I’m Tired, You Win
We did knife point-counterpoint exercises last night at karate, and my right arm feels like it is going to fall off. There weren’t many students, so the exercise must have gone on for over 40 minutes. In fact, just swinging the knife while fighting off the blocks of a guy twice my size was extremely tiring. However, what made it worse was that getting my right hand blocked in the exact same area for that long has just destroyed the left side of my forearm. The area is all red, and it feels like I have three layers of bruises in the area; moreoever the arm feels rather stiff and my hand motion is limited. I had to tie an ice pack to my arm all last night, and that’s probably the only reason the arm isn’t just black, blue, and purple.
As for the exercise itself, it was pretty cool. From the demonstrations on draw-cuts, I’m not sure how long you could defend against an attacker with a knife, and the sensei stately point-blank that no matter what you will get cut a lot in a knife fight. The difficulty of picking up the blocks really hammered home the point that the defender wants to end the fight as quickly as possible (kick to groin ASAP), because in real life the attacker will not pointlessly attack until his right arm is completely tired out and bruised.
We worked with training knives that were rather short, each having maybe a 3-inch blade. The speed of the short (and concealable) weapon is rather intimidating, and you cannot simply trap the weapon hand because the attacker could simply pull his hand back and give you a very nasty cut. It really only takes a short tap to throw your block off, and that split second is usually all the assailant needs to stab you. I’m no expert in knife fighting or defense, but if you are being attacked with a knife, running is definitely option #1. After that you’ll probably only get 1, maybe 2 blocks in before everything spirals out of control. Aside from keeping your body away, you’d probably want to counterattack as soon as possible, because time is really not on your side. Also, some of those large wooden training knives you see are just ridiculous because no one is going to jump out at you with a bowie knife or a machete.
I thought that this was an interesting read, and matched up pretty well with my experiences so far with knife exercises.
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