Knife training

If you are teaching your knife students ground fighting you might be missing the whole picture. Seems like every martial arts school today feels like it must compete with the Gracie Brazilian Ju-Jitsu rage and teach ground fighting. On You Tube there are hundreds of videos explaining that you must be prepared to “take the fight to the ground.” Really? I hate rolling around on the ground and getting my arms bent backwards and my face ground into the pavement. Maybe instructors ought to spend more time teaching you how to stay on your feet instead of on your back. Yes I realize that your leg muscles are some of the biggest in your arsenal but don’t let the muscle between your ears convince you to lay flat on your back to fight. Someone will gladly kick in your skull. Going back to the previous post about my young student, remember my comment about attacking while moving backwards? I was not speaking in tongues. There are three components to any fight that you must understand and hopefully master. They are: timing, distance, and rhythm. Read your Sun Tzu and you will find this is true. So you are probably wondering why I did not mention speed. Speed is completely relevant to the other three components. You can move too fast as well as too slow. Unless you are hopelessly clumsy and tend to randomly fall down, the only reason you are on the ground is because you let your attacker in too close, Distance. Or he moved and you did not, Rhythm. Or maybe he cut and you waited too long to block/move, Timing. So if you cannot control all three elements because you are old, slow, handicapped, tired, ill, whatever, then pick the one element you think you can best control and focus hard on it. If your attacker is faster than you then work on rhythm and timing. If he is taller than you work on maintaining your distance. Attack while retreating. There is a lot more to knife fighting than hacking and slicing. Unlike kenjutsu or fencing some people refuse to see it as an art. At the first class I picked up a bokken (Japanese wooden training sword) and said this is a devastating weapon. I shifted my grip on the bokken up to wakizashi length. It is still a weapon to be reckoned with. Then I moved my hands on up to tanto length. You get the idea. People say you cannot use lessons learned with a sword to fight with a knife. This is one of those comments spoken by the untrained to impress the unknowing. Well come on down to our dojo and we’ll have some fun and I’ll try to enlighten you about that. Oh and bring your arm guard.