Andrea Contents
Breaking the snake’s tooth is one of the phrases that a Filipino martial arts practitioner(FMA)often hears and repeats.
It is one of the key concepts of the Filipino martial arts combat approach!
Breaking the snake’s tooth is the way to indicate the art of destroying/breaking the armed hand of the opponent either in dirty boxing or dirty boxing your hands aggressor (but in general the limbs that attack) and is a characteristic signature of the approach to combat used in Philippine martial arts.
The Dirty Boxing practitioner is taught and emphasized in combat the use of the crunch techniques of punches and elbow blows to the hands of the attacker with the purpose of fracturing them.
This concept is central and is exasperated both by hand naked and with weapons!
If you go to research in the history of ancient boxing even there you will find crush techniques.
One of the parades of ancient boxing, indeed to be precise the first parade that was taught, was to parry the fist with the front part of the head (the hardest part) because not using gloves it was easy to fracture the fingers or knuckles.
Now although it sounds strange as everything should be trained and conditioned!
Often people have a too smart vision of what is really a training of a fighter that is a very hard life made of hours and hours of technical training, physical conditioning, daily practice to build a physique that moves correctly to stimuli and suitable for combat.
The important rule for hitting bare hand:
Hit the hard parts of the body with open hand and the soft body parts with your fist and your hard parts.
This approach is also part of the family of gunting techniques, but the origin of fist destruction techniques comes from the knife.
“If you know how to parry a punch in deviation, it is “easy” to drive the attacker’s fist against your elbow.”
Personally I find it a very evasive approach and by evasive I mean that it is a good approach if you do not know well who you have in front of you and it is crucial as if very fast shots are pulled and it makes no sense to stay in the middle of that vortex of blows but it is better to go out and put in the middle precisely objects or hard parts with the aim of fracturing the limbs that attack.
Training is needed because it is a set of technical movements of deviations and positioning of the elbows and footwork.
The crush with the elbow can be done with a descending movement, horizontal or to rise using the opposite hand to direct with the deviation the blow of the aggressor but a very valid system is also through the masks of which I will talk to you in another post.
Personally I do a mix of the two but masks is the approach I prefer but it depends on your approach to combat.
Like everything it must be trained in sparring but beware that even with gloves it can be dangerous!
Ps. An important detail about the dangerousness of these techniques, in sports such as boxing is forbidden to raise your elbows and you are sanctioned, it is not a case of this.
Naked hand and knife
The guntingmovement is identical with bare hand and with the knife or if you want similar due to the readjustments.
Bare hand the knuckles of the fingers with the clenched fist are like the teeth of a saw if you have the thumb up or the knuckles of the hand clenched if the thumb is down.
The movement is always thought of as if you had a blade that goes to cut even if in some cases it can also be a direct blow and therefore with a less ascending trajectory but more similar to a direct punch blow to the wrist / biceps / triceps.
Even with a knife clearly the movement must be adapted according to the grip of the blade, when the knife is in the Hammer position (point up) or Ice Peak (point down).
The empty hand that performs the parrys directs deflecting the blow and the knife simultaneously cuts the blow of your incoming aggressor with a vertical or horizontal movement that can be to go up or down.
I know you’re probably thinking that it’s hard to apply this technique, and that it doesn’t really do much damage, but I’m sorry you think this because it means you’ve never tried it.
Try applying these techniques during Sparring All the while, train it, make it a natural movement and you will find that despite the 16 oz boxing glove that protects the hand, it hurts and that those who pull will decrease the power for fear of feeling this sensation enter their bones and a shiver go through the brain.
There are many ways to train them but for now what is important is that you understand the importance of breaking the snake’s tooth.
If the snake does not have teeth it loses its ability to bite you and kill you with its poison.
If you break your opponent’s hands or damage them, you’ll give them the ability to use your hands to hit you.
This approach is important because before entering the medium/short range, from a safe distance you can damage your opponent’s weapons and only then enter the Range to hit it in the Primary targets, when he no longer has the ability to use his hands to hit you because he has a damaged hand and has Fear to pull for fear of hurting again.
Ps. Consider that now I told you about the average distance but the same goes for the long distance.
What you need to understand is that the parades simplifying the speech can be:
- active saves
- passive saves
The more active saves you make, the more paradoxically it’s like attacking while defending yourself from shots because you’re parrying but trying to do damage to the attacker.
As I told you consider that there are crush techniques for every distance so also for the lower limbs but in this post I want to focus on the concept of these approach with hand strokes.
Conclusions
What I told you about is a concept and if you want in some way an approach to combat and if you are interested in dirty boxing is a fundamental concept because it is perfectly integrated when it comes to bare hand combat and not sports.
Before approaching if you can break the snake’s tooth first.
Break the snake’s tooth!
Stay Tuned!
Street Fight Mentality
Andrea
