How To Not Be A Victim

5 Self-Defence Essentials That Could Save Your Life - No Training Required!

Written by Chris James, owner and head instructor at Pentagon Krav Maga

Our streets feel more unsafe than ever…

We can argue about what the statistics actually tell us about violent crime, but that feeling of worsening danger is definitely there for many of us. People are avoiding going out at night, or alone. Just living a normal life, going about your business in public spaces, feels risky and anxiety-inducing. My job is to change that…

If you’re reading this, it’s because you’ve seen one of my ads (thank you!) and you want to know what you can do right now to improve your personal safety. I applaud you for taking some ownership over your own circumstances and I want to help how ever I can. The following article covers the vital non-physical skills that enable you to pre-empt danger and reduce the likelihood that the bad apples of the world will mark you out as a possible soft target. Even better, you can start using these skills right away and instantly make yourself safer from the very next time you leave your home! I’ll also cover some other important basic considerations around use-of-force as we go, for when everything goes sideways and physical action is the only option. And when I say ‘everyone should know’ this stuff, I’m really mean it - regardless of your age or physical ability (or lack of!) these tips can help you keep you safe. Sadly, we need these kinds of skills in our modern world, so please feel free to share this with your teenagers, friends, parents, whoever. The more people see this, the better!

I’ll address the elephant in the room up-front: why, when I’m running a business entirely focused on teaching self-defence, would I give away such valuable information away for free? And I understand the cynicism. There’s a lot of over-hyped BS, time-wasting clickbait, and outright slop (often AI-generated) polluting the Internet, so surely there’s a catch, right? Truth is, most what we’re going to discuss here is A) something we can’t really teach or practice in class but rather that you just need to know and live day-to-day - after all, you can’t exactly show me 10 reps of ‘awareness’! - but also B) it’s just too damned important to keep it pay-walled. So as promised, let’s discuss the five essential, practical steps you can start living from today to make yourself a little safer in what can sometimes feel like a very threatening world.

Awareness is King

Awareness of your surroundings is perhaps the single most important self-defence skill you can possess, and always your first line of defence against random violence. Violence generally does not come out of a clear blue sky, though of course sudden ambushes and honest lapses do happen - to borrow a line from my old instructor, Dave Stevens, ‘even monkeys fall out of trees sometimes’. Being alert to the early warning signs of possible danger can take you a very long way to not needing any of what we typically cover in a class. Please understand that ‘awareness’ is not about being paranoid, flinching at every movement and being scared of your own shadow. It’s simply being present and observant in your environment, with your eyes up and ears open. This way, we can get an early sense of whether trouble might be brewing and take steps to avoid potential flashpoints, be it a rowdy group of lads up ahead coming home from the football, or the shifty fella loitering on a corner, or more innocently, just environmental obstacles, like a crooked paving slab that you might trip on.

…And yet, this crucial skill is often wildly underdeveloped. I’m sure we can all relate to the frustration of encountering someone in our path who seems completely away with the fairies. But let’s be honest with ourselves, how often have you found yourself distracted by your phone when walking in public? I have literally seen two people, both entirely lost in their screens, walk directly into one another in the street (Corby, on a December evening, if you must know!) Even I sometimes still catch myself, despite knowing better, with my head in my phone when I’m in busy spaces. It’s easily done, especially if you’re trying to meet up with someone and checking messages to see whether they meant this pub or the other, or using Google Maps to find your way around an unfamiliar place. The problem of course is that by having your head down and focused on something else, reasonable or otherwise, it takes away your broader situational awareness, and makes it far less likely that you’ll be able to avoid problems. Worse, predatory individuals may well clock that you’re distracted, and mark you out as an easy target. Headphones create a similar problem. You may be able see and look around fine, but your hearing is also a crucial early-warning - you can’t hear footsteps close behind you if your Spotify playlist drowns everything out!

Fortunately, this is something that’s easily corrected from the very next moment you step out of your front door. Obviously, minimising your screen time while in public is sensible (not just from a personal safety perspective, but also just being present in the moment generally!), as is being careful about when you use headphones. Simply walking with your head up and a sense of purpose, instead of staring at your shoes like you’re flinching away from the world or looking completely lost, makes a huge difference. This benefits not just to your awareness, but also your overall confidence and self-esteem. You don’t need to bowl down the street like you own the place, but it projects self-respect and confidence, which enhances the appearance of being a harder target, and also helps you to feel good about yourself - a bit of faking it ‘till you make it, if you will. Naturally, there will be moments when your attention is drawn to some specific task. It might be the navigation of a new city like I mentioned above, but it could also be everyday tasks like loading the shopping into the car, or corralling the kids. These provide relatively unavoidable moments of vulnerability, but even then, we can reduce the risk these activities pose by simply understanding the need to quickly glance around from time to time, and re-establishing your broader situational awareness.

