I was watching a clip of Ed Parker teaching a seminar. He asked the class to rank, in order of importance for a street altercation, the following three terms: body position, environment, and range.
Fortunately, I knew the order: environment, range, and then body position. Would that have been the order that you ranked them?
Where you and your opponent are in terms of location (environment) is crucial. Here is a humorous example that Ed Parker gave. Let’s assume that two guys are in a bar in Alaska. The two of them start arguing, and one proceeds to rip his shirt off as if to say, “the fight is on”. In response, the other person decides to step outside in the freezing cold so that his opponent (if he decides to immediately follow him) will be without a shirt. Clearly, environment is working to the one’s advantage that still has his sweater on! Now given that both are outside in the freezing cold, and one person is without a shirt, one would guess that in all likelihood, the one without the shirt is going to be in a big hurry to get the fight over with so that he doesn’t have to fight in such cold climate. Environment is crucial in any fight, and is an important factor in which technique one could employ.
Range is less important than environment but more important than body position. Range allows our perceptual speed to “read” the opponent’s attack so that we can respond with an appropriate defense (or better put, OFFENSE). Range is simply the distance between yourself and the attacker. If you knew for certainty that a specific gun could only shoot 200 yards, you could stand at 300 yards away from an attacker and do the Macarena! You won’t be shot. No, don’t really try this; I am just throwing some humor at you. But the point, nonetheless, is that range is very important once environment, and I would argue target availability, have been established.
