Tuesday, 14 May 2013

Leverage Strategy No. 5 - The Depress


The fifth and final strategy of the leverage strategies is the Depress. Whereas the Tire strategy sought to utilise the opponents own energy by getting him to blindly overexert himself the depress strategy is not allow him to exert himself enough. In ground fighting when we have an opponent in side control or have the top mount position, part of our strength, our leverage, is the weight we can physically apply without using much strength. A good lock applied to a down opponent who is held down by our bodyweight on top of him can be an easy ‘tap out’ unless he has especially good grappling skills.

In boxing or kickboxing we can depress our opponent through overwhelming him, imagine in a full contact competition you manage to ‘tag’ your opponent with a good shot to the jaw; his knees wobble and his eyes glaze over slightly, he is stunned but not downed. What do we do? We press our attack hitting him with everything but the kitchen sink! We feel the fight is close to being finished so we leverage every bit of energy we have to end it there and then. If we manage to overwhelm him, monopolising his vulnerability we take the trophy and end up the winner.

The opposite side of the coin is that we don’t manage to finish him by him, either being tough or us not targeting our shots well enough. This can turn the tables on us and end up with us being defeated by being burnt out, in effect if we misjudge or misuse our moment we can apply the first leverage stratagem against ourselves by tiring ourselves out. I use this to demonstrate that strategy will not always work which is why we need a range of them in order to get what we want more often.

These then are the FLITE strategies of LEVERAGE; Tire, Recruit, Isolate, Align and Depress. We use the mnemonic T.R.I.A.D. to help us recall them more easily. Study them, observe them and apply them to learn how to better use the techniques and methods you have. Observe others and how they use them and whether they know they are using them or not. Leverage is as I said earlier the key to all strategy, to get what you want with less effort. Remember that they can be applied against someone else or in cooperation with another and that you might also be using them against yourself without realising. Strategy is a fascinating subject especially when it starts to bring results. 

Thank you for reading today's message

Best wishes

Tony Higo
Chief Instructor National Martial Arts Colleges UK
8th Degree Black Belt
www.nat-mac.co.uk
0800 092 0948

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