Trust Your Gut

Following directly on from awareness is being in touch with, and trusting in, your intuition. This is something we all possess, and we’ve all encountered a situation where you just get a sense of dread and unease. You might not be able to describe what is creating that feeling, but the feeling is definitely there. This is your intuition sending you a warning - you’ll have picked up on something on an unconscious level that indicates that danger might be around the corner, perhaps literally. An old student of mine shared a perfect example of this: he had entered a pub in Derby with his partner, immediately got a bad vibe from the place which he couldn’t put his finger on, and so they left. This was the right decision - it might have been nothing, but it was better they went elsewhere rather than sticking around to find out.

Unfortunately, it’s tragically commonplace for people to get that intuitive sense of impending threat and then do exactly that: stick around, or in some other way continue with their original course of action, like walking deeper into a neighbourhood giving those dangerous vibes. People making this mistake will tend to rationalise the bad feelings away as being paranoid or overly anxious. Worse, it’s also commonplace for these same people to find the threat was indeed real - a significant proportion of individuals who have survived a violent assault report having a sense of something being off in the minutes before the actual attack occurred. In short, their subconscious had given them a big flashing warning sign well ahead of time, which they ignored, and subsequently learnt too late that the warning was accurate.

Fortunately, this problem is quite easy to resolve: when you get that bad feeling about a place or a situation, trust that feeling and do something about it. I often discuss this with my students, and do a drill known as the ‘bus stop game’ to illustrate the point. Consider a 1-to-10 scale, where 1 is where you feel perfectly safe, with the front door locked, the fire going and the cat snoozing on your lap, and 10 is ‘oh my god I’m in deep-shit trouble call the police’ level of fear. Once you hit 6 or 7 on that scale, you need to be taking steps to remove yourself from that situation and bring that number down to a 4. This doesn’t mean that you need to start kicking and screaming - it can be as simple as moving away from the oddball on the railway platform who is standing a hair too close for comfort. Of course, this scale is highly dynamic. The number can jump or fall in big steps depending on circumstances, and this is part of why having good awareness of your surroundings is so crucial; it keeps you in tune with your own internal sense of the danger posed by your present circumstances.

The essential thing to recognise here is that everyone’s tolerance for risk is unique to them, based on their character, abilities and past experiences. Understand (and apologies for the therapy-speak) that your feelings about a given situation are valid and should be respected, if only by you. You don’t have to explain it or apologise for it - just act appropriately to the circumstances to bring your discomfort level down to a tolerable level. Yes, there will sometimes be situations where it’s not possible or practical to immediately leave an unsettling situation, and in these cases, heightened awareness and readiness is crucial until you’re able to take more effective action. Bottom line: don’t ignore your intuition. It’s there to protect you!

Guard Your Personal Space

Personal space is exactly that: personal. It is your own little patch of ground in which you sit or stand and it belongs to you, and you alone. So the third essential element to effective self-defence is knowing how to manage and protect that space. The main consideration here is that the closer a possible threat is, the less time you have to react should they do something… unexpected. This no different to when you’re driving along with someone riding your rear bumper - if you were to hit the brakes, the likelihood of them going up the back of you is greatly increased, because they simply won’t have time to react. Additionally, someone who is very close can easily grab onto you, and your counter-attacking options become more limited, and require more skill to use effectively (especially if you have been grabbed).

Even setting aside the risk of a chance attack, someone moving too deep into your personal space is an emotionally uncomfortable place to be (see the section above about intuition), even if they’re just a bit special and mean you no harm. And if they do mean harm, physical or emotional, failing to stand your ground and assert your right to your space is going to embolden the aggressor to keep pushing your boundaries. Think of the school bully who ‘gets in the face’ of the wimpy kid with the glasses, to intimidate them and belittle them for the sport of doing so. Because there’s no push-back, the bully perceives that there’s no risk to them, and so they keep victimising the easy targets that won’t (or can’t) stand up for themselves. I was that wimpy kid once, so I relate to this feeling very strongly. Simply put, the more physical space you maintain from the person creating the problem, the easier it is to resolve the situation successfully, whether they’ve actually attacked you or not.

