In this lesson, we are going to learn some more effective moves you can keep in mind to deal with an aggressive wrist grab. Wrist grabs are a basic attack, used as a tool to show dominance and to control your movement. Attackers grab wrists to keep you in the intended location as they decide on their next move. While likely to create panic, this situation also gives you a chance to reclaim control before the situation escalates into something worse.

So, let’s take a look at an effective way to handle this sticky situation. First and foremost, get yourself into a stable posture, keep your breath stable, and relax your wrist. The tighter your wrist, the harder it is to turn your wrist. When your hand is held by the wrist, the pressure point – Large Intestine 4 will be exposed in the attacker’s arm. You’ll find it in the thick part of the muscle between the thumb and index finger.

Use your thumb to press this point directly and as hard as you can. This will force the attacker to release your hand quickly. Take this chance to follow up with any of the attacks that you have learnt in the previous posts or flee from the scene, depending on the situation. The ability to release yourself from a wrist grab is an essential part of any remotely decent self-defence arsenal. And the knowledge of pressure points and pressure point techniques can be a very useful addition to this.

While I sincerely hope you’ll never have any reason to use these techniques, I do want to remind you that the most important thing to remember here is to keep your BREATHING steady. A steady breath will help your mind be stable and allow you to respond to the attack instead of freezing in place.

Keep practising these techniques in front of a mirror or with a willing volunteer. Practice will help you develop muscle memory. And in a flight-or-fight situation, this muscle memory can be the difference between saving yourself and falling victim to a physical attack.

If you enjoyed reading about these techniques in self-defence, do check out our other blogs. You can also share these blogs with friends and family who you think will find the information useful.