.

Against unfamiliar partners.

From different positions.

At different distances.

When surprised.

When the first attempt fails.

When the opponent does something we have never practiced.

The technical curriculum may remain relatively small while the practitioner's capability becomes considerably larger.

That is the direction we deliberately pursue in Functional Wing Chun.

We still teach techniques, and we still use scenarios. If a genuinely different problem reveals something missing from the system, we should be willing to add another tool.

But another scenario should not automatically mean another technique.

First understand the problem.

Look for the similarities.

Try to shape the interaction toward something familiar.

Allow the opponent's response to provide information.

Adapt what we already have.

And only when that is not enough should we ask whether something genuinely new is required.

Perhaps that gives us a better way to think about civilian self-defense:

Don't try to prepare for the unknown by memorizing every way it might appear. Build a small, deeply trained system that helps you begin, shape what happens next, and adapt when reality refuses to follow the scenario.