Here is a one page pdf guide to self-defense:
My goal with these pdfs is to include materials that I think will be helpful to travelers. It seemed to me that self-defense is something that should definitely go in, even though I’m not hugely into it on a personal level. A little self-defense training is good for everybody and you never know when you’ll be in a tight spot when you’re traveling. By the end, I felt a little more secure and I was glad I spent a few hours looking at these things.
As always, what I wanted was the most minimal essentials, the barest bones. For this, I think the best discipline to follow is Krav Maga, rather than karate, or boxing, or another martial art. Krav Maga was developed by the guy who trained the Israeli army in the 1940s. As a discipline, it’s supposed to be very basic and effective, drawing the best techniques from other martial arts. At some point, I’d like to take a self-defense class or two and I think it will probably be a Krav Maga class.
Another simple and effective source is the US army’s field guide to combatives. There is also a related series of YouTube videos. I like the videos because it’s kind of hard to visualize everything just from the field manual.
The problem with the army manual and Krav Maga are that they’re geared to fights where the fighters are pretty evenly matched – that is, a couple soldiers facing off against each other. For my pdf, I wanted it to be useful for everybody, including for instance a smaller woman facing off against a larger man. There are also plenty of guides like that on the internet and, in the end, my pdf looks more like those guides than the Krav Maga guides.