Everything You Need To Know About Pressure Points In Martial Arts & Self Defense

The use of pressure points in martial arts has always been a contentious issue. Whilst the majority of people believe that pressure point techniques are completely useless, there is still a small community that believe they work.

Without a doubt, there are points on the body which can knock a person out, stun them, or incapacitate them. However, these points usually have to be hit with extreme force and are obvious places you would already try and hit such as the jaw, temple, or liver. This type of pressure point strike is not really debatable since there are hours of footage online with various fighters being incapacitated with such strikes.

The arguments begin when practitioners of arts such as Kyusho-jitsu and Dim Mak believe that their way of fighting can bring an adversary to the floor with a single touch. Not only this, but Kyusho-jitsu claims to have healing powers from touch as well.

Despite these martial arts claiming that a pressure point can bring a man to the floor, it has yet to be demonstrated in a setting other than their own gyms or instructional videos. Even though there are cameras recording almost every professional fight, as well as thousands of street fighting videos, it would seem as if nobody has managed to use pressure point fighting successfully whilst in a combat situation.

In summary, whilst the jury may have been out before the internet became so popular. Due to the mountain of evidence we have against pressure point practitioners, they have no evidence to show what they practice actually works.

What Are Pressure Points?

Pressure points are simply areas where nerves are more sensitive. These can be nerve endings or parts of the body in which various nerve paths originate. Any area with an abundance of nerves can be considered a pressure point and there is a total of 361 in the human body.

Under 10% of these pressure points are targeted by advocates of pressure point self defense. In general, if you are to get hit in any of these areas, it will hurt slightly more than an area that is not a pressure point.

Are Pressure Points Real?

Pressure points are used in a variety of different disciplines, which mostly revolve around the health of the body. Typically you will find the use of pressure points in practices such as acupuncture, other forms, and pain relief and generally trying to solve problems with the immune system.

In this regard, pressure points are real, since people can be helped to recover from a variety of chronic pains and illnesses.

However, pressure points in terms of fighting are likely not real. As previously mentioned, there has never been a knockout in an uncontrolled setting on a participant who was not a uke of the pressure point master.

To compare this to other martial arts. If you stood still against a boxer and let them hit you, they would at least knock you to the floor. If you were to stand still against a wrestler, you would be put on the floor immediately and the same goes for judo. In fact, any other martial art could take a stationary opponent to the ground with almost any technique they wanted.

A pressure point “fighter” could not put an unresisting opponent to the floor, no matter which part of the body they were to touch.

Even martial arts that make reference to pressure points such as karate and kung fu can be used whilst ignoring the concept completely. Kung fu and karate are still extremely viable if pressure points did not exist. You can certainly use pressure points to your advantage, but they must be used with some degree of force and cannot be applied by just tapping someone gently on the hand.

Can You Knock Someone Out Using Pressure Points?

It may be possible, but it’s never been shown so is extremely unlikely. On the internet, you may have seen various charlatan “instructors” showing how to knock people out using only pressure points during a seminar.

Typically the uke is a willing student of the “instructor” and is happy to do whatever is required of them. There is no known footage of a real pressure point knockout from a real sanctioned, or unsanctioned fight. This should be an indicator to show just how effective pressure points really are.

Pressure Points In A Practical Self Defense Scenario

Even if we give pressure points based martial arts the benefit of the doubt, they still leave a lot to be desired.

Granted, pressure points are a supplement to some striking based martial arts, as these include dirty tactics such as digging a knuckle behind the jaw of an opponent. This may seem fairly obvious as everybody already knows this hurts quite a lot more than any other area on the face and is one of the few examples of legitimate pressure point fighting.

However, when fighting in a realistic scenario, it is very difficult to locate and strike a precise point on an adversary. Typically your opponent will be moving around and trying not to get hit. Therefore it is very hard to land something extremely precise such as in between muscles or behind a bone.

In reality, this is a very low percentage way of fighting, and time would be mostly better spent by training something else such as punch accuracy or conditioning.