Reality of Fighting

If you want to defend yourself, you need to train live. When you train live you should focus on causing actual incapacitating damage with your techniques. The only thing accomplished by eye gouging and groin shots against skilled and sometimes unskilled people is escalation. If you really want to defend yourself, you should be training consistently and technically the things that have a high success rate with minimal damage to you when not in training gear. Palm strikes, hammer fists, and push kicks are all low risk and highly effective. Takedowns where you aren't driving your knees into the ground are better than risking slamming your knee in concrete. Chokes are better than joint locks, because if you choke someone unconscious, they can't fight, but some people can fight through broken limbs. Scratching, eye gouging, groin strikes, pressure points, and many of the other conventional self defense techniques do not function the same when in actual combat, and you only find that out by placing yourself in vigorous simulated combat.