The big problem here is the feeling that being too assertive about your personal space might be seen as rude, or paranoid, or aggressive, or whatever. I get that this is really difficult for people sometimes - we don’t want to rude! This a result of our social conditioning, particularly here in Britain where there is (or at least once was) a strong culture of valuing being polite and accommodating above everything else. Just like the school bully who picks on the smaller kids who don’t stand up for themselves, so criminals and grown-up bullies take advantage of that social conditioning to target overly-accommodating and unassertive adults - people so hung-up on being polite at all costs that they compromise their safety. It is really important to overcome this when it comes to our personal space. This links back to intuition: when you feel uncomfortable, you do something about it, so someone being too close - by accident or design - needs to be confronted. Now, as I’ve already said, ‘confronting’ doesn’t mean that you need to be aggressive or actually rude. I’ve done this in real life a number of times, where someone has been stood too close for comfort, and I have directly stated ‘sorry, you’re too close. Take a step back please.’ It can be that simple, and if they comply, there’s no problem (they might verbalise their disapproval in some way, but so what? More on this later.)

The final question is ‘how much space is enough?’ This, like with your intuition, is very personal and situational. However, I do recommend a general rule here, at least for strangers who aren’t giving you immediate reason for concern: far enough away that you can’t reach out and touch them. If you’re close enough to touch them, they’re close enough to hit you. This for me is the bare minimum. I personally prefer a little more space because someone can reach you with a sudden strike reasonably easily if they’re halfway skilled, by taking a small forward step. Obviously if they’re a friend, hug them closer, and if they’re giving you bad vibes and you suspect possible bad intent, keep them at a longer distance, using your voice and your body language. It’s up to you to know what feels right for you generally, and in any given situation. Remember, listen to your intuition and act accordingly, and remember that you have a fundamental right to your own comfortable personal space. Assert that right!

Bite Your F-ing Tongue

We’ve all been there: someone has insulted you in some way and you’d had that burning desire, justifiable or not, to fire back with a snappy one-liner. Understandable, but such a reflexive response carries real danger of escalating a verbal confrontation into a physical one. Fundamentally, this is a matter of ego, and keeping appropriate control of it when dealing with every day disputes. This especially important for young men, where impulse control is relatively underdeveloped, worsened by a social pressure to ‘step up’ to challenges rather than simply walking away.

We’ll consider a couple of familiar examples of where this can go rapidly, disastrously wrong. The first scenario to consider is the verbal (or physical) challenge: a would-be aggressor cussing you out from across the street, say, or giving every school bully’s favourite, the ‘Dickhead Shoulder Barge’. Actions such as this are intended as a provocation, a proverbial throwing down of the gauntlet with the hope that you’ll react. On the part of the aggressed-upon party, the temptation to rise to the challenge is powerful and entirely relatable: how dare this oxygen-thief impede or insult you in this way?!?! One’s sense of justice and honour demands a response. And so, often without thinking, when say the challenger sneers something like ‘what are you looking at you [insert profanity here]?’, the challenged party snaps back with ‘you, you [profanity of your choice here]?’ Or, if we consider the shoulder check scenario, the reflex might be to wheel around and snap ‘watch where the [!!!!] you’re going!’ And herein lies the problem, because now you’re in a fight. Hands might not have been thrown yet, but it’s coming, as the aggressor will inevitably escalate the situation in response to you. After all, this is what they wanted, and you’ve just given them the excuse they were looking for. By engaging with the anti-social behaviour of the aggressor, you are now trapped in a situation that is difficult to resolve peacefully. Again, for young men it’s even harder, as the emotional (and possibly social) cost of losing face can feel overwhelming and almost guarantees an escalation to violence. Rory Miller, a veteran officer within the American prison system who has written extensively about violence dynamics and whose books are well-worth a read, refers to this behavioural pattern as The Monkey Dance, aping (if you’ll pardon the pun) the dominance games of lesser animals. Wherever possible, we want to avoid getting caught up in the dance.

