Previously, I discussed a technique to prevent one’s wrist from being grabbed in the first place. However, there are various instances where your reaction time may not be fast enough to prevent an attacker from grabbing your wrist. 

If you are not able to do this first technique in time, and the person does grab your wrist, there is a surprisingly simple technique you can use to get your hand out of their grip. This technique is used at the end of most sections in Si Nim Tau. It is most evident at the end of Section 2, and may be referred to as ‘circling hand’.”

Once their hand is on your wrist, you would move your fingers so that they are pointing towards you, without moving your wrist. From here, you would rotate your wrist 180 degrees towards the attacker’s thumb. The thumb acts as the weakest link in the grip and this technique takes advantage of this weakness to effectively become free.

This is a manoeuvre that does not actually require much strength. The reason the attacker’s grip would falter from here is that it would not be possible for them to turn their hand 180 degrees without getting hurt, and so it would lead them to let go. You can take this brief opportunity to follow up with an attack. Here are the various attacks you can return:

Though this technique is unbelievably simple and effortless, it does remain to be one of the most effective and useful. Before moving on to learn other techniques, this is one I highly recommend learning.

A video of this technique will soon be uploaded to my Youtube channel and linked below.