When people train with me they learn knife sparring first. There are many reasons for this: unlike firearms knives are found in every home that needs defending, knife sparring teaches evasive footwork that translates well to many situations outside of employing a knife, knife sparring makes you understand the various ways you can be attacked by a knife, etc.
And knives are somewhat unique in their ability to intimidate an attacker...
I very often see YouTubers suggesting that if someone has a knife, there's nothing you can do but run. However it turns out that may not a be a reliable solution.
The reality is having a knife pulled on you is a very common self defense situation, and one of the few that justifies spending a lot of time studying self defense in the first place. Every martial art has to be considered in this context: what if they have a Knife?
People think of sparring oriented stick fighting styles like Arnis and Kendo as bladed fighting arts. However were they really shine is for using sticks to knock a knife out of the hand of someone causing problems. This is true of virtually all sparring oriented stick, cane and staff fighting systems: they are great for dealing with a knife attacker.
Brazillian Jiu Jitsu compared to stick fighting does not fair well. If you don't spar with any strikes, defending against a force multiplier like a knife is nearly impossible. If you pull guard on a knife attacker, you just made his job of killing you much easier as now you can not evade him with footwork.
Wrestling does much better than BJJ in the context of a knife, because Wrestling has tools used in sparring for getting back to their feet. Wrestling's raw explosive aggression is more appropriate for a situation with a knife than BJJ's chilled laid back mentality. Wrestling is more focused on takedowns that will make a knife attacker far less dangerous. However not handling strikes in wrestling makes them generally unfamiliar with how to handle a weapon swinging or stabbing at them.
Some think Western Boxing changed drastically when the USA got involved with the Philippines. Filipino Boxing is more or less that square style of boxing with your hands up and forearms facing your opponent like you see with Manny Pacquiao or Mike Tyson. If you are going to be struck with a knife, you want it to be on the outside of your forearms. Having clever head movement and defensive footwork focused on KO strikes is a viable option for defending against a knife.
Tae Kwon Do and Capoiera have been mocked for being impractical. However in the context of a knife, on the street someone has shoes on, the bottom of those shoes is probably the best striking weapon they have against a blade. Jumping back and managing distance while looking for a chance to KO the attacker with a kick is not a bad option to have compared to grappling.
This is another place Muay Thai shines. With the aggression of wrestling and most of the same tools as both boxing and Tae Kwon Do, if someone must take on a knife wielder unarmed, Muay Thai is one of your better training backgrounds to have. Muay Thai has footwork and potent kicks to keep the enemy at bay, while also having practical sweeps and takedowns with which they may be able to get the knife attacker on the ground.
As Christopher Hein has pointed out, Aikido theory makes the most sense when a knife is in play. I would add that Aikido's defensive footwork and courage to use practice knives frequently in Randori actually teach the Aikidoka a lot more about knife fighting than they would like to admit.
There are too many Karate styles to analyze here one by one how effective they are against a knife. However all Karate styles seem to have some kind of clue about where a person could start with knife defense as well as practical kicks.
There are at least 10 times as many Kung Fu systems as Karate styles. In general Kung Fu systems are more comfortable with using bladed weapons for self defense, train in variety of weapons so that they can use any improvised weapons available to them should they have to face someone with a knife, and they have more answers for defending against bladed weapons while unarmed than most other martial arts.
Next time you are evaluating a martial art, don't forget to ask how it would work against a knife.
My first style of martial arts I ever studied got a lot of things right in the 1980's that I have only come to appreciate in the 2020's. The style was most often called "Tae Sho Arnis," though it was also called at other times "Tae Sho Karate Do" and "Combat Arnis." In an era of Kumite Point fighting that was decaying the quality of martial arts in the USA at the time, Dave Bird decided to combine the best aspects of the martial arts he had mastered: forms from Shotokan Karate, free sparring from old-school Tae Kwon Do, and Arnis for weapons technique. Though he his style produced kickboxers who competed in our area, most of the sparring in class was continuous controlled contact and included both unarmed sparring and stick sparring (though we did also train for Kumite Point Fighting tournaments a few times per year.)
In the 1990's this controlled contact free sparring would be lost in the USA as MMA got more popular and we over compensated for our participation in no-contact kumite point fighting, but would return to the MMA community by way of Muay Thai within a few decades. But there's something that has not returned 1980's controlled contact free sparring that we used to spar with frequently: groin kicks. I am not sure if these came from Shotokan or TKD, and I have wondered if they came from Arnis; see the kick at 1 minute 26 seconds in the last video I know of featuring Dave Bird:
Later as I studied Chinese martial arts I noticed that the most basic kick WAS the groin kick. If you pick your knee up with a groin kick so that you can stomp forward with the bottom of your foot you get a front kick. If you swing your groin kick around to connect with the side of your target's body you get a round kick. Watch all of this UFC champ and Shotokan master's kicks carefully and you will see many of his kicks that connect are not much more complex than a groin kick (especially his round kicks that connect to the body):
This Kung Fu teacher does a great job of explaining how in traditional martial arts, many different kicks are built from a basic groin kick:
To this day when I am free sparring with kicks I have to be careful because my feet target the groin like a heat-seeking missile because of all that free sparring with groin kicks I did in Tae Sho Arnis. Our basic strategy was simple enough: groin kick to set up straight punches to the face, and straight punches to the face to set up groin kicks. To block the groin kick we would bring up a knee. To counter the knee block we would use a round kick to the calf muscle on the blocking leg. To prevent groin kicks we would try to step on their lead foot as we threw straight punches. In retrospect there was a lot to like about that strategy from a self defense perspective.
