[quote]666Rich wrote:
When fighting with knives… and other instruments, footwork, angles and having good sense of distance is all the more crucial.
[/quote]
Yes, those are crucial skills indeed, in the right context. The thing is though that you have to take into consideration that most fights begin from a “conversational range”, meaning that they are already close enough to successfully attack you. It’s not like sport MMA where you start 20 feet from each other and then gradually work your way in.
You also have to take into consideration realistic environments. Are you going to be able to angle off if attacked in a phone booth? How about if you’re sitting in your car and somebody attacks you? Footwork isn’t going to do you much good in those situations, so you’ve gotta have other systems of defense in place as well as just footwork.
There is also the problem of distance/reaction time. At that close distance, you are not going to be able to see the exact angle of attack and move your entire body out of line to avoid it using footwork and be able to make the attacker miss (definitely not anyone with anything resembling hand speed or the real intent to get to you with the knife). It would be nice if we could train to become like Spiderman or some other superhuman blessed with ridiculous reaction time, but it’s just not realistic.
Also keep in mind that knives are “touch weapons”, meaning that all the knife has to do is to touch you with the blade to do damage. They aren’t like “impact weapons” where the force must have bodyweight, and structure behind it, and must follow a distinct path to the target in order to do damage. If you guess wrong, or they change the angle of their attack mid attack, and you don’t have some form of less vulnerable/lethal obstruction to take the attack, then you could wind up in serious trouble.
[quote]
Ive worked on some knife defense techniques, and the most common attack is not the overhand easily dealt with stab, but an underhand shank that you rarely see as the guy is not going to wave his knife in your face. Hes gonna pull it out from his belt/pocket etc and stab when you are in close. For example, with the underhand shank, step to the inside the arm can still come in and stab you. You need a quick switch step or angle to the outside that still puts you closer to the attacker. This way his stabbing momentum is going the other way, you can pin the arm, disable the person, or simply just disable them. All this happens in an instant.[/quote]
Practicing for the most common types of attacks can be helpful. But assuming that you can predict how a person is going to attack you is a bad idea. Murphy’s law will not be kind to you if you do.
The truth is that you really have no idea how someone will attack you with a knife in a real situation and if you become “internally focused”, meaning that you are paying attention to what you “think” he is going to do rather than what he is actually doing, then you’d better hope that you are a very lucky individual and just happen to guess right.
That technique sounds like a little too “precision” (meaning that there is very little margin for error and the attacker would have to do pretty much that exact attack for it to work) of a defense for my liking. You’d better be “shielding” at the same time you are moving in case you guess wrong or they change angles mid attack if you try that for real.
But hey, maybe you can make it work, and if so then go for it. I’d just suggest actually “pressure testing” it before assuming that it will save your life. Have you and your partner strap on some protective gear, give him/her a magic marker/actionflex knife/rubber knife and tell them that at any point they can attack you (and can continue attacking you until you stop them) and see if you can pull it off without taking a hit on a lethal target from the knife. Start off with just that attack (the underhand stab), then gradually add in more lines of attack as you get better. Eventually tell him/her that they can attack you from any angle. If at the end of that experiment you still feel like you could successfully pull that off against a fully resisting unpredictable attacker, then it’s a keeper. If you can’t, might want to reconsider either scrapping it completely, or modifying it so it does work.
Also, if you’re going to “wrap” the arm, make absolutely certain that you do it above the elbow, otherwise they can potentially pull their arm out and possibly cut you in the process. I know of an instance of someone actually dying due to wrapping an attacker’s arm too low and in the process of the attacker pulling their knife arm free, the individual’s brachial artery was severed and they bled to death.