Knife as a vehicle (diary entry)

24.10.11.

So, the grading is over and it is half-term. Time to look at what needs to be improved and where to new to begin. I put it around the group to pick some subjects. Both self-defence and MMA were requested. A senior student wanted more practice on knife defence and other students wanted to look at takedowns and submissions. So, I came up with a happy combination of all of these.

When it comes to teaching defence against weapons I normally make it a rule to teach evasion, drawing attention to someone suspected of carring a weapon, escape and looking for incidental shields or equalizers in the surrounding environment. This is before we even consider taking on the weapon-user unarmed. However, today was not a knife awareness class - although now that I am a qualified senior KEWAP instructor I will be offering seperate courses on this aspect soon - and I made this point clear. We used hard skills aspects from Karl Tanswell's S.T.A.B. programme and Mo Teague's "Face the Blade" to look at controlling limbs. Typically in these courses control of the weapon hand is of paramount importance once you have been engaged in this type of assault. Control of the limb from the class Greco-Romantwo-on-one and back position, as well as Mo's variations on the standing arm-bar control, teach a type of tactile awareness. 

We then got rid of the weapon and looked at the holds from a typical clinch perspective. The takedown aspect came in as a defence to a back position (bear hug or waistlock takedown) and, moving into the realm of sport (although this move has been taught as a military unarmed defence move) we used the rolling knee bar. This, of course, gave us our submission as well.

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