The Basic Understanding of Knife Fighting, Knife Attack & Knife Defense

Let’s be real, it’s never a fun thing to find yourself in a situation where knife fighting and knife defense come into play. The reality though is that every good self defense curriculum should have some type of knife defense training in it.

We shot this video because Sensei David Melker wanted to show how the Ngo Dac Na way of handling a knife attack is much different than many videos out there on YouTube and other video sharing sites.

Many times what you see is a lot of moves that show knife disarms and knife defenses that look good, however, in reality, the technique only works, because the guy is just sitting there with his arm out. Let’s be honest, if a person is trying to stab you with a knife… Do you think they are just going to keep their arm out there?

The answer is… Of course not.

The question you should ask yourself is what do you do if the person is continually stabbing at you and they are not a compliant partner? After all they are trying to hurt you, not be your training buddy.

What you need to understand is that when it comes to knife fighting, you shouldn’t look at the knife as the weapon. It is the person wielding the knife that is the weapon. Therefore you should focus your attention on attacking the person and not defending against the knife.

The reason why is because by itself the knife is harmless. If you where to stick the knife in the hands of a 3 year old, you would easily disarm the child. However, if you put the knife in the hands of a 25 year old. Chances are you would feel more threatened.

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Why?
It’s not because the knife got more dangerous, it’s because your opponent has. That is why our mental state isn’t chase the knife, our goal is to damage the opponent. To do this, we strike the person which is the weapon fast and efficiently with weapon strikes.

Watch Sifu Phu Ngo Explain The Basic Of Knife Defense:

Knife Fighting Strategy To Practice:

First keep in mind that you want to go 1 to 1 or 2 to 2. Meaning that you don’t want to make 2 moves if your opponent is only making 1 move. The reason is that if you are taking 3 moves for every stab that is coming towards you, then you are taking too long to counter. Basically if he/she stabs at us. we go 1 to 1; they attack we attack.

That’s why we do techniques like weapon striking techniques to handle knives. These are techniques that damage the opponent through their limbs. You can weapon strike their arms, legs, knees, elbows, etc.

We damage the arm with that type of strike, because if we can damage the arm, then they can’t hold the weapon. If you watched the whole video you seen Sifu Phu demonstrate weapon striking. It’s a very effective technique in a knife fighting situation.

This is just a primer to what we do, Enter Shaolin members can check out our hour long knife defense webinar here.

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About Sifu Larry Rivera

Sifu Larry has been training in martial arts since he was 5. In his early years his father influenced his martial arts training. He taught him the basics of self defense, guile, military tactics, Judo and Jiu Jitsu. At age 7 his he was enrolled in Goju-Ryu which he trained in until he was 16. He took sometime off, but when he came back he decided he was never quitting martial arts again and at the age of 19 his thoughts on what martial arts was and was not got flipped when he started training with Sifu Phu and learning internal martial arts. Needless to say, he's a lifer and a guy you want on your side.

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