When going full contact you can't count on a cup to protect your groin. But now that controlled contact free sparring is back to the USA, groin kicks are still not used in free sparring because most people doing free sparring are training for combat sports were groin kicks can get you disqualified. But this raises the question: should students who train for self-defense-only include groin kicks in their controlled contact free sparring?
In Make Yang style Tai Chi Great Again I mentioned various problems with Yang style Tai chi, and how and why it has degenerated so badly as a martial art. There is a very specific issue with Yang Style footwork that helps demonstrate another problem with passing down martial arts. But first, let me point out why I have an opinion on this specific subject.
Yang Chen Fu was THE Tai Chi master who made Tai Chi famous (largely by selling out and watering down the system to outsider students.) His top INSIDER student was Hu Yuen Chow, so that Hu Yuen Chow was the best FIGHTER Yang Chen Fu produced. Therefore Hu Yuen Chow's opinion on technical details regarding Yang Style Tai Chi would be VERY important.
My main Tai Chi teacher was Vern Miller, 1st Disciple of Doc Fai Wong. Doc Fai Wong was one of Hu Yuen Chow's top students in both Choy Li Fut and Yang style Tai Chi. However, Vern Miller did travel to Hong Kong to work out with Hu Yuen Chow and asked that master many detailed questions about Yang style footwork specifically, as Vern had noticed many different opinions on Yang style footwork.
I have studied several martial arts for more than a year each, and cross trained in several others still. When it comes to why different martial arts have different footwork, I have as much experience understanding the differences as anyone. So when Vern Miller lectured me extensively on EXACTLY what he got STRAIGHT from Hu Yeun Chow IN PERSON, I understood very well what Vern was saying.
Let's say we have a two dimensional rectangular box on the floor. In your basic Yang style stance (which is not unlike a Karate front stance,) if your left foot is forward, your left foot would be on the front left corner of that box and your right foot would be on the back right corner of that box. The width of that box would be the width of your shoulders, and the length of that box would be how far you can step in one stride without discomfort.
I am not going to try to explain here all the intricacies of basic Yang style Tai Chi walking, but the issue at hand is how far apart your feet are supposed to be when you walk forward. When you take a step forward, there would be a new box in front of the (and identical to) box you are standing on now. When you step forward onto the next box, what path should your right foot go in as it steps forward onto the front right corner of the next box?
Should the right foot travel diagonally to the left foot before traveling out again diagonally?
Should the right foot come up to knee level before going back down to the ground?
Should the foot drag along the ground as you step forward?
None of the above. The right foot should travel right side of both boxes, with the right big toe about one centimeter off the ground. This is called "staying on the 3rd line," the "1st line" being the left side of both boxes, the "2nd line" being the exact center of both boxes.
This has significant impact on application of techniques. What happens to your feet in relation to your target's feet is very different if you are doing any of the bullet points above, and because so many techniques in Tai Chi are tripping, where your feet end up in relation to your target's feet is extremely important. Beyond this there are questions of efficiency, your foot goes faster from point A to point B in a straight line, and the kind of balance you train is different than intended if you are embracing any of those 3 error bullet points above.
Good luck finding ANY YouTube videos explaining this, and this kind of basic detail about foot path movement wouldn't be debated in Choy Li Fut or Karate, yet there is ZERO consensus on this basic fundamental detail in Yang style Tai Chi. It's so bad that I have found other people who's Tai Chi comes from Hu Yuen Chow who strongly disagree with me on this detail!
Let's actually look at Hu Yuen Chow's Tai Chi form for a few minutes:
He's not a little man, he's tall. If he takes a step forward while keeping his feet on the first and third line all the way through the step, and he takes a full step forward, his stance might look very long and rectangular rather than square. Another thing you notice is that his head is quite hunched forward. However as you see him adjust his student's Tai Chi form, you see that he is getting them to stand perfectly upright instead of being hunch backed! Likewise you see his students using that full box footwork structure in their stance without his apparently more narrow footwork.
When it comes down to passing on important details of martial arts, remember that it's not simply copying the moves of the master, imitating old black and white photographs. It's much more important to do as that master instructed rather than as that master demonstrated.
These are the top 10 most practiced martial arts in the world. These are numbers just estimations based on Google searches, and probably mostly industry hype. My best guess is the numbers are probably all equally inflated so that the proportions of the true numbers would be about the same...
The hardest and least accurate number for all of these is for Wrestling. My estimation was somewhere between 16,000,000 and 280,000,000 depending on what you call wrestling. One of the things I had to take into consideration is that most wrestlers only wrestle for a few years as a youth. If you have better numbers for the total numbers of people wrestling globally, please post those numbers and links to your sources in Self Defense Evolution.
The finding is bizarre: not only is Tai Chