05/06/2011 – Bladework: Defence, Disarm and Counter at Speed, Part 2

Last Saturday's was a very focused session, with an introduction to live blades that suddenly put everything in perspective.  Fancy flowing knife disarms suddenly don't seem so easy when adding a sharp, live blade into the mix.  Couple that with a non-compliant partner and you begin to get a rough idea of how difficult it will be do doing it for real on the street to someone who means to kill you with a live blade.  Contrariwise, while this builds the necessary caution and respect for live steel, it also deconditions unnecessary fear responses, which are the true killers versus blades.  In the Russian methodology, the blade is a tool of psychophysical conditioning as well as a weapon.

For today's work, we used small blades - roughly 3.5in/8.9cm blades with handles only slightly longer.

The reason for this is twofold - firstly, as a form of handicap training, since larger blades are easier to disarm.  You can see them coming from further away, judge their effective range better, they may* be slower and, when actually applying force to them, their length works against the wielder when using them as levers in disarms.  If you can disarm a non-compliant assailant with a small blade, a large blade should be that much easier to work against.

Secondly, small blades are far easier to conceal and therefore much more likely to be employed in ambush scenarios, which makes training with and against small blades much more specific to the self-defence needs of most people.  Choppers, machetes and the like are far less easy to conceal.  Out in our neck of the woods, the most likely way for your average civilian to encounter these weapons wielded against oneself is when a heated argument spirals out of control and the other party marches away to their vehicle to fetch a weapon, while our hero remains standing his ground out of anger and desperate fear of a loss of 'face'.  Better to lose 'face' than to lose your face, so to speak (likewise sundry other bodyparts).  In any case, my rule of thumb stands - if you are confident of intercepting and disarming a barely visible small blade wielded at speed, a chunky larger blade should be no problem.

Ground engagement has improved a lot, and I am pleased at the progress that has been made so far.  The main issue now is conditioning, and I want everyone to keep up with that part of the syllabus on your own time, now that everyone is familiar with my conditioning methods - that means joint mobility, strength/conditioning work, de-tension/decompression, all together.  Miss out one and you detract from the effectiveness of the whole.  We will revisit it from time to time during class, but class time is better spent doing partner work. 


*:  This is conditional, of course - it depends on the weight and balance of the blade in question, but definitely, a tiny 3.5in blade will be a lot harder to catch than a hefty chopper or a cheap parang with a badly designed handle.

Objectives

- Introduction to live blade work

- Blade ambush training

Warmup

- IntuFlow basic routine

- Freeform ground engagement – hard ground



Skill-Specific Biomechanical Drills

- Leverage disarm drill

- Body figure-8 to stab

- Biker flip grip change

- Figure-8 draw cut

- Rolling snap cut

- Finger-flip


Preparatory Partner Drills

- Partner push drill with live blade

- 1 and 2-step slow evasion and disarm versus live blade

Primary Skill Drills

- Warmup to standup grappling – mixed neck and body pummelling

- Submission grappling – takedown and submission beginning from neck and elbow tie

- Submission grappling – takedown and submission from neck and elbow tie with knife draw upon hand-clap signal


Objective-based Sparring

Freeform submission grappling with concealed training knives. Partners grapple as per normal until hand-clap signal to draw is given. If asymmetry of force (ie. someone achieves a successful draw well ahead of the other partner) is achieved, drill continues with unarmed partner attempting to defend against and disarm knife-wielding partner.


Tension Release and Joint Decompression Cooldown

- Sleeping Child pose

- Downwards Cat pose

- Downwards Dog pose

- Upwards Dog pose

- Plough pose

- Table pose

- Seated Twist pose

- Shinbox Switch (5x each side)

All static poses held for 20s each


Circle