Single and Double Leg Takedowns for Military/Police students

Author: Odhinn Kohout

Shooting in from a distance on your Attacker’s legs in order to take him down is a really bad idea…

This technique is used in MMA all the time so what makes it wrong to use when teaching Military/Police personnel?

Shooting in from a distance on your opponent requires you to change levels before you shoot in order to lower your height so that it is in line with your Attackers legs. This unfortunately gives him a HUGE heads up and provides a few seconds window to prevent this from happening.

How will he stop you from using his legs for a takedown? It’s really quite straight forward:

1.       Knee or kick you in face

2.       Sprawl, so that when you have attached your hands to his legs you will be pulled face down to the ground with your Attacker on top of you.

The last thing that you want to do when attempting to defend yourself during an attack is to give any clues or advantage to the bad-guy PRIOR to performing the technique. But this is exactly what will happen when you try to shoot in on him from a distance. You might as well hold up a sign which says “You might want to think about sprawling because I am about to try a single leg takedown on you.”

How do we correct this as Instructors?

A good approach to teach your students is to use single or double leg techniques from a clinch position. There is very little time for your opponent to counter this due to the element of surprise and the proximity of the leg attack.

Almost every NEW student that enters in an MMA gym will learn use a sprawl as a way to counter a takedown, in fact it is taught to almost immediately as an entry level technique. If we know as Instructors that this is the case and criminals can also access this knowledge then we must teach our students to not try and perform their tactics from a distance as to alert their Attackers of their intentions.

Distancing is a topic that I find is seldom addressed in Military/Police combatives classes. Your Officers need to to understand the concepts using distance to calculate kick, punches, elbows and takedowns and the ranges that make this effective. I will almost always see students trying to perform elbow strikes from a distance that is too far from their target area causing them to lead with their chin as they incorrectly throw their weight too far forward over their hips.

If we look at leg takedown tactics it would make more sense to grab around the floating ribs of the attacker instead of the legs( from the initial attack) as the sprawl defense will not pull you back and down to the ground. The waist and floating rib area also provides great control for sweeps and many different types of throws.

Experiment during your next class with various distances when employing single and double legs and see how dramatically it affects the success or failure of the technique.

Train hard, train for combat!