Throwing Manual

Target Target Target Target- -- -Focus Focus Focus Focus
Training Training Training Training

THE ART OF HEAD TRAUMA:
DUMPS, DROPS & THROWS
TFT Thowing Series TFT Thowing Series TFT Thowing Series TFT Thowing Series
v3.0 v3.0 v3.0 v3.0

Chris Ranck-Buhr

2

TFT Group
Publication
R-WEv1
2007

Target-Focus Training Weapons Series, Volume One. All information pre-
sented here is Copyright 2007 by The TFT Group. The terms Target-
Focus, TFT, TFT Group, Cause-State, Effect-State, and the TFT logo are all
servicemarks
sm
2002-2007 of the TFT Group. All rights reserved. No part of
this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without express writ-
ten permission except in the case of brief credited quotations.

1
Important Note Concerning The
Video Presentation
Why is he just standing there? Shouldnt he be
throwing a punch or grabbing you or

You dont expect him to be standing still when
it starts, and neither do we. Instead of attempting
to model all possible initial states of all possible
violent situations, we are choosing to start where
everything changes in your favorthe point where
you cause the first injury.
If we tried to factor in all possible initial states
he could throw at yougrappling from every an-
gle, with one, the other, or both hands (not to men-
tion legs), standing up and on the ground; punching
from every angle with straight punches, hooks, up-
percuts (not to mention chops, claws, hammers,
and elbows); kicking with the foot, shin, knee,
backwards and forwards, out to the side, round-
house and crescent; and we havent even gotten to
every permutation of knife, stick and gunwed
both just get exhausted, the video would consist of
a googol hours (thats a one with a hundred zeros
after it) and it would cost the National Debt com-
pounded through all Eternity.
Its not as useful as youd think.
Instead, what do all these bazillion possible
situations have in common?
Everything changes in your favor when you
injure him.

i
Everything that happened or didnt happen be-
fore the injury is immaterial. Once you injure him,
you are in absolute control of what happens next.
Whether hes throwing a punch or you just got
punched, whether hes pulling a knife or you just
got cut, or whether hes attempting to pull off a
Buddhas Palm Descending from low Earth orbit
once you injure him, the rest is easy.
Because now all you have to do is take out an
injured man.
And how hard is it to beat down a man with a
broken leg?
Starting from the initial injury gives us a
framework within which to illustrate a physical
example of a principle of violence. This maxi-
mizes your ability to learn and dramatically in-
creases your chances for success.
ii
Table of Contents
IMPORTANT NOTE CONCERNING THE VIDEO
PRESENTATION ii
Executive Summary The Big Idea 1
Forward: Head Injury Roulette 2
Introduction 6
The Goal of This Product 8
How to Use This Manual 9
Training Methodology and Safety Issues 12
Why Go Slow When Everyone Knows
Real Fighting Is Fast? 12
Why Go Slow II: The One Thing Missing
From TFT Training 15
Target-Focus TrainingViolence as a Survival Tool 20
The Effect StateInjury & Spinal Reflexes 21
The Triad of Violence: Penetration-Rotation-Injury 24
Throwing: The Hammer of Gaia 28
Techniques or Principles? 30
The Difference Between a Sport Throw
and a Combat Throw 32
Throwing as a Special Case of Striking 34
The Results: Falls, Throws, and Injuries 38
Requirements for Throwing 46
Components of a Throw 52
The Mechanical Definition of Balance 56
The Two Throw Families 58
Slips: The Patch of Ice 58
Leg Sweeps 58
Trips: The Crack in the Sidewalk 61
Direct manipulation of the CG
hip pushes and pulls 62
Base-break throws 63
Drop throws 64
iii
Hip throws 65
Shoulder throws 69
The Power of the Bad Landing 70
Learn more about Target-Focus Training 74
iv

v

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TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
Executive Summary
THE BIG IDEA
In violent situations you want to cause injury.
The primary way to do this is with impact
by striking him.
A throw is a kind of strike.
A throw is an uncontrolled (for him) fall that
results in head/cervical spine and other trauma.
You injure the man, cause him to fall and
then control the fall to maximize that trauma.
Throwing is using the planet as a bludgeon to
go straight for the brain.

2
NOTES
I used to have a weird little hobbycollecting
news stories about people who got knocked down,
hit their head on something, and died. It was one
of those things that started when I began training.
It was the second article I remember reading where
this happened, and that second iteration synced up
with all of the dumping, bouncing, slamming, and
kicking of heads we were modeling on the mats,
always with the typical admonition, Dont do this
if you dont want to kill him.
I dont recall the first article I read, only the
second. It was notable in that dj vu sense, Hey,
Ive seen this before... and the fact that no one
involved meant for anyone else to die. A man exits
a donut shop and is accosted by a beggar. The man
rebukes the beggar; the beggar shoves the man and
the man falls backwards, striking his head on the
doors push bar. He later died of his injuries.
I clipped this one out and began collecting
them, a new one every two, three months or so. I
collected them until I had a fat file folder of brown,
curling newsprint. The sum total of the
ignominious ends of too many lives. And then,
suddenly, I lost all interest in the topic.
Why? It wasnt for a shortage of material,
thats for sure. There was a surfeit of the stuff, as
if there were only so many plotlines for personal
stupidity that had to be played out over and over
again. What finished it for me was that sickening
regularity, and the fact that all the stories began to
Forward: Head Injury
Roulette
Forward Head Injury Roulette
NOTES NOTES

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TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
sound the same:
A & B have a problem. B pushes A. A falls
down, brains self and dies. B is really, really sorry.
The problem was usually one that you or I
could solve given five minutes and a mug of hot
cocoa; sometimes the deadly impetus was pushing,
sometimes it was a haymaker. But the last part
never wavered from what youd expect: head
bounces off something solid, person dies. Like any
hobby, youd leave it as I did; imagine if every
game of golf you played suddenly became identical
to all the games that came before it. Youd quit,
too.
Now, it must be said that many more people
bounce their heads off of things everyday, with no
lasting effects. Ive suffered at least nine
concussions, one of which was from falling off a
roof onto a brick patio (kids, tomfoolery is no
laughing matter); another was from leaving a
bicycle at full speed with no helmet (and no
hands!), though I did end up with a goose egg the
size of my fist on my forehead... Again, this
happens everywhere, every daypeople see lights,
get dazed, or knocked out, often leaving with
nothing worse than a headache. Natures brain
bucket ends up doing its job after all.
So what then, is the difference between all that
comedy and those few unlucky deaths? How can
you keep Americas Funniest Home Videos from
becoming Faces of Death?
Heres the deal:
YOU CANT.

4
NOTES
Theres no way to know if its going to be
comedy or tragedy; if youre just going to knock
his ass out and teach him that lesson or commit
manslaughter. The obvious variables, like speed,
angle of impact, acceleration, and fitness of the
tissues involved are all out of your control, at least
in any meaningful way. In other words, theres no
safe way to bounce someones head off the
concrete. The only meaningful effect you can have
on the above variables is to do it as hard as you
can.
Which is to say that bouncing peoples heads
off the sidewalk, or kicking them in the head as
hard as you can when theyre down, works like
gangbusters when our desired goal is non-
functionalityknocking them senseless, or
unconscious, or dead. We can be assured of
number one, sometimes number two, and
occasionally number three. But we dont get to
pick which its gonna be this time. You can spin
the wheel as hard as you can hand hope the ball
lands someplace usefulbut you cant forget that
one of the colors on that wheel is black, for death.
More than anything else, this single idea colors
how we interact with violence. Its why we tell
you to let the stupid stuff slide, and, a hint: its all
stupid stuff. Its why we tell you not to tear into
someone unless youre comfortable with a terminal
outcome. Its also why I wont tolerate people
putting their hands on me in anger on the street; I
dont want to end up in one of those stupid articles,
the end of everything I am reduced to three column
inches and one very, very sorry jackass.

