Three Pieces

Today in weapons class we broke down knife defense into three pieces: moving our bodies out of the way, using our hands and moving our feet.

Not surprisingly, defending against a knife by just moving the body out of the way or just using hands or just moving the feet is really difficult.  The point wasn’t to suggest that any of these isolated methods was a functional way of dealing with an actual knife attack.  The point was to get students to look at the way that they are currently trying to solve a very difficult problem (unarmed versus knife) and see if by breaking into these three pieces, they can make solving that problem any easier.

Suppose, for instance, that when practicing any of the three pieces, a student realizes how unfamiliar it is.  It might occur to them, when drilling just moving their body out of the way of the weapon, that that isn’t something they normally do.  Great.  Hopefully they can take that realization to their normal knife work and see if moving their body out of the way (along with using footwork and hands) increases their survival rate at all.