The Way of Least Resistance

Following my article " Dealing with knife attacks ", I want to make an admission: I once thought that it was a good idea to kick knives out of people's hands.  Now I didn't actually teach this: I don't think I have ever held a class where we practised this as a "technique". But I did use this scenario in a couple of demonstrations many years ago.  Why?  I suppose that at the time I thought it created a bit of atmosphere.  Bring out a knife and the audience perks up. I also suppose I had in the back of my mind that it might  work tolerably well:  I'd seen it demonstrated so many times over decades of training that it was just "part of the furniture": kicking a knife-holding hand seemed quite plausible.  Of course, you'd never do it with a bare foot - but then again, when are we bare foot?  On the beach?  Generally we wear shoes in daily life.  And I suppose a part of me thought: "Yeah -  thick rubber and leather are going ...

Introduction Recently a member of the Traditional Fighting Arts Forums, Emero, posted a query where he asked how one would defend against a spinning kick and a reverse crescent kick, pointing to the 2 examples below: A video showing the spinning back kick A video showing the reverse crescent kick I answered Emero on the particular thread, but I thought the question was appropriate enough to pose, and answer, here in my blog - especially since it will feed into my upcoming article “ Situational reflex: the key to martial effectiveness ”. Challenges in dealing with circular attacks What Emero notes is that powerful circular attacks are hard to respond to. A linear attack is relatively easy to understand and can be dealt with by controlling the center line (a topic I hope to address in the future). But circular attacks don’t really respond to the same methods; for one thing, they don’t move along the center line, so controlling it does not yield the same benefits. Now i...