Forward Head Injury Roulette

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TFT Throwing Series
NOTES

6
NOTES
Introduction
Gravity and hard surfaces probably cause more
accidental injury than every other method
combined. The simple fallsolo, with no help
from another personcan result in something as
trivial as embarrassment, or it can, in the rare
occasion when everything lines up just right, cause
death.
If we add another person into the equation,
someone to shove, trip or otherwise knock down
the victim, we begin to leave the realm of
unfortunate accident and enter into the willful use
of gravity and hard surfaces as a tool for violence.
We are now throwing people.
Predictably, this leads to the creation of
techniques for throwing, whole schools and
disciplines devoted entirely to its study and
perfection. The result is a forest of techniques, the
growth of a thousand treeseach one a more
interesting and impressive throw.
And for all this, a simple fact gets missed,
forgotten:
People get hurt falling down.
A throwno matter how simple or
complicated, how cool or mundaneis only as
good as the injuries it inflicts. The answer to the
question, Whats the best throw? is: The one
that puts the man down so he cant get back up.
This was our starting point for this manual and
video. Instead of demonstrating the crowd-
pleasing super-impressive throws that no one but
the most coordinated, athletic and highly-trained
could ever hope to achieve, we chose to share with
Introduction
NOTES NOTES

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TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
you the base principles that drive all throwing. To
show you how people fall down and get hurt, and
then show you how to help them on their way.
Let's be very clear: we are not trying to
debunk or contradict any training or technique out
there; the goal of this text and video is to educate
you in throwing to cause injury. If you have
previous experience or training, this information
will enhance your skills and give you new ways to
evaluate and apply what you already know. If you
have no experience whatsoever, this information
will give you the fundamental tools required to use
your body as an impact weapon. Either way, our
goal with TFT is to give you the tools to allow you
to come out the other side of a violent situation
alive and well.
There are many places where throwing to cause
serious injury is not desirable or appropriate, the
most obvious being sporting competition and
certain law enforcement applications. In the
competition ring, the goal is to best your opponent
with skill, speed, strength, endurance and
cunningnot by causing life-long, debilitating
injury. Likewise for LE, dumping someone onto
their head in order to break their neck is almost
always entirely inappropriate.
Throwing to cause debilitating injury is
violence. The only time this information is
appropriate and useful is in violent conflicta
situation where the goal of the people involved is
to maim or kill.

8
NOTES Chris Ranck-Buhr The Goal of
This Product
In a nutshell: To keep you from having to
choose between memorizing a thousand techniques
or just giving up on throwing altogether.
If the man is standing up, hes already halfway
there to falling down. All you have to do is know
where, how, and in which direction to knock him
over.
To this end, we will:
- Demystify throwing by removing it from the
realm of special techniques and put it back where
it belongsas a special case of striking in order to
cause a bad fall
- Show you how to recognize the potential for a
bad fall and then make it happen
- Explain how balance works and what you
need to do to take his while keeping yours
- Give you an operational understanding of the
specific injuries youre gunning for
- Break all throwing down into the only two
ways people can fallby slipping or tripping
giving you the toolset you need to build any throw
you need, on the fly, from the ground up.
NOTES
The Goal of This Product
NOTES

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TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
How to Use This Manual
This manual is meant to be used in conjunction
with the video. Either one used alone will lead to
gaps in understanding. The manual itself goes into
great detail on points that are merely mentioned in
the video; likewise, reading the manual without
seeing the principles applied to a human body in
real-time makes the whole affair unnecessarily
abstract.
The video contains all the illustrations you
could ever need to understand the manual, and vice
versa. Writing about physical action is a difficult
half measure. If you find yourself confused by any
of this textespecially when were writing about a
specific throw or throw family, your best bet is to
watch the portion of the video covering the same
topic. This manual is, after all, commentary and
reference for those physical examples.
The manual is the thoughtbut the video is the
action!

10
NOTES

NOTES NOTES

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TFT Throwing Series
NOTES

12
NOTES
Training Methodology and
Safety Issues
Understand that the principles and techniques
illustrated in this manual and video product are for
a singular purpose: to cause serious, debilitating
injury and/or death.
With that in mind, understand that practicing
them is dangerous. To minimize this inherent
danger, you will need to:
Work with a partner who understands and
can successfully model the basic concept
of the Effect State (spinal reflexes)
GO SLOW
Work in an environment that is appropriate
for safe practice (or look out for
Grandmas Hummel collection!)
DID
Why Go Slow When Everyone
Knows Real Fighting Is Fast?
Because targeting is a skill.
It takes practice - you want to practice hitting
targets, dead-on, accepting no errors.
Its hand-eye coordination. Its foot-eye
coordination. Its body-space coordination. Its
being able to successfully apply your body parts in
motion to his body parts in motion.
But even more than that, its the visceral/spatial
understanding of where the targets are on his body,
and how to get to them from where you are.
NOTES
Training Methodology and Safety Issues
NOTES

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TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
This only comes from practice - slow, steady,
and correct - on a real human body.
As far as practice goes, speed only mucks
things up.
Fast practice actually hinders your targeting.
Lets be real about this - on the street, in a
violent situation, youre going to strike him as hard
and as fast as you can. But if you dont have the
underlying skill of targeting, you will miss and be
ineffective.
If you go fast, without the requisite underlying
wetware of targeting, you will not cause injury.
Youll smack him around instead of breaking him.
Reliable, repeatable injury ONLY occurs when
you strike a target.
Remember: Perfect practice makes perfect
performance.
So get to it - but use common sense, take care
of your partner, and slow it down so you can get it
done right!
Why Go Slow II: The One Thing
Missing From TFT Training
Speed. We make you train slow, or, at least not
as fast as you could go if you went full-bore. In
order to understand why we do this, we need to
look at what's required for injury. Debilitating
injury is the result of an interrelated chain of
factors:
You have to drive your entire mass through a
target and follow all the way through with your full

14
NOTES
force and effort.
A shorthand way of stating this is:
Penetrate & rotate through a target at speed.
So that's what it takes to crush a throat, gouge
an eye, rupture a kidney or break a knee. All well
and good until you try to figure out how to train for
that. If you keep it all as is, your 'training' is
actually maiming. Every training regimen has to
remove one or more of those elements in order to
train without putting the practitioners in the
hospital. (At least on a daily basis.)
So if you're going to go fast when you train,
you have to lose something else. But what?
Take away the follow-through.
Almost no one goes here. You still have
bodyweight on a target at speedtrain like this &
even without the follow-through someone's going
to lose an eye.
Take away the target.
This is a typical padded-up sparring session. If
we make the target indistinct, we can run around
and hit each other pretty hardbut the minute it all
lines up right, someone's screwed. You're also
training to cause generic, non-specific trauma:
bumps, bruises, lacerations, etc., and not the kind
that results in a reliable state-change in the man.
Take away the bodyweight.
This is a slap-fight. You're swatting at
targets... but without your mass, there's nothing to
compress the tissue, and effect the kind of volume

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TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
change that breaks, tears, and ruptures anatomy.
Some targets, like the eyes, throat and groin can
still be injured practicing like this, which is why
they'll almost always end up 'off limits' for safety.
The problem is that the result you're really
gunning for is only ever going to occur through
accidentwhen all the elements are present at
speed. In other words, if you remove anything else
other than speed, you're not training to get the
results you need in violence.
And the funny part is that speed is the one
thing everyone walks in the door with. It's the only
thing on the list that you don't have to train. The
other elements, yesno one walks in with good
targeting, or the ability to control their mass such
that they can drive it like a battering ram while
maintaining balance, or the proper mechanics to
really sink it with complete follow through. These
things have to be learned.
And once you learn them, you just add the speed
which you already had to begin withand you end up
with injury, any time, every time.

16
NOTES
In Summary
People get hurt falling down
Throwing is making them fall down on
purpose in order to cause serious injury
In order to practice this safely:
Work with a willing partner who knows
how to fall
Work in an appropriate environment
(matted floors, etc.)

GO SLOW


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TFT Throwing Series
NOTES

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NOTES
Target-Focus Training
Violence as a Survival
Tool
The goal of violence is debilitating injury -
injury that fundamentally changes the normal
functioning of his body and will require medical
attention.
Target-Focus Training is a training
methodology by which you can learn to wield
violence as a survival tool. In short, this means we
can teach you how to injure people.
TFT is not self-defense or a combat style. We
are not interested in defending against an attacker
or competition with a persons skill, speed, or
physical ability. We are not interested in modeling
all the possible variables found in a fight. Instead,
we are only ever interested in injuring people. Real
criminal violence is not about competition, it is
about destruction.
Violence is the use of physical force to cause
an injury.
A violent situation would be one in which the
parties involved are trying to injure each other,
typically with the prevailing party maiming or
killing others.
Simply put, the best way to survive a violent
situation is to be the one doing it.