For a second example, consider a situation where, say, you’ve been in a minor car accident. Someone went up the back of you, or vice versa, whatever, and now the other person has gotten out the car screaming and cursing about what a moronic driver you are and how you should get your eyes checked and yada yada yada. Now, this is a crap situation to be in, for sure. Even minor crashes are expensive and inconvenient and it’s fair to say that both parties in this circumstance are having a terrible day. So even when the ‘aggressor’ in this situation is shouting and cursing, there is room for compassion. It’s stressful, and who knows, maybe this unfortunate soul as other things going on in their life of which this latest shunt is merely the straw that broke the camel’s back. Does it excuse such behaviour? Of course not. But this is neither the time nor place to argue about that. Most decent folks when they’ve lost their rag will feel a sense of shame after they’ve cooled down and try to do better anyway, and at any rate it’s not really your place, as a stranger, to tell them. It’s certainly not going to help if you meet their anger and frustration with your own, because again, while the cause of this conflict is different - driven as it is by unfortunate circumstances rather than the deliberately bad behaviour of others - the resulting escalation will the same. In these situations, having control of yourself, especially if the other party has poor control themselves, is crucial.

None of this is to say that we should allow ourselves to be submissive in the face of a verbal aggressor. As we’ve previously discussed, being assertive, being protective of your personal space and so on are still required. This on its own can be a very difficult thing to do, especially if you’re shy or have poor self-esteem. But what we’re talking about here is more about picking your battles, and biting your tongue when your words are more likely to worsen the situation than soothe it - basically tempering pride with restraint. If someone was standing too close, and you’ve asked them to step back, then all that matters is their compliance. It doesn’t actually matter if they call you a paranoid asshole as they do so, so there’s no need to snap back. Someone shouting hurty words at you from across the road, but not moving closer to you, is not a real threat worth fighting over. Cars are just metal and plastic, so in our car crash example, there is nothing to gain from getting into a shouting match and escalating it an already crap situation a fist fight. While I don’t subscribe to the Present Year cliché that ‘words are violence’ (they are not), they can certainly be the difference between violence occurring, or not. We need to have the self-control to not get caught up in this kind of escalatory behaviour that can so easily turn into real violence, especially once you get to my age. But if your aggressor is really committed to doing you harm, and can’t be talked down, then we need to act. Which brings us neatly onto our final point…

The Last Resort…

Our work and training in Krav Maga almost exclusively concerns the physical aspects of self-defence - the punching and kicking, releases from grabs, dealing with armed assailants and so on - and drilling these movements until they become second-nature. But we must never ever forget that physical action is the last resort of self-defence, when all else has failed. Perhaps my awareness let me down at a critical moment. Maybe my intuition about a situation was in a bit of a grey-zone of ‘is this a problem or not?’ and I judged it incorrectly. Perhaps despite knowing better I engaged with an asshole because I’d already been having a shit day, and suddenly they turned into an unhinged nutjob. (Side note: sometimes the ‘engagement’ could be as trivial as a glance. True story, a colleague of mine in Scotland was cut-up by another road user and simply shook his head and tutted to himself. The other guy saw, and that was sufficient disrespect in this guy’s mind to trigger a road rage incident, which my colleague was fortunately able to disengage from without undue drama. It can be that minor for some deeply fragile, unbalanced individuals.) Finally, you might just have been unlucky - sometimes things just go south and you can’t reasonably have avoided it. This is where the practical skills come into play.

Some of our bread-and-butter techniques are so simple and effective that you can go far with those alone, without even needing to come to a class. These are the open-hand strike to the nose, the kick to the balls, and running away. Nothing more complicated than that. These take advantage of the natural vulnerable points of the human body and can be performed by anyone regardless of age or ability. Those of you of a certain age who remember You’ve Been Framed (the 90’s was the peak of Saturday evening TV and I will die on this hill!) will recall the classic videos of a toddler aiming to kick a football, missing, and catching Dad square in the crotch. So simple and effective, even a small child can drop a man! Obviously we have so much more besides, but these foundations carry us through our entire training careers. Even now, well over 14 years since I started training, I still practice these elementary techniques to keep them razor-sharp. Running also cannot be ignored as a foundational skill. Our ultimate objective in all civilian self-defence is to escape the situation, so having the ability to run fast for a short distance - one or two minutes at max chat should get you to safety in most urban conditions - is well-worth developing.

Keeping all this in mind, it is extremely important that we understand when to deploy physical force. It’s all well and good having the skills, but using them inappropriately is clearly in no-one’s interest. Use-of-force carries physical, legal, moral and social consequences and absolutely cannot be utilised lightly. It is important to know, however, that British law does allow for pre-emptive (i.e. hitting them first) strikes in self-defence. It’s a common myth that striking back only counts as legitimate self-defence if they’ve hit you first, which is dangerous nonsense, because that first hit may very well be sufficient to end your life - we’ve all seen the ‘Dad killed with one punch by a stranger’ stories in the papers. If a 6-foot monster off his head on coke is in your face screaming that he’s going to kill you, it is reasonable to strike first and hard in order to safely escape! You will still need to account for your actions to the appropriate authorities, but the legal justification does exist for using violence in a genuinely defensive capacity, even when striking first. The key is demonstrating the honestly held belief that you were in immediate danger of physical harm, or needed to use force - which must be reasonable - in order to successfully escape. Please note that if you are reading this from outside of the UK, hello and thank you, but understand that your local laws may be more or less restrictive than ours!

