Practical Joint Manipulation: For Fighting and Self-Defense

This book shares useful skills without overhyping them. Excellent general guidance on how to understand and build open hand submission skills. You will need a trusted partner and hours of work to develop a working knowledge of these skills. This book is very condensed and caries an encyclopedic knowledge base, but you cannot deploy it successfully by just reading the book. This book is intended for intermediate to advanced martial arts students, and is unusual in its devotion to this aspect of skills that can, with practice, enable one to submit an adversary with or without doing a lot of damage. Very good for LEOs. You will need 2-3 years to learn half of what’s in here - this is a fairly unique collection best served as a side dish to a comprehensive system. If you are looking for junk food thrills, you should skip it.

The book is well written and the descriptions of the techniques, along with the photographs, makes it a useful manual. Practice is, off course, the key to being able to apply the joint locks efficiently in a stressful situation, but the book is a good resource.

Over the last 7 plus decades’ one of my many serious interests have been the martial and fighting arts (Judo, Jujitsu, Karate-Do, Boxing, Wrestling, Krav Maga, Police D.T. tactics and numerous weapon systems) of which I also taught for many years after learning from some of the best martial art and police tactics instructors in the country.Even though I am now well into my senior years I still read as much as possible on the above combative systems. This is why when I saw this 125-page soft cover volume (Practical Joint Manipulation for fighting and self-defense by Chuck Callaway) on Amazon I decided to purchase it.As always, I love the quick delivery service. I just finished reading this interesting and informative manual and found it to be a good review of all the same techniques I used to practice and teach in my Jujitsu and Police defensive classes over the years. My approach is somewhat different; however, this book does a fair job of presenting the basic principles of learning and applying these techniques. His names for most of the techniques are different than the original names I used in my classes; nevertheless, the author does a pretty good job of presenting the techniques.Even though the black and white photographs are not the best I had no trouble understanding them because of my background, but to be honest, I think it would be very difficult to actually master these techniques without actual hands-on training with an experienced instructor. In fact, I emphasize this point in all the self-defense and martial art books I have reviewed (including my own manuals by the way). In any case, I think this book provides an excellent review and reference source for any instructor who teaches control, joint manipulation, and take down techniques.This book is organized into nine areas: An introduction to the material, myths and realities, key concepts, basic rules of joint manipulation, the actual techniques covered, lock flow, training, joint manipulation with weapons and conclusion.In conclusion, I really liked this book and as a retired police officer and martial arts instructor I found this volume to be a good reference review.Rating: 4 Stars. Joseph J. Truncale (Author: Tactical Principles of the most effective Combative Systems).

This book coupled with YouTube was helpful to fully understand and to learn each tactic taught in the book. The book does a good job of explaining the techniques and strategies that can be used/applied for each manipulation but I found that by using YouTube I was able to understand exactly how to secure and maintain control over an individual without having the unfortunate consequences of seriously injuring others. That is especially helpful today where the use of such techniques could land you in civil court or worse a criminal proceeding that could result in the loss of your freedom. As a general rule I have being a professional in the security industry the less damage I am able to inflict to get the desired outcome in a situation where use of force is required the better off I am in the aftermath of the situation. This book is written in the same manner, it gives you the tools and shows you how to inflict pain but warns of the dangers that come with the use of the techniques. This would be a perfect book for someone who is new to self defense and wants to learn the basics of joint manipulation or for a woman who wants to learn how to use her body to defend against an attacker. I could also see this as a book for someone in the nightclub industry that isn’t looking to always throw punches or use the common chokehold to subdue drunk patrons.

Everything was great! Same response to Elbow Boxing 1 & 2 & Elbow Combinations.