NOTES
Violence as a Survival Tool
NOTES

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NOTES EFFECT STATE Targets &
Spinal Reflexes
Nothing changes in your favor until you injure
him; once youve injured him all thats left to do is
take out an injured man.
You will be causing injury by striking or
otherwise affecting targets, anatomical weak points
of the hu-man body that are naturally susceptible to
trauma, typically with cascading effects to other
body sys-tems - causing an interruption of normal
function. For example, a blow to the solar plexus
will interrupt normal breathing; he cant walk with
a broken knee; gouging the eyes will blind him.
In addition, there is a single universal effect
that all targets have in common: a spinal reflex in
re-sponse to injury.
A spinal reflex is an involuntary, pre-
programmed movement, specific to each target,
that is acti-vated in response to injury through a
threshold switch in the top of the spinal cord.
It does not involve the brain proper, or
conscious thought. If you kick a man in the groin,
rupturing one or both testicles, he will bend his
knees, put his hands over his groin, and bend
forward at the hips with his chin up - even if he
doesnt want to.
Knowing targets, how to affect them to cause
injury, and the associated spinal reflex grants you
two major advantages:
1. You deny him control over his own body
2. You can predict what he will do nextby
making him do it.

20
NOTES
For example, say youre facing a man who is
bigger than you, stronger than you - hell, hes even
meaner than you. And he has a knife. How could
you possibly overcome his superior size and
strength? His cruel tenacity? And whats he going
to do with that knife?
All those question marks vanish with a hard
boot to the groinhis size and strength are
meaning-less as he momentarily loses conscious
control over his body to execute a picture-perfect
groin reac-tion. Hes still mean - but he cant do
anything with it. His will has been trumped by the
threshold switch at the top of his spine.
And whats he doing with that knife?
Hes a doing a groin reaction is what hes
doing.
Find your next target while hes busy, injure
him again and repeat until satisfied.
In Summary...
Target-Focus Training is:
A training method to learn how to use
violence
Not competition, sport, or fighting
How to use violence to hurt another human
The Effect-State is:
A response to injury
Involuntary reaction
Predictable
NOTES
Violence as a Survival Tool
NOTES

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TFT Throwing Series
NOTES

22
NOTES The Triad of Violence:
Penetration-Rotation-Injury
Techniques are worthless; how many ways are
there to kick a man in the groin?
Theres only one way to kick a man in the
groin - as hard as you can.
You can be in front of him, off to his side,
behind him, standing, sitting, on the floor, etc.
Though there may be thousands of techniques for
getting it done, the base answer is always the same.
As hard as you can!
Beneath all possible violent techniques there
are three common elements. Effective violence
starts with penetration, drives it home with rotation,
and winds up with injury.
Penetration
In order to injure someone with your bare
hands, you need to be near enough to touch him.
Pen-etration gets you to him and through him and
beyond; getting you right on top of him,
dominating his space, driving him off balance and
maximizing kinetic force for injury. You want to
penetrate so youre standing where he used to be.
Rotation
This is the follow-through; rotation is how
youre going to take his balance and beat him down
with it. Its the drive all the way through the ribs
you just broke by penetrating, above.
Injury
The ultimate goal of violence; this is what you
get when you penetrate to a target and rotate
The Triad of Violence

23
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
through it. And then hes locked into spinal
reflexes as discussed above.
Injury is the light at the end of the tunnel. It is
the bright hole in a dark shroud of chaos; it is the
way through, the way out, the way back home to
your loved ones.
Lets take a look at how the three snap together
into the triad of violence with the following
example:
You step in and punch him in the solar plexus,
then grab his hand and break his wrist, slamming
him down into the concrete.
This is really two iterations of penetration-
rotation-injury:
You step in (penetrate through his space) &
punch him (rotating your torso to throw the punch
and follow all the way through) in the solar plexus
(thereby causing an injury to the target).
You then grab his hand (penetrating) and break
his wrist (with rotation & complete follow-through
to cause the injuryas well as additional injuries
from the fall).
Effective use of violence as a survival tool will
always include this triadit powers everything
from striking to joint breaking and throwing. It
exists in the use of extraneous tools like knife,
stick, curb, etc. The triad of violence makes it all
work for you.

24
NOTES
In Summary...
Violent techniques have three components:
Penetration (maximizing force)
Rotation (follow-through)
Injury

The Triad of Violence

25
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NOTES

26
NOTES
Throwing: The Hammer of
Gaia

Throwing is one of those things that
simultaneously delights and intimidates a crowd.
On the one hand, it looks greata smaller person
steps through a larger person and then, as if by
magic, hurls the bigger man to the ground in a
mysterious flurry of limbs and blurred motion.
We all know theres no way the smaller person
could pick up the larger; that means it must be
either magic or highly advanced skill. And this, of
course, is the intimidating partpeople
immediately assume they cannot hope to replicate
what they just saw without years of work, bulging
muscles, robes covered in black sashes with gold-
fringed epaulets, and, not to mention, a law-
professor-load of certificates papering their walls.
Nothing could be further from the truth
throwing is as simple as knocking people down.
Its doing the work of a patch of ice or a crack in
the sidewalk.
Its simply recognizing when people are
windmilling at the top of that last stair and giving
them a good, hearty shove down the flight. What
happens next is just the laws of the universe
screwing with them.
All throws, from the simplest takedown to the
most complex example of free flying lessons arise
from the same set of rulessimple, easy rules
anyone can remember, recognize and master.

NOTES
Throwing The Hammer of Gaia
NOTES

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TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
And the best part is, between gravity and the
ground, youve got a fool-proof weapons system at
your disposal thats always on and everywhere you
go.

28
NOTES Techniques or Principles?
Smooth performance of throws does not
involve 'doing a technique' but rather recognizing
opportunities to manipulate balance into a fall,
seeing a through-path from where you both are
now into either a slip or a trip.
If he's already moving, he's already falling
saving it is a matter of him getting his legs back
under him. Sticking your wooden shoe in his
gears, either by preventing him from getting his
feet under him or knocking him down, is
technically a throw.
With two bodies in motion you don't really
have time to sort through a mass of techniques
looking for just the right one you need to be able
to take full advantage of where you're both going to
break his structure and put him down.
This ends up looking very much like a specific
technique; many of us have had training partners
ask, "Can you show me that throw you just did?"
This becomes difficult because what happened was
correct for that specific set of circumstances that
one time, it was merely the recognition of
opportunity followed by the application of a few
simple rules.
If I show you three throws, then you know
three throws. Sometimes they'll work, and
sometimes they won't. They'll work best when the
initial state was amenable to that particular throw;
they'll fail when you try to shoe-horn it into a set of
circumstances that are not favorable to pulling it
off.

Techniques or Principals

29
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
If, instead, I show you:
1. How to recognize the opportunity for a
throw, and
2. The few simple rules to take advantage of
that opportunity,
well, then you know every throw you'll ever
need in a combat situation.
Of course, 'knocking people down' isn't nearly
as cool as knowing 50 different throws that you can
practice by the numbers, one through 50, for an
admiring crowd. But being able to put anyone in
the world down so they can't get back up is far
more effective and, training-wise, far more easily
achieved. It's the difference between a two-step
process to learn every throw and a 50-step process
to learn 50 throws.
Just as emptying a clip into a man's chest isn't
as 'cool' as trick-shooting a slug through a tossed
50-cent piece, effectiveness and looking good are
often at opposite end of the spectrum.
One is good when ego is involved and you're
making friends and influencing people, the other
when someone wants to kill you.

