In the last post I wrote about knowledge as the great equalizer — how the right information about leverage and weak points allows a smaller person to neutralize a larger one.
But I was still left with a nagging question.
What if bullies knew what I was trying to do? What if they knew how to stop those moves?
Finding secret escapes and leverage tricks was a revelation, but it still felt like little old me against big old them. I was still working against their strength — just more cleverly. What I needed was something more fundamental, a completely different relationship with the attacker’s force itself.
That answer came in a single class demonstration that I have never forgotten and always use.
The Shirt Grab Defense
I walked into one class as a white belt and my teacher said: “This person is going to grab your shirt with two hands and start pulling you and shaking you.”
I knew exactly what that felt like because I had been there before, more than once.
He asked: “What happens if the person pulls you forward and you try to fight back — if you instinctively pull backwards?”
I already knew the answer. I lose. They’re bigger and stronger. I had been there too.
Then he asked: “What would happen if you moved in the direction they pulled you?”
This seemed like madness to my pre-teen brain. Why would I want to go toward someone who was trying to hurt me? I had no desire to move in the direction of any threat.
Then came the demonstration. And all I could say was: Of Course!
If you step forward as the person pulls you toward them — with both their hands already gripping your shirt — you can cover their hands so they can’t let go to hit you, while your free hand strikes them in the nose.
Their own force, their aggression, all their energy — used against them, by me, in the same moment they attacked.
I was hooked immediately. I wanted to take this principle and apply it everywhere. If struggling and resisting a larger opponent didn’t work, and this did — I should be doing this all the time, with every attacker.
My teacher told me the name for it: Borrowed Force.
My Mental Revolution
Borrowed Force was not just a technique, it was a mental revolution into a much larger world for me.
From this point on, it was no longer little old me against big old them. It was my strength and intelligence combined with their strength — turned back against them. Self-defense no longer seemed like a losing proposition. The attacker’s size and aggression stopped being a threat and became a resource.
My key insight was this: I didn’t need to get bigger or stronger, because the attacker gave me all the strength I needed to defeat him.
The harder they attacked, the more they contributed to their own defeat. The more force they brought, the more force was available to redirect. Their aggression became my advantage.
This was a principle I sought to master completely.
What the Ancient World Already Knew
Twenty-five hundred years ago, Lao Tzu — the founder of philosophical Taoism — wrote in the Tao Te Ching: “There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water, yet for attacking things that are hard and strong, there is nothing that surpasses it. The soft overcomes the hard. The weak overcomes the strong.”
Water doesn’t fight the rock. It flows around it, finds the cracks, moves through the path of least resistance — and given enough time, dissolves the rock entirely. It wins not by force but by yielding, not by hardness but by adaptability.
This is the philosophy of Wu Wei — often translated as “non-action” or “effortless action.” Not passivity, and not weakness. It is the ability to align with the natural flow of a situation rather than fighting against it, to redirect rather than oppose, and to move with force rather than against it.
Martial artists across Asia encoded this philosophy into their training thousands of years before it had a name in physics. The principle appears in Chinese internal arts, in Filipino martial arts, in Russian Systema, in Japanese “aiki” arts, in virtually every tradition that has been tested by serious conflict over time. They all arrived at the same conclusion: force comes — redirect it. Force goes — follow it. Instead of resisting force head-on, learn to handle it by redirecting what comes your way without opposing it directly.
The ancient Taoist texts even offer a physical demonstration: an old man falls into a river beneath a waterfall. He survives not because he’s strong enough to fight the current, but because he yields to it — he lets the water’s own force carry him to the river bank. In the same way, the martial artist uses the opponent’s energy rather than striking against it — deflecting their force and turning it back on its source.
Lao Tzu wasn’t writing about fighting. He was writing about a way of moving through the world. Martial Artists simply discovered that it worked on the training floor too.
What the Physics Says
Newton’s third law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In a conventional confrontation — strength against strength — both parties absorb the full force of the collision. In a tug-of-war, the larger, stronger person wins almost every time.
Borrowed Force changes the equation entirely by eliminating the head-on collision. A force of tremendous power can be deflected with a very small force — the goal is to exert minimal effort on the opponent and not interfere with their motion, only redirecting their attack. When you redirect rather than resist, you don’t absorb the incoming force — you add to it, turning it back in a direction the attacker didn’t intend to go. In Tai Chi Chuan they say,“four ounces deflects a thousand pounds.”
The faster the attacker moves, the easier it is to use their inertia to unbalance them. Movement and convergence with the attacker’s momentum is essential — strength is not. This is not poetry, it’s physics. The attacker’s own commitment to the attack — the energy they invest in it — is precisely what makes the redirect possible. A tentative, hesitant attack is actually harder to use than a full, committed one.
The harder they attack, the more their own energy turns back on them.
Their aggression is the problem, and their aggression is also the solution.
Beyond the Training Floor
What I discovered on that mat as a white belt has never stopped being useful — and not only in physical situations.
The principle of Borrowed Force is a way of moving through conflict in general. Arguments, pressure, difficult conversations — the instinct is always to resist, to push back, to match force with force, and that almost never works. The person who is angrier usually wins that exchange, just as the person who is stronger usually wins a physical one.
But yield to the direction of the argument — find the truth in what the other person is saying, move with their concern rather than against it — and the dynamic changes entirely. Their energy stops being something you have to overcome. It becomes something you can work with.
Lao Tzu understood this twenty-five centuries ago. The martial arts encoded it into physical practice so that the body could learn what the mind sometimes refuses to believe: that yielding is not the same as losing, that the softest thing can overcome the hardest, and that the force aimed at you can become the force that protects you.
Borrowed Force — from the attacker, from the situation, from whatever is coming at you — is another reason I love martial arts. And why you should too.