Risk is required for learning. It is unavoidable. When practicing anything new, you must attempt to perform a movement before you have any experience with it. You repeatedly take the risk of making mistakes as you practice a technique. When you test a combination, a takedown or a disarming technique in sparring, you risk failing. Failing could mean you get hit, you lose a match or you just feel like an idiot when you mess up in front of everyone. The truth is, taking risks and learning through failure is the only path to mastering your skills. Risk, Failure and Learning You must focus on taking risk and making mistakes in training in order to learn and grow. If you do not attempt anything that challenges you, then you will miss the chance to expand your skills beyond your current leve...

Regardless of your level of training, defending against a knife attack is very hard.  No amount of training can reduce the risk, but training for a knife attack will help you survive.   When defending against a knife attack, there are a few things you should avoid doing and there are some things you can do that will help you come out of it alive. In learning to successfully defend against a knife attack, we must understand as much as we can about the attacks themselves.  The more we know about them, the more we can tailor our training to fit reality.  We must understand the offense in order to plan a defense. We also have to consider the special dynamics of an attack with a knife.  The knife may be hard to detect, so we may not even know initially that a knife...

Training for Results Sparring can serve as bridge from your technical drills to realistic application or to competition. Whether you are training to apply Kali for self defense or for a fighting competition, the right sparring drills will give you the perspective you need to be successful. Rather than taking a leap of faith from the flow drills we practice with partners to a real life application, we can use a series of objective oriented drills to prepare for the unscripted application of our techniques. Sparring Preparation Drills and Training Objectives You must have objectives to get best results from your training. This is especially true with sparring. If you know what you want to improve, then you can train appropriately to make those improvements. Sparring without objectives c...

To be able to defend against a knife attack, we must understand as much about edged weapon attacks as we can.  Knowing the mechanics of a how a knife is used and learning about the dynamics of an edged weapon attack will add a dimension to this understanding.   What is an Edged Weapon?   When considering the threat of edged weapons, there are more than just knives.  It is a category of weapons.  For the purpose of developing a defense against edged weapons, we can include conventional knives, blades, etc. as well as other objects that cause damage similar to a knife or blade in the same category.  These include things like homemade shanks, pens, pencils, scissors, screwdrivers, nails and anything else that can pierce flesh with a thrust.  This category al...

Knife assaults occur in a variety of circumstances and have a wide variety of victims.  Knowing more about situations that lead to knife attacks will help you better understand who and how you need to train for self defense.   Who are the Victims?   It can happen to anyone from anyone. There appears to no combination of personal relationships in knife related crimes that does not make the news.  Kids as young as age six are attacking others in school and in their homes.  Kids are stabbing parents.  Parents are stabbing children.  Siblings are stabbing each other.  Husbands are stabbing wives.  Wives are stabbing husbands.  Friends are stabbing friends.  And, of course, strangers are stabbing each other.  Threats range from those y...