30
NOTES
The Difference Between a
Sport Throw and a
Combat Throw
The following facts hold true no matter
what the tool:
In a nutshell, its the end result.
The goal of a sport throw is to up-end your
opponent, to change the orientation between the
two of you to one that puts you in an advantageous
position while simultaneously putting him in an
awkward one. Imagine any number of wrestling,
Jiu-Jitsu, or mixed martial arts takedowns. The
players are typically looking to disrupt balance,
take each other off their feet and down to the
canvas in such a way that facilitates the setting of a
painful joint lock or choke-out technique in order
to subdue and win the match.
Youre looking to turn an equal situation, both
of you standing, into an unequal oneone guy
down with the other lording it over him.
The goal of a combat throw is to land the man
on his head to directly injure the brain and neck.
Youre looking for everything from a fractured
skull with a concussion to severe head trauma
(bleeding in the brain) and a broken neck. In other
words, youre putting him down in such way that
he cant get back up. Think in terms of traumatic
sports injuries and the rare instances in which a
tackle or sport throw goes terribly wrong and
someone gets a broken neck. In terms of the sport
this is an awful accidentit wasnt supposed to
end like thisbut in terms of illustrating what we
want out of a combat throw, these are the rare
Sports Throw vs Combat Throw

31
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
instances where everything went exactly right.
This is taking advantage of circumstances to
use his own mass as a hammer to break him against
the anvil of the entire world.
The desired outcome colors the execution of
the throw. In sport, throws are not meant to cause
career- or life-ending injuries; a lot of care and
attention is given to throwing safely, to ensure that
the man can tuck his head, roll with it, and not get
unduly wrecked in the process. This necessitates
large arcs to create enough space and time for your
opponent to land the throw successfully. In
combat, throws are meant to cripple and kill. To
this end they need to be targeted, e.g., aiming the
head at the ground, and need to be sharp and tight
to ensure that there is no slop or room for the other
guy to weasel out of the desired impact.
The state of the man being thrown also changes
the manner of execution. For a sport throw, youll
be doing it to a man who has all his powers and
faculties at his disposalyou will be competing
strength to strength, speed to speed, technique to
technique. Miss your timing and you could end up
getting countered. This changes the nature of the
throw into one that is essentially a struggle for
balance; the advantage will tend to go to the
superior competitor. When your life is on the line,
you cant afford to enter into such a strugglefor a
combat throw, you must start with prior injury.
The injured man will not have his powers and
faculties at his disposal. This changes the basic
nature of the throw from a struggle for balance to a
purely mechanical exercise of dumping him on his
head. Without the struggle, you are free to
concentrate on technical accuracy; you have the

32
NOTES
opportunity to set up and execute the throw without
any say or undue resistance on his part. There will
be no countering, or fancy break-fall. Just
wreckage.
While combat throws are not appropriate for
competitionpurposely landing an opponent on
his head in an effort to break his neck obviously
violates the rules of good sportsmanshipalmost
all good competition throws can be turned into
combat throws. Its really as simple as:
1) Start with prior injury,
2) Tighten it up, and
3) Specifically target the head.
Tighten it up means removing the space
between the two of you to shorten the arc of the
throw, reducing his ability to tuck and roll with it.
You want to remove as much slack as possible; if
youre moving and hes not, then youve got space
and slack between the two centers of gravity. What
you want is a nice, tight integration of your two
centers of gravity into a single systemwhen you
move, you move him, too.
Specifically target the head means to aim it at
a spot on the groundand then drive it straight into
that point. Its the X youre going to bounce his
head off of. This is the opposite of the typical
competition throw approach of up-end the
opponent to flat-back him on the mats. In one,
youre simply looking to alter his orientation. In
the other youre looking for head trauma. Its
enormous target (the entire body) vs. small target
(the head).

33
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
A great example of this can be seen in the
classic hip throw. For competition, youd want to
round it off at arms length and roll him around
your hip in a large arc so he can transition over
onto his back and hit the mats flat. In combat
youd want to keep it tight, in close, so you can see
-saw and pop him into the air for just enough hang-
time to allow you to ride him down, dropping to
one knee as you pile-drive the top of his head into
the concrete.
Unfortunately, most combat throws make for
terrible and inappropriate competition throws, for
all the obvious reasons cited above. The two skill
sets do have a lot in commonthey both require
coordination, timing, and training, chiefly for the
physical understanding of how to take someones
balance while maintaining your ownbut in the
end, truly, they are worlds apart.
Throwing someone to not hurt them is a very
different thing from throwing to kill.

34
NOTES
Throwing as a Special
Case of Striking
When looking at throwing from a technique-
based perspective, it appears to be its own
discipline, removed from other aspects of violence.
A throw looks like nothing else its much easier
to see the connection between striking and joint
breaking. Stomping an ankle looks like a strike, as
does hammering the back of an elbow to break it.
But a throw... a throw must be a discrete
technique, unlike any other method of injury, right?
In reality, throwing is nothing more than a
special case of striking. Striking, as we define it, is
applying bodyweight in motion through an
anatomical target in order to break it:
Striking = penetration + rotation through a
target
When that target is a joint at the pathological
limit, i.e., its at the end of its range of motion and
cant bend any further in that direction, we get a
joint break:
Joint breaking = penetration + rotation
through a joint
For throwing, the only change is in the target
the target ceases to be a piece of anatomy and
becomes a component of balance:
Throwing = penetration + rotation through
structure
With the goal of disrupting balance to initiate

Throwing as A Special Case of Striking

35
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
and accelerate a fallan aimed and assisted
collision with the ground, typically isolating a
specific piece of anatomy or cluster of targets (like
the head) for that collision. Instead of smashing
ourselves through that anatomy (as in a vanilla
strike) were going to smash it against the ground.
We can also look at this progression from the
striking side:
Striking applied to a target causes injury
Striking applied to a joint at the pathological limit
breaks it
Striking applied to structure is a throw
With the end of the throw resulting in injury.
The question, of course, is wheres the body
weight? We know that in a typical strike (like a
shin through the groin) you dont just want to
swing your leg up, you want to drive your entire
mass through those testicles, his pelvis, his center
of gravity, with everything youve got. Thats
what causes anatomy to fail and gets an injury. So
wheres your body weight in a throw? Your body
weight will typically be used as a battering ram to
buckle his structurethink of kicking his legs out
from under him, tripping him or body-checking
him to knock him off balance (or maybe a lotta-bit
of all three). When he falls it will be his body
weight in motion that smashes his own anatomy
against the ground. If you dump a man on his
head, his mass becomes his own worst enemy. To
pile on even more, you can use your own mass as
wellriding him down as he fallsso he hits as if
he weighs twice as much.

36
NOTES
Rotation also plays a key part, both in taking
his balance and in accelerating his fall. If you
shove someone off balance in a straight line
simply pushing them backwards its a very easy
thing for them to figure out where to put their foot
down behind them to catch their balance. So easy,
in fact, its an automatic response they wont even
have to think about. Their body will naturally
move and set the foot in exactly the right place
every time. Instead of pushing him straight back,
lets say you grab the injured man by the hair and
pull his head around and down to your hip and then
towards the ground behind you in a descending arc
or, even better, a decreasing spiral. With this
added rotation and the body has a harder time
figuring out where to put the foot, and even if it
gets it right its only right for that small moment
before the CG gets twisted past the base again.
Because you used a descending, decreasing spiral
his weight will make that foot stick, e.g., he wont
be able to pick it up and place it again to catch his
ever-changing balance situation. In short:
Linear loss of balance > easy to catch
Rotational loss of balance > difficult to catch
It also means we dont have to travel as far to
take his balance. If you shove him backwards three
(linear) feet to make him stumble he ends up three
or more feet away from you and now you have
to play catch-up and run after him to keep him off
balance or effect a throw. With rotation, you can
easily describe a three-foot arc around you, more
than enough to take his balance and effect a throw
without having to take a single step. This
allows you to throw in close quarters as well as
stay right on top of him once you put him down.
NOTES
NOTES

37
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES

Rotation also allows us to accelerate his fall.
Left to his own devices, hell go down at the
gravitational constant. With rotation, we can make
him fall faster, and that means hell hit harder. If
you take him through an arc when you throw him,
youll actually accelerate him into the throw; for
maximum effect youll want to use that
descending, decreasing spiral throwing him on
an arc that gets tighter, curling in on itself, to get
the most out of rotation. This idea can readily be
seen in drop, hip and shoulder throws where weak
or large rotation makes the throw seem to lose
steam halfway through. When done with a nice,
tight spiral the man picks up speed and gets
whipped into the ground instead of simply falling.
This allows you to load him with as much kinetic
energy as possible before he lands. The more kE
he has in him, the more he breaks when he hits.

