I LOVE teaching people self defense and martial arts. I love the challenge and the joy. The challenge in teaching is learning how to help each student reach their full potential. The joy in teaching is seeing students reach their full potential. It’s different for each student, so the teacher needs to be ‘sensitive’ to how and why the student learns.
‘Listening’ Hands
One of the first lessons I teach blind people in a weekly or otherwise ‘regular’ class (rather than a one-time clinic) is a training system called ‘Push Hands.’ It’s also known as ‘Pushing Hands.’ Some systems of martial arts use the term ‘Sensing Hands,’ ‘Sticking Hands,’ or ‘Sticky Hands’ (Chi Sao) to describe something similar. When I teach a blind person, I use the term ‘Listening hands.’ It’s part of helping blind or partially-blind people use ‘feel’ and ‘touch’ to enhance their increased sensitivity to ‘sound’ and ‘smell.’ I want them to understand that learning Push Hands can give them the ‘upper hand’ when a sighted person attempts to harm them. Sighted attackers are easily surprised by a trained blind person.
Sighted people often think of a blind person as being ‘disabled.’ While it is true that a blind person cannot ‘see’ with their eyes, their other senses often become better than a sighted person’s ‘other’ senses. That includes ‘sound and smell,’ and ‘feel and touch.’
Sound and Smell
A research project from several years ago demonstrated that blind people’s brains actually ‘rewire’ themselves to enhance other senses. The study results reported that it was especially true of people born blind or who became blind in early childhood.
An older study reported that blind people ‘have no keener sense of smell than the sighted.’ The study when on to report that vision loss makes people ‘pay more attention to how they perceive smells.’
I have found in my own experience of teaching self-defense skills to blind or partially-blind people that many do seem to have an increased awareness of both sound and smell. My challenge as a teacher is to help them use enhanced physical sensitivities to their advantage in staying safe.
Feel and Touch
Just a quick reminder about legal blindness –
Legal blindness refers to a person’s vision being 20/200 or less, with normal vision being 20/20. A 20/200 vision means we would need to stand 20 feet away from an object to see it as clearly as a person with 20/20 vision could see it from 200 feet. People can also experience partial vision loss, where cloudy or fuzzy images result from conditions like cataracts, or they can lose central vision but maintain normal peripheral vision, like with macular degeneration. Meanwhile, total blindness refers to the complete inability to see anything with either eye.
Medical Daily
Feel and touch are important to understand in training a person who is legally blind. Some of your students can see that someone or something is moving toward them. Others cannot see anything, though they may smell or hear something that alerts them to possible danger. However, once a person is touched, especially if the touch is a ‘grab,’ your student needs to know how to respond quickly and effectively. If they are using a ‘cane,’ then they can respond with it in ways that we shared in previous articles (here and here).
What if they are not carrying their cane when someone attacks them? If they are carrying something else, they could use that to ‘strike’ a person (e.g. handbag, groceries, books, etc) and ‘yell’ for help. If the strike or yell were not effective, then what? Blind people are at a disadvantage if they attempt to run away from a sighted person, unless someone comes to their assistance.
That assistance may not come, so then what? A legally blind person needs to be able to defend themselves. That’s why I believe ‘Push Hands’ (aka ‘Listening Hands’) is important to teach.
Push Hands
The idea of “Push Hands” is to become sensitive to another person’s intent without needing to ‘see’ what they’re doing. As soon as a legally blind person ‘feels’ that the intent of the person touching them is to harm them in some way (e.g. steal from them, abduct them), then that ‘touch’ needs to lead to a ‘hair trigger’ reaction by the blind person. The unwelcome ‘touch’ sets off (triggers) an immediate response by the blind person. A defensive technique quickly becomes an offensive response without ever disengaging from the attacker. In fact, that’s the point. Once an attacker has grabbed you, you know where every part of their body is located. You can attack eyes, throat, groin, joints, etc. with amazing speed and accuracy. However, that kind of ability takes time to develop.
Push Hands is a slow and careful way of training legally blind people in how to ‘listen’ to a person’s touch to determine their ‘intent.’ It also teaches a blind person how to ‘lead’ an attacker into ’emptiness.’ In martial arts terms, ’emptiness’ (sometimes called the ‘void’) is somewhere away from the intended victim.
The attacker may find themselves ‘trapped’ or ‘projected’ by the trained blind person. The Push Hands ‘trap’ can quickly lead to dislocated joints, knockout strikes with feet, knees, elbows, and hands, or hard throws to the ground that can cause the attacker to lose consciousness long enough for the blind person to get help or get away.
A ‘projection’ is where the trained blind person can ‘push’ or ‘pull/push’ an attacker into a wall, over furniture (if the attack is inside a home or business), down a flight of stairs, over a wall, etc. The attacker finds themselves in ’emptiness,’ which means they are removed some distance from the intended victim. If the attacker happens to be injured in the ‘projection’ to the point they can’t continue the attack, that’s the point. Martial arts is about ‘stopping conflict.’ Push Hands training is a great way to help legally blind people ‘stop’ an attacker in their tracks.
Continual practice under the watchful guidance of a qualified instructor will help blind people “feel” what an attacker intends to do before the attacker has time to carry out their intent. I know that is a little difficult to grasp in words without personally experiencing the special training, so I highly recommend you find a teacher who teaches Push Hands.
Instructors who teach Push Hands, Sensing Hands, Sticking Hands, or Sticky Hands include people who teach T’ai Chi Ch’uan, Wing Chun, and other forms of Kung Fu. Training often includes the teacher blindfolding themselves as they teach. It’s a good way to demonstrate to a class of sighted people how Push Hands works for blind people. It’s also helpful for the blind person to know that their instructor is sharing in their experience.
One other note about Push Hands. It can be a great ‘friendship exchange.’ Push Hands does teach sensitivity to someone who wants to harm you. However, it also teaches sensitivity to someone who wants to help you. Push Hands can be fun and very relaxing.
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