Re: Article: On the Interdependent Nature of Tactics and Strategies by "The Grindstone"
Thanks for posting. Good question.
If I am understanding you correctly, "yes," would be the answer. While the point of the article was to show how striking and throwing, for example, need to work off of each other, and not necessarily to say that we "should" look to strike at our attacker, one could say that underneath all of this there is an assumption that striking is a viable tactical option. I think that would go for anything however - the suggestion of any tactic assumes its viability.
Using your example, when a smaller person vs. a much larger person, the smaller person is going to face the performance envelope of any tactic more quickly than when size is more evenly matched. A greatness in size variation will always require a greatness in skill acquisition - in other words. It takes skill, as it always does, to push the limitations of any tactic back far enough so that one is still operating within its sphere of influence. Thus, I would not want to say that a smaller person cannot strike at a larger person, nor that a smaller person cannot be effective against a larger person when it comes to striking (heck, this is what Karate is all about - right?) - it's just that skill is going to play a larger role for that smaller person (vs. the inverse). BTW: Sean is a larger man than myself. He has the size, but, for the moment, I got the skill.
Still, out of the major options of striking, pinning, throwing, and/or taking it to the ground, and with all things being equal in terms of your example's capacity to generate power, the smaller female in your example will probably be able to utilize her size disadvantage better by striking (e.g. to vulnerable parts of the body) than by anything else. It will be easier for her to be successful in striking than in throwing, pinning, or ground-fighting, and this becomes more true the more skilled her attacker is. (Do not forget that this would be against the non-committed attack - that is what we are talking about in the article.)
Last edited by senshincenter : 11-22-2005 at 08:25 AM.