In Summary
Throwing is a special case of striking
Instead of striking a target, youre striking
through his structure to make him fall
Injury occurs when he hits the ground

38
NOTES
The Results: Falls,
Throws, and Injuries

Why Bother?
This is actually a great question. Throwing
sure does look like a lot of effortand while any
actual exertion is an illusion, it does take a little bit
of know-how, as well as some set up. Why go to
all that effort when you could just punch him in the
throat and be done with it?
Well, like most things in violence, were in it
for the injury.
Throwing people into the ground gives us some
big payback for that (small) effortnamely, head
trauma. Its the only way, absent a baton or
firearm, that we can get right at that brain. Were
going for concussion, skull fracture, and serious
head injuriesbleeding in the brain. To be blunt
about it, we throw people to crack their skull open
and kill them.
On the way there well get some other injuries
as well. Going head-first into the ground with all
his bodyweight over him (ass over teakettle) isnt
going to do his neck any good, so we can gun for
some cervical injuries as well. Not to mention the
added bonus injuries hell get when he reaches
out to break his fallsprains, dislocations and
breaks of the hand, wrist, elbow and shoulder to
name a few possibilities; we can also end up with
the same kinds of injuries in the legs, all the way
up to broken bones.
Lastly, injured people dont operated well on
the ground (not that theyre any good anywhere
The Results Falls, Throws and Injuries

39
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
elseits just worse for the downed man; harder to
get his bodyweight into the equation, etc.). The
standing person can very easily engage more
bodyweight against the downed manthrough
stomps and knee drops, upping the severity of
further trauma.
So, a single strike applied through his structure
can get you multiple injuries, some life-
threateningly serious, put him into a vulnerable
position and allow you to really ramp up whatever
you do next. Thats a lot of gain for a single strike.
The punch to the throat, on the other hand, gets you
a single injury that will take time to manifest fully.
Throwing is the injury multiplier; it magnifies
your efforts.

Its Not the Fall, But the Sudden Stop at
the End
Injuries from simple falls can be fickle things.
Sometimes you bounce back without a scratch,
and sometimes youre dead. A common thread
in the news, if you pay attention over a long
enough time, is the odd fatality resulting from
a relatively trivial altercation. The stories are
always the same: A and B get into a
disagreement and go to blows, B catches A
with a solid right hook to the head, A falls
down, brains himself on the street and later
dies. This is almost always the result of an
uncontrolled fall, that is, the man lost
consciousness because of the initial blow to the
head and fell to the ground without trying to
catch himself, striking his head on the

40
NOTES
concrete. The initial injury is usually small
a concussion but directly contributes to the
major injury that ends up killing the man,
usually intracranial bleeding. For every one of
these tragedies, there have to be thousands
upon thousands of fistfights that dont result in
death, legions of heads bouncing off of hard
surfaces with no lasting ill-effects.

There are two important lessons to take from
the information above:

1. Throwing is not trivial it actually
kills people, and

2. In order to get the results we want, we
need to throw injured people.

This means that if you dont want to kill the
man, dont knock him down and bounce his
head off the sidewalk; if you do want to kill
him, then make sure hes injured ahead of time
and that his fall is, for him, uncontrolled.

This is the essence of making an accident
happen on purpose its sussing out all the
awful things that lined up just right when
people died and turning them into a checklist.

Injuries Typically Associated With Falls

Unless hes unconscious, the man will usually
try to catch his fall by extending his hands and

41
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
arms. For throws that are untargeted (that is,
not isolating the head for impact) and/or
otherwise restricting his ability to catch his fall
(dislocating his shoulder as you throw him),
the initial impact will be to the hands and arms,
making serious head injury less likely. It does,
however, make injury to the extremities highly
likely:

- Sprained or broken fingers and/or wrist(s)

- Sprained or dislocated shoulder

- Broken clavicle (collar bone)

The last two (shoulder injuries) are the results
of landing on either a locked-straight arm
(elbow completely extended) or the shoulder
itself.

Should the torso strike the ground as a result of
failure to catch the fall, we can momentarily
stun the diaphragm:

- Wind knocked out

If he lands face-first, whether as a targeted
throw or happenstance, we can cause cranio-
facial injuries:

- Broken nose, teeth, zygomatic arch
(cheekbones), mandible (jaw)

42
NOTES
If he lands on his head, with his body weight
either driving him down or transitioning over
his head after it strikes the ground, we can
cause neck injuries, leading to impairment,
and, in the most energetic and severe cases,
death:

- Sprained, dislocated or broken cervical spine
(neck)

The most serious injury, and the one usually
targeted for, is traumatic brain injury (TBI). If
we understand that for the purposes of combat
the goal is the shutdown of the human brain, it
stands to reason that hurling it against the
planet is the most direct way, without the aid
of other tools, of achieving this goal. It is the
primary purpose of throwing we hope for it
in untargeted throws, we make it happen in
targeted ones. TBI includes:

- Concussion (for impairment and loss of
consciousness)

- Intracranial bleeding (for impairment, loss of
consciousness and death)

For our purposes a skull fracture is a side-
effect of TBI. Its not a necessary component.
The target is the brain, and if the case gets
cracked while we wreck it, thats just fine... but
its not the goal, but rather a symptom of the
goal.


43
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
A typical combat throw is going to differ from
a simple fall in that the man will be injured
before throwing, increasing the chances of
further injury. An untargeted combat throw (a
simple takedown) will very often result in
several of the injuries listed above a
sprained wrist, a jammed shoulder and a mild
concussion, for example. Targeted throws,
obviously, cause a specific injury, or cluster of
injuries, to the targeted anatomy. If you up-
end the man and drive him down into the
ground face-first, for example, you can expect
cranio-facial, cervical spine and brain injuries.
Again, the entire point of a targeted throw to
begin with.

While it is possible that the man may break
long bones in the arm(s) (radius, ulna,
humerus) or sustain fractures in the feet, ankles
and/or knees in throws that toss him ass over
teakettle (thereby accelerating the feet/knees
through a large arc and into the ground), were
not going to rely on such things. Yes, they can
happen, and if they do well gladly take
advantage of them. In the end theyre unlikely
side-effects to the injuries were after and
those injuries will be more than sufficient to do
the job.

Done right, hes not getting back up. Broken
arm or no.

44
NOTES
In Summary
The goal of throwing is debilitating injury
These injuries are the same ones that can
occur in simple falls:
Broken or sprained fingers and/or wrist(s)
Sprained or dislocated shoulder
Broken clavicle (collar bone)
Momentary inability to breathe (wind
knocked out)
Sprained or broken cervical spine (neck)
Traumatic Brain Injury (concussion,
intracranial bleeding)
Targeted throws make specific injuries
much more likely

NOTES
NOTES

45
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES

46
NOTES
Requirements for
Throwing
Ideally, throwing a man is as easy as
recognizing that the opportunity for a fall exists,
and then stepping in, and through, to exploit a set
of advantageous circumstances to make that fall a
reality, and to make it as bad for him as possible.
If a man is leaning or stepping in a certain
direction, its easier to effect a throw that keeps
him moving in the direction hes already going, for
example, you just need to trip or shove him to turn
that motion into a fall. On your end, there are three
things you must do to make this work as simple
and effective as possible: you have to want to
seriously injure him (intent), you have to injure him
before (or while) going for the throw (prior injury),
and you have to use your mass to effect the throw
(body weight in motion).
Intent
You have to want to plow him into the ground
with everything youve got and bounce his head off
the planet to shut him off. If youre worried about
killing him, youll botch the throw. Just remember
all those articles weve looked at the in past (and,
sadly, well see in the future) about people getting
involved in monkey politics, striking their head on
the ground and ending up in a coma or dead. This
is what youre gunning for. Go for it 100% or not
at all. Going after it half-hearted or half-assed can
get you killed. Remember, throwing without a
resulting injury is horseplay. Its worthless to you
in a life-or-death situation.
If you dont want him to strike his head on the
planet, then dont throw him. Period. Throwing,
Requirements for Throwing

47
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
as a method of causing fight-ending injury, isnt a
parlor trick that somehow dissuades a would-be
murderer from finishing the job on you just
because you tossed him. If youre throwing him in
an attempt to impress him with your skill and cow
him into submission then you better pray that the
situation was truly social in nature, and all part of a
nasty misunderstanding... and even then, what good
is it to make him afraid if, for the sake of argument,
hes armed with a firearm?
What would you do if someone made you fear
for your life while you had a gun in your pants?
What makes you think hell do anything
different? Human is human, and knowing that, you
need to keep things streamlined and throw for the
right reasons. If youre going to throw someone
its to knock them unconscious, kill them or make
it otherwise impossible for them to get back up.
Youre throwing them to do the most damage
possible with your bare hands. Youre throwing
them because its exactly like smashing their skull
with a concrete club that weighs as much as they
do.
If you wouldnt have the wherewithal to crush
their skull with a chunk of concrete on the end of a
steel pole, swung overhand in both fists, then you
shouldnt be throwing them. If such a thing seems
inappropriate, you shouldnt be doing violence at
all.
Lack of intent is a self-fulfilling prophecyif
you dont want to hurt him, you wont. Youll pull
it, youll hesitate to land him on his head, youll
blow it. And for the other guy, thats an
opportunity to do it to you. Its his chance to pull
the gun you didnt know he had and use it to save

