5 FIGHT FALLACIES

Slicing Through the Myths That Surround Edged-Weapon Defense!

- Patrick Vuong

No matter which category a particular system belongs to — traditional martial arts, reality-based self-defense, modern combatives — almost all instructors of those coming. And after I co-founded a combatives training psycho. Or at least they think they do. Before you start sending me hate mail and planning a cancel campaign, let me explain.

You see, almost all knife-defense techniques work great in theory. They also work on a compliant student in the safe confines of the dojo. But when applied in a life-or-death situation, many of them amount to responses that I like to call “death by martial arts myth.”

That’s because many knife-defense methods are based on fight fallacies. In other words, they train you to respond to attacks that a criminal with a knife will never use, and that could leave you mortally wounded during a real encounter.

This article is not meant to criticize any particular style but rather to present a reality check for martial artists who are serious about fending off a knife attack. To that end, I’ll examine five of the most common knife-defense training methodologies in an effort to see why they’re likely to leave you bleeding … or worse.

TRAINING MYTH NO. 1

THE ATTACK WILL START WITH A KNIFE IN HAND

In 99 percent of the edged-weapon classes and seminars I’ve attended, the instructors had everyone start with the training knife in hand. That makes sense on paper. But on the street? Not so much because this is not how a gangster will gut you. Quite the contrary.