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.

PITA

What a PITA just to get back into my blog I had to reset the password and that took forever to figure out. Our lives have become a miasma of passwords, user names, PIN numbers, codes, and the only people who can navigate it all are the hackers.

What I really wanted to talk about was knives not aggravations. I recently bought a new Bagwell Style bowie on ebay. It was made by a man named Fitzen. You can see the strong similarity to a Hells Belle in the guard and blade shape. The knife on the bottom is my largest Matt Lamey bowie with a 12 inch blade.

That knife is a real cleaver but the new one is much faster in the hand due to the narrow 11 3/4 blade and counter-balance of the antler knob. Is exhibits a vivid Damascus with strong contrasts of metals. The guard is designed for blade trapping, (and yes to the arm-chair and forum experts) it really does work. I am amazed as usual by the numbers of people who regurgitate knowledge without having ever stepped out onto the dojo floor or sparred with blades.

The  butt of the antler is crowned with this detailed silver skeleton head. Quite the nasty looking fellow! Nice workmanship. The sheath is a simple one made with a belt stud and is of elephant hide. I am anxious to get down to my dojo this week and "play" with this new knife which, based on the antler, I have named "Gnarly."

I bought a matching blade and plan to fit it out as a "Dogbone style" Bowie. It might be a while until I get to that project since my work has gotten more demanding. That is also why this blog has been less active in the past few months. Thanks for hanging out and checking back. I am preparing to drive 1600 miles to Houston for work because I do not trust what the government is saying about Ebola and planes are great incubators of germs, not to mention having to suffer the harassment of the TSA goons. Hope you like the Bowie.

Knife Class round two

Held our second knife class with the father and son. Both showed marked improvement from the first session and it was obvious they had been practicing and doing some sparring. That is always rewarding for a teacher. So they had a few questions which we discussed and they were ready to show me what they had been working on. I had taught them the eight angles of cutting. They worked most of them in a back and forth sparring. As I observed several things became obvious.

Not surprisingly the son was much faster and more aggressive than his father. The father was using a good fighting posture but too rooted. So I suggested the son might not want to stick his head in where it could be easily slashed and I suggested the father move about more and not focus on his son's knife. I explained to them about using peripheral vision to more quickly catch movement even though the perception is not as sharp. They asked me about where to focus and I advised them to watch the opponents shoulder tips for movement. That seemed to improve both of their blocks.

Since their movement was still a little stiff we discussed the idea of moving on triangles, both the male and female triangle, side stepping and forward and back movements. Practicing this definitely allowed the father to avoid some of the hits to his forearm. That is always a welcome relief because even a hard rubber knife whacks the bone pretty good. The one thing that both seemed to forget is that you can attack while moving backwards. I'm not going to explain it in detail. Think about it.

As we wound down for the evening I could tell the son was dying to spar with me so I manned up. I had a lot of fun and he learned that this old man is still pretty fast. He was caught off guard several times and had to back pedal to keep from eating steel (ahhh rubber that is). It was good for me too since I have not sparred for about two or three years now. I had to laugh when the son decided to go left handed and mix in a few thrusts, which were not on the menu this early. Didn't give him the advantage he was hoping for. He's a fine young man and going to make a good knife fighter. His dad made great advances and said he felt more confident by the end of class. All good signs for a healthy training session. Check back for our next meeting.