48
NOTES
his life by ending yours.
Go in with the intent to wreck him, and you
will. Youll put him down so he cant get back up,
or do much of anything at all. Which is exactly
why you bothered to throw him in the first place.
Prior Injury
No one wants to get thrownputting it on the
uninjured man is wrestling. Injury ensures
compliance and negates intelligent break-falls &
slap-outs; unless hes unconscious hell still
reflexively reach out to stop his fall, getting you
those extra injuries to the proffered limb. The
injured man doesnt actively resist the throw (in
any meaningful way, in other words, the injured
man cant counter) and he doesnt do a nice tuck,
roll and slap-out at the end. He just eats concrete.
Injury is the difference between throwing a
wild animal or a sack of potatoes. Throwing a man
who is in full control of his body is a difficult and
dangerous feat. Its not impossibleit just
requires strength, training, and skill. Throwing a
man who is injuredbusy reacting to being
broken, semiconscious or on his way to being
unconsciousquickly reduces things to the physics
of the situation. It leaves you free to concentrate
on the throw proper, how best to angle, drive and
land the throw to get the worst outcome for him.
Look at it this way: which would you rather do
if your life depended on the outcome? Try to
throw a man whos going to actively resist you or
knock down a blind man?
Prior injury means youre always throwing
injured people. And thats just easy work.

49
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
Body Weight in Motion
Throwing, as a special case of striking, means
all the usual rules still apply. Its never going to be
mass against massyoull apply your mass against
a leverage point in his structure to get him moving,
falling, and then add your mass in motion to his to
accelerate his fall.
This is also a backhanded way to keep you
from using your strength against his, or against his
mass or inertia. If youve done your job properly
to this point, the strength-to-strength problem
should already be solvedprior injury should have
taken care of that. But people tend to go stupid
biomechanically speakingin the realm of
personal combat and forget what their body knows
naturally. To the point, ask someone to move a
refrigerator and theyll tend to employ their entire
mass, using the power of their legs, squatting low
to get their center of gravity below the fridges,
using their arm strength to clamp themselves to the
fridge. Ask them to move a person and its all
monkey-slapping with the prime movers being arm
strength. Because what were talking about here
has nothing to do with social dominance, and
everything to do with unbalancing and moving a
mass, your best bet is to throw that injured guy the
same way youd tip a fridge. Use your massand
the chassis of your legs and hipsto get him
moving while saving your arm strength as the
clamps to tie the two of you together.
In other words, youre going to hang onto him
with your hands and arms, but youre going to
throw him with your entire mass.

50
NOTES
In Summary
Throwing requires:
Intent (the desire to cause injury)
Prior injury (its easier to throw an injured
man)
Body weight in motion (to break his
structure, displace him, and drive the
throw)


51
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES

52
NOTES
Components of a Throw

If we think only of the most base requirements for
a throw intent, prior injury, and body weight
we have you simply shoving an injured man to the
ground. Its almost the oldest trick in the book.
(The oldest trick in the book is where your friend
gets down on all fours behind him as you shove so
he trips over your friend and falls over backwards.)
While not bad theres a reason its still in the
book its not optimal, either. Theres nothing,
other than perhaps the prior injury, that says he
couldnt conceivably catch his balance and arrest
his fall, or fail to break anything important when he
hits the ground... all weve done with those base
requirements is shove him into accident territory.
With prior injury and a good shove chances are
hell smack his head. And chances are he wont.
By failing to turn this accident into a purpose we
have left the outcome up to chance.
And thats not good enough if lives are on the
line.
A real combat throw is more than a happy
accident its making the accident happen in the
worst way possible for him. Youre going to get
things going with intent, prior injury, and body
weight in motion, and then youre going to finish
them off by breaking his structure, taking his
balance, aiming a target at the ground, and
accelerating his fall.

Break his structure.
All things being equal, hed prefer to stand up
with his center of gravity stacked up on top of his

53
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
legs. When everything sits nice and neat like this
CG over legs over base he can easily
maintain his balance and move his weight around
at will. You want to break his structure knock
one of these pieces out of alignment. This can be
buckling his leg so he starts to collapse, or
knocking his CG past his feet (base) so things
arent stacked up so nice and neat anymore. When
done properly, youve interrupted the normal
relationship between his CG and his base such that
he cant reacquire a nice stable system of balance
without stepping, moving, or laying down, i.e., it
doesnt count as broken structure if he can simply
shift back into balance.
Imagine kicking a leg out from under a stool,
or kicking the stool over. This is your bodyweight
striking through either his base or his CG to get
him moving or make him vulnerable to a fall.

Take his balance.
Start the fallthis usually happens in
conjunction with breaking his structure, but not
always. It gets its own entry so you dont forget it.
Take his balance and dont inadvertently give it
backuse it to wreck him. In other words, dont
break his structure and then grab onto him and hold
him up so that he comes back into balance. Keep
him moving into the throw, with the new
equilibrium of balance occurring when he smacks
down at the end.

Aim the target at the ground.
Isolate a single body part for impact usually
the head, but can also be a single shoulder (from

54
NOTES
the side), the scapula (shoulder blade), the coccyx
(tailbone), among others. Aim, in this case, is a
two-part deal, with an X marks the spot on the
ground and a projectile that youre hurling at that X
(the anatomical target). Your job is to make sure
the two connect as precisely, and as hard, as you
can.
Its better to have a specific target (landing
surface) in mind than notyoull be more likely
to get the injuries you want on the street & more
likely to give your reaction partner direction for
their break-fall on the mats. Simply tossing people
with no idea of how theyll land tends to result in
no injury on the street and serious injury on the
mats. Murphys Law. Youre the one doing the
throwyou should know how hes going to land.

Accelerate his fall.
Add your body weight & rotation to the mix.
This is one of the features that makes throwing so
devastating: youll have his body weight in motion
for the strike, and can add yours in as well. This
doubles his mass for the fall & final impact.
Imagine youre striking people while weighing 400
pounds with fists of concrete. Thats the picture.
Also, accelerating him into the throw screws with
the timing of his catch-fall reflex. Chances are his
arm will be late for the party, though his brain will
get there just in time.
Using these specific protocols, we can turn any
shove-and-fall accident into an effective combat
throw with minimal training. If you grab the
injured man by the hair, or neck, and buckle his leg
by driving through it with your own and then ride
his head down into the concrete with your entire

55
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
mass either shoving it away to accelerate it to
bounce it off the ground or simply landing on it
you have a targeted and controlled sequence of
events that make serious head injury as likely as
possible. Now youre leaving nothing to chance,
replacing all the variables with constants.
Instead of shoving and hoping for the best,
youre going to take charge of the situation to do
your worst.

In Summary
Throwing consists of these four components:
Break his structure
Take his balance
Aim the target at the ground
Accelerate his fall

56
NOTES
The Mechanical Definition
of Balance
When we say structure were really talking
about upsetting the mans balance by changing the
relationship between the two components of
balance, the base and the Center of Gravity (CG).
The base is defined by the area under and between
his feet; the CG is, for our rough purposes right
now, located just above the pelvis. So, as long as
his hips (or most of his mass) stays above his feet,
hes fine. Should either one of those move such
that his CG is no longer over his base, hell start to
fall. (And try to regain his balance by stepping to
move his base back under his CG. This is typically
something well take advantage of either by
making it impossible for him to step (sweeping the
leg or driving him down so he cant step, or, in a
hip throw where well supply the base, giving us
total control over it) or otherwise intercepting the
foot.)
This means we have two ways to go: we can
either blast his base out from under his CG, or push
his CG so it falls outside his base. And so we have
two basic families of throws: slips and trips.
Slips are just like the patch of icethe feet
shoot out from under the CG and he falls.
Trips are like the crack in the sidewalkthe
feet hold still while the CG falls outside the base.
And thats it. It doesnt get any more
complicated than that. All the myriad throws,
techniques, options, variations, whips, dumps,
drops, tosses and rolls are really just doing one of
two thingsbase out from under CG or CG falling
The Mechanical Definition of Balance

57
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
past base. Period.
In Summary
Balance consists of two components:
The base (the area under and between his
feet)
The Center of Gravity (CGa point just
above his hips)
Balance is maintained as long as:
The CG stays over the base (hips over
feet)
The base stays under the CG (feet under
hips)
This gives rise to the only two kinds of
throws:
Slips (base comes out from under CG
the patch of ice)
Trips (CG falls outside basethe crack in
the sidewalk)

58
NOTES The Two Throw Families
Slips: The Patch of Ice
Leg Sweeps

This is making his base come out from under
his CG having his feet come out from under his
hips. The simplest operational expression of this
idea is the leg sweep pushing, pulling or kicking
one or both of his legs out from under him to take
him down. While leg sweeps can be spectacular in
an ass-over-teakettle sort of way, there are two
issues you have to take into consideration when
executing them: picking up vs. kicking out &
reliable targeting of injury.
Pick Up or Kick Out?