All this being said, however, one must not lose sight of the consequences of violence, even if the legal ones end up being negligible. People get hurt, sometimes catastrophically. There might be reprisals from your aggressor and their associates. You still need to be able to look at yourself in the mirror with this possibly life-changing new knowledge about yourself and your capacity to do harm to another human being. And bear in mind the previous section about biting your tongue: a self-defence situation might be harder to justify if the other person is able to claim you provoked them. This is even assuming you successfully executed a physical defence in the first place, which even with all the skills and knowledge in the world simply cannot be guaranteed. Reality is messy and mistakes will happen once the fear and stress and adrenaline of real unrestricted violence bites, and the more aggressive and powerful the opponent, the worse all these factors become. Ultimately, the sad fact is that there is no winning in a street fight, even if (and it’s a big ‘if’) you physically survive, so our overriding goal is to avoid the fight as much as we possibly can. However, if the fight is unavoidable, committed decisive action is the key to getting out in one piece - when there is no other opinion, doing something will always beat doing nothing.

Wrapping Up

I appreciate you taking the time to read this article, and I hope that you’ve found some useful stuff here which you can carry forward into your everyday life. I must reiterate that what we’ve learnt here is relevant to everyone, regardless of age, ability or circumstances. To summarise, here are the key self-defence essentials we’ve explored:

Maintain awareness of your environment: walk straight-backed, with your eyes up and ears open. Spotting potential danger ahead of time is always your first and most critical line of defence. Minimise undue distractions in public spaces as much as you can.
Trust your intuition: when you get that ‘bad feeling’, listen to that feeling and take action to make that feeling go away, even if it’s as simple as moving away to a place that feels safer. You don’t have to be able to explain it (and not certainly not justify yourself to someone else), just trust it and act on it.
Guard your personal space: the closer someone is, the harder it is to react successfully to a sudden attack, so keep unknown people at a comfortable distance, especially if you don’t know their intentions or your intuition is warning you of possible danger! Rule of thumb: if you can touch them, they can hit you, so absolutely no closer than this!
Keep your ego in check. When facing a provocation, bite your tongue, and let rationality take charge rather than your emotions. So many violent confrontations can be avoided by simply not rising to the unpleasantness of others. Being the bigger person and walking away - or staying calm and polite - is almost always going to be the better option.
Finally, never forget that use-of-force is your last resort. Even if you successfully defend yourself, there will be longer-term consequences of all kinds to navigate. However, if you must use force, remember that doing something will always beat doing nothing. And once you’ve done something, escape to safety as fast as you can!

I want to add one final point, regarding drug and alcohol use. Obviously we can’t control what other people indulge in, but it is important to understand how recreational chemicals change people’s behaviour, including our own. I’m not going to sit here and give you a sermon on the ‘evils of drink’ - I like a drink as much as anyone, and besides, you’re an adult, so what you do in your downtime is your business! Just understand the effects drink and drugs have on all of what we’ve discussed in this article. It impedes awareness, dulls our intuition, and makes us more likely to rise to provocation. It disinhibits possible aggressors and makes them less predictable, so they might be more likely to use violence (and more severe violence at that) at the merest hint of an insult, real or imagined. In short, it makes all of the challenges around personal safety worse. So, when you partake, do so carefully, in safe spaces, and in moderation!

If this has been useful to you, and you would like to know more, or to book a trial class with us in Kettering or Market Harborough, please get in touch via our enquiry form. I’d love to know we can help. Please feel free to explore the website as well to find more information about Krav Maga and our classes, and also the blog where I have written on self-defence and Krav Maga topics.

So, wherever you are, I offer you my thanks and best wishes, and hope that You Too Can Walk In Peace.

Inevitable Disclaimer:

This article is reflective of the private opinions, perspectives and understanding of the author, and are not to be considered as an officially-held position of any organisation, including the IKMF and Pentagon Krav Maga. This article cannot be taken to constitute legal advice in any capacity. Pentagon Krav Maga, the IKMF and the author will not held be liable for any action or inaction taken by a third-party as a result of this article.