There are many leverage-based physical skills you can use to defend yourself in an escalated situation. Here you’ll find some exercises to build skills in this area.

When moving into this section, take a moment to caution participants that you’re about to cover some pretty high-intensity, potentially triggering material, and remind them to take care of themselves as needed.

Note on Physical Skills:
In our series classes, we teach a much larger assortment of physical skills than we are currently able to present on our website.  While we offer here a step-by-step how-to for teaching What’s Free, What’s Open, Targets, and Strikes, many of the other physical skills we cover — Ground Fighting, Grab Releases, Blocking, Multiple Attackers, and Weapons — are not presented here.  These skills, as well as the strikes that are described here, are best learned through repetitive physical training with a good teacher.  Especially if you don’t have a solid background in martial or related arts, we strongly recommend that you find in-person teachers to help you learn these skills well before you teach them to others.