It all depends on where his weight is. A leg
that is not bearing weight, whether due to injury or
the fact that youre catching it mid-stride (in the
air) is easy to hook, pick up, push or pull to take
him down. In that case youre just moving the
weight of his leg, and the rest of him just falls. If
he does have his weight on it, youre not going to
be able to do any of that. The leg will stick,
anchored to the ground by his mass resting (or in
transition) above it. In that case, youre going to
have to strike it out from under him, with your
entire mass, with something akin to a shin kick to
blow through the leg or full body check while
violently displacing his feet out from under him
with yours.
Look at it this way: if a man is walking, at any
given moment hes bearing his weight on one leg
while moving the other one forward. Its an easy
The Two Throw Families

59
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
thing to nudge the leg in the air into a new,
unintended (for him) position and if he was
planning on landing his weight on that leg, well,
now hes going to fall instead. But you can also
see that you cant do the same trick to the leg that
is currently bearing his weight. It would take a lot
more effort to move that one out from under him
effort you can supply by striking with your
entire mass through it. So:
Stepping leg > sweep
Standing leg > strike
Sometimes its obvious which is which, but
most of time its not. Its important to know, or at
least be able to figure out, so you can choose the
proper method for taking that leg out from under
him. Here are a couple of ways to make it happen:

Anticipate gait.
In general, people will plant one foot, then
move the other. This will allow you to make
predictions about which leg is ripe for which
reaping. For example, lets say youre on the
ground and hes walking toward you you should
be able to figure out which foot hell be picking up
when hes close enough for you to reach out with
your own foot and sweep it for a takedown.

Use injury to make him shift his weight.
Injured people move. This almost always
involves stepping to try to maintain their balance as
they go. While strikes to the centerline of the body
tend to make the body move straight back
(meaning he could step back with either leg),

60
NOTES
strikes to one side of the spine or the other force the
body to rotate, making it much easier to know
where his weight will be. If your timing is good
you can catch the leg as he steps, for a sweep; if
not, you know hell plant his weight on it as he
finishes the reaction, making it perfect for a full-
bodied blast.
Also, the body will shift weight off of an
injured leg and onto the good one. When you
injure one of his legs, you now have a clear-cut
choice sweep the newly injured leg or stomp
through the other one. No more guessing!

When in doubt, blast through it.
This is last because its best. Your most
reliable, default answer is to simply strike through
the leg as hard as you can, technique and nuance be
damned. If the leg has little or no weight on it
(meaning it was sweepable) youll knock it out
from under him and drop him. If he was standing
on it after all, it doesnt matter you just blasted
it out from under him anyway. If your timing is as
poor as your coordination, dont sweat it this is
the final answer to the question, Which
technique? How about all of them at once?

Injury Left to Chance
The other problem with slips, especially leg
sweeps, is that if thats all youre doing taking
his feet out from under him then you arent
targeting a specific piece of anatomy for the
collision with the ground. It will be an
uncontrolled fall, for both of you. This leaves the
resulting injury up to chance. Chances are hell

61
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
smack down badly and catch his head in the
process... but chances are that he wont. If he gets
his hands out in time his reflexes will save his
head, and then you have to hope for sprained or
broken wrists, jammed shoulders, and the like.
Maybe hell get the wind knocked out of him. All
told, its not terribly reliable unless youve gone to
lengths to ensure that it is, like grabbing him by the
neck, kicking his leg out from under him and
hurling his head at the ground as he goes. Without
such measures, legs sweeps are a spin of the injury
roulette wheel sometimes a good number comes
up, sometimes it doesnt. So either make it happen
or be prepared to stay right on top of him, putting
more injury into him when he hits the ground.
Dont count on a simple leg sweep to finish the job
the way a properly executed hip throw can.

Trips: The Crack in the Sidewalk

Trips are a much larger throw family than slips
because while there is really only one way to knock
someones feet out from under them you simply
do just that there are a multitude of ways to
knock people down. Its important to note, though,
that mechanically all trips are identical, making the
CG fall outside the base, its just that there are
many, many ways to effect that change. From the
very simple hip push to drive his pelvis past his
feet and into the ground to the seemingly esoteric
shoulder throw (replacing his base with yours and
then making him fall outside it on your terms)
and everything in between theyre all just
expressions of the same simple idea.

62
NOTES
Direct manipulation of the CG hip
pushes and pulls

In order to effect a throw, we need to attack,
break, displace or move one of the components that
make up balance the base (feet), the CG (the
hips or pelvis) and/or the structures that support
one over the other (the legs). In slips, we were
attacking the feet and legs, to drive them out from
under the CG. Now were going to be looking at
striking the CG directly, to drive it out past the base
and down at an angle to effect a knockdown.

In a general sense, were going to be driving
through the pelvis where the CG of a standing
man resides to get this work done. Specifically,
were looking at blasting through the targets that
cluster around the pelvis: the bladder, pubic
symphisis, sacrum, and the hip joints themselves.
The groin, perineum and coccyx dont figure into
this set because they reside beneath the pelvis and
require striking vertically rather than allowing us to
displace the pelvis and CG laterally.

A full-bodied stomp or straight-arm drive
through the bladder, pubic symphisis, sacrum, or
either hip joint, down and through at a 45 angle (or
less) will effect a takedown. Technically, this is in
the same class as a simple striking knockdown
this is the place where the line between striking
and throwing becomes blurred, and we can most
easily see that throwing is, indeed, nothing more
than a special case of striking.


63
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
Base-break throws
This is where we attack, and break, the
structure holding him up in balance. This can be as
simple as a stomp through the ankle or knee,
breaking the joint, or as nuanced as using body
weight applied to buckle his leg and drag his CG
out past his base (as in a T-Leverage takedown).
Stomping through an ankle and breaking it is
obviously a strike, but its also a joint break, and
fulfills our definition of a throw as well. While this
is another obvious intersection of those three ideas
in action, it underscores the importance of looking
at joint breaking and throwing as subsets of striking
proper. If we look at it purely as a joint break,
without paying attention to whats required for
striking, it becomes a useless technique
sometimes itll work, sometimes it wont. When
striking is abandoned, what happens next is an
attempt to get the ankle to roll. It becomes a push
instead of a break, a technique instead of an injury.
Likewise, if we look at it purely as a throw,
ignoring both the striking and joint breaking, we
wander even more deeply into the dark forest of
pushing, losing everything that made it a throw in
the first place.
Injury makes it a throw. Injury makes it a joint
break. And striking makes it an injury in the first
place. Everything that happens after the strike is a
side-effect of that Striking through the ankle breaks
it, rolling the foot and moving his CG out past his
base which then causes him to fall.
So, while the answer to the question, Is it a
strike, a joint break, or a throw? is, all of the
above, the answer to the question, Which aspect
should I focus on? is, striking. Strike first, look

64
NOTES
for side-effects later.

Drop throws
This is where you attach your mass to him and
lay down to throw. Imagine putting your shin
through a mans groin, then grabbing him by the
neck and laying down in front of him to body-slam
his head into the concrete. Hell hit as if he
weighed twice as much, and itll be twice as ugly
as doing it all by himself.
Drop throws come in two basic varieties:
attaching yourself to the top of his spine, and
attaching yourself to the bottom end of his spine.
When you attach your mass to the top end of
his spine, by grabbing the hair, head, neck, lapels,
shoulders or arms, you move his CG beyond his
base by creating a new system of balance that
includes both of your masses, but only his base.
The CG for this new system will be outside his
base as soon as you go airborne to lay down
throwing him off balance. You will then use
rotation (rolling or curling to throw him) to
accelerate his fall.
When you attach yourself to the lower end of
his spine, by grabbing the hips or knees (usually
from behind him), youre using your mass to drag
his CG out past his base in a sort of inverted hip
push to make him sit and fall backwards over you.
Drop throws can manifest in something as
spectacular as grabbing the injured man by the
throat and neck as you plant your foot in his hip
and sit down and roll back to make him cartwheel
over you to something as small and non-obvious as

65
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
grabbing his wrist in both fists and dropping your
weight six inches while aiming his hand toward a
point just behind his own foot to flat-back him.
While the two techniques appear to be worlds
apart, theyre really the same thing attaching
your weight to the injured man and then dropping it
to break his structure, take his balance, and make
him fall.

Hip throws
A hip throw is so called because of the use of
the hip as a fulcrum point for the throw the
victim is kicked up into the air by the hip and
rounds the hip on his way into the fall. While the
hip is indeed the fulcrum point for the throw, its
more correct to view the legs as the primary actors
in getting this done. The hip is more properly the
contact point upon which youll balance his CG.
A better way of understanding the hip throw,
and how it is indeed a trip, is to look at it this way:
youre replacing his base with yours, taking him off
his feet while balancing him over your own, and
then making him fall outside your base. Imagine a
person tripping over a saw horse that catches them
just below the hips and youre starting to get the
idea. Before he runs into the saw horse, his base
consists of his own feet. As he hits the saw horse
and bends forward over it his feet leave the ground
and for a moment hes balanced like a teeter-totter,
head and torso sticking out to one side, legs stick
out to the other. His base as this point consists of
the legs of the saw horse. Of course, his problem is
his forward momentum hes pitching head-first
over this thing, after all. While this is a pretty good
model for the basics of the hip throw, were not
going to be content with something quite so static...

66
NOTES
Now imagine that the saw horse has a
pneumatic lift we can fire off to pop it up a couple
of inches, suddenly, as he flops over it. Now hes
not just tripping over the damn thing, but its going
to launch his legs up over his head as he falls...
But thats not all. Instead of just having it sit
there, waiting for him to bumble into it, were
going to fire it into position through is structure
so that even if he were holding still it would
slam into him, trip him over it, and then launch him
upside-down.
As you may have already guessed, were not
done adding awfulness to the accident were
constructing here we have one last bit coming
up but this is a good point to reign in our
ridiculous model and make it real. Youre going to
provide that awful industrial-accident-saw-horse
with your own feet, legs and hips. You will step
through him, harshly, as a strike, to make him trip
over your hip and then stand up suddenly to kick
him over the top, striking him with your hip to toss
him into the air. Lest you think this will require a
lot of brute strength, youre not going to lift his
entire mass youre going to trip him so his mass
transits over the chassis of your feet and legs
(merely bracing at this point) and only kick up as
his mass is falling forward off of you. Youll only
need to be strong enough to lift half (or less) of his
mass with your legs. And this, anybody can do.
Now for the last bit, the bit we were aiming for
all along the landing. Youre not doing this to
simply make him fall. There are lots of far simpler
ways of doing that. Youre spending the effort to
get all this dramatic hang-time so you can drive

67
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
him down, head-first, into the concrete with his
body weight over the top of it all. (Or, even better,
your body weight as well, so he lands twice as
hard.)
Common hip throw pitfalls and fixes:

Attach yourself so the two of you
become a single balance system.
When you move, he needs to move, too. If you
can move and nothing happens to him, youre not
attached. Not only that, but hes probably in
control of his own balance. You need to be latched
onto him, tight and secure, to take his balance and
incorporate his mass into a single balance system
that you control.
Ideally, you will begin this process with the
injury prior to the throw, essentially striking him
into the throw, e.g., with a backhand forearm
hammer to the lateral neck, bending him sideways
off balance and grabbing the neck out of the strike.

Replace his base with yours.
This is him getting the saw horse rammed
through his structure youll step through his
space, coming in low and rising up to pick him up
off his feet (your CG scooping up underneath his
CG) to balance him on your hip/back of pelvis.
Its important to note that you want to slide in
torso-to-torso, with no daylight between the two of
you. If theres space between you when you step in
to throw, hell fall through that space and onto you,
knocking you off balance and turning the hip throw

68
NOTES
into a dog-pile.

Make him fall outside your base.
This is the continued motion of the initial strike
to the neck, above. Tip that teeter-totter so hes
falling forward off your hip. Then, as his weight
shifts off your legs...

Stand up to hip him up into the air.
This is a short, sharp straightening of your legs
like a strike to toss his legs vertical and get
that hang-time. This is all about timing: if you go
too early, youre trying to leg-press his entire mass
and the throw wont pop. If you go too late, you
wont kick him into the air hell already have
fallen off of your hip.

Complete the rotation into the ground.
This is the end of the strike to the neck in the
example above the arc begun with the backhand
terminates in the ground in front of you. You have
effectively struck his head into the ground while up
-ending him.
Though these bits have been chunked out 1-2-
3, in reality its a single, smooth motion from back-
hand to the neck to terminal landing. It takes skill
and coordination to pull off, in other words, prac-
tice. And while you can potentially get the same
effect from a simple, full-bodied stomp through a
knee (something that is easy to pull off without any
skill or coordination or practice), the hip throw al-
lows you to target and ensure serious head
and neck trauma. When done right,

69
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES
Shoulder throws
For the most part, shoulder throws are just hip
throws with the fulcrum point at the shoulder
instead of the hip. What we get out of this is a hip
throw with an added lever-arm as long as your
spine. This takes him through a longer arc,
resulting in a higher throw you have more time
to accelerate him and he ends up falling from a
greater height. When we couple this with an Earth-
shattering John Henry swing of your arms
slapping him down by his arm, we get the most
powerful throw possible. Especially if you drop to
one knee, pulling him down out of the sky as you
go, to ride him down with your mass.
This throw gets you so much hang-time and
projection you can literally throw a man upside-
down through a plate-glass window, or into/onto/
through anything else in your environment the
curb, a fire hydrant, traffic. In training Ive seen
lights cleared off the ceiling by the victims feet.
Much like the hip throw, if you know what youre
doing, its well worth the effort.
The set-up is very similar to the hip throw
injure him, latch on, snug up, replace the base, and
hip him up into the air. The primary difference is
that youll snug up with his arm pulled tight over
your shoulder, so his armpit is stuck fast on top of
your shoulder. Think about what we do with the
CGs in the hip throw: yours scooping up
underneath his. Youre going to do the same thing
with your shoulder and his armpit: scoop up
underneath and stick them together so that for
balance purposes you both become a single mass.

70
NOTES NOTES
NOTES You do this at the hips and the shoulders at the
same time its still going to set up and fire off
like a hip throw, powered by your legs, but instead
of rounding him off your hip so he falls from your
waist height, youre going to round it off over the
top of your shoulder so he falls almost twice as far.

71
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES

72
NOTES
The Power of the Bad
Landing

It's about keeping things simplejust as joint
breaking looks like a bajillion techniques even
though every joint only breaks one way, one way
that can be gotten to in three directions, and back-
and-forth gives us six base leverages that can then
be concatenated upward into those bajillion
techniques, so it is with throwing. There's only one
throwwhen someone falls down. That fall can be
caused in only one of two ways, making his feet
come out from under him or making him fall
outside his feet. Everything else is just detail work
(and near-endless concatenation of a few simple
rules). In other words, don't over-think itwe're
still doing rock to the head. We're just using all the
rocks at once. The entire planet.
Around the Instructor Cadre we like to say that
the most effective way to put someone down so
they dont get back up is to Stab em with the
planet. It sounds ridiculous and it is a bit of
conscious hyperbole but if you know what
were talking about it should send at least a little
shiver down your spine. If it doesnt, then try this
line from a guy who did a big throw onto concrete:
It was like taking a wet burlap sack full of
meat and bones and slapping it down into the
ground as hard as you could. Thats what it
sounded and felt like, anyway.
After that he found he didnt have to follow
up. The guy was unconscious and convulsing.
The whole thing was over with a single strike and a
throw. Nothing fancy, no long, drawn out struggle.
NOTES
The Power of a Bad Landing
NOTES

73
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES Just a single injury and then a very bad landing
for a whole bunch more.
Results like that simple and final are
more than reason enough to study, practice and
perfect throwing, as a special case of striking, to
add to your violence toolbox. Throws arent
superior to joint breaking or basic striking. Theyre
just another option for injury, giving you yet more
ways to take advantage of physics and physiology
and get the two to meet up badly.
Everywhere you go theres gravity and the
cold, hard ground. All you have to do is use it.

74
NOTES
To Learn More About
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NOTES
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NOTES

75
TFT Throwing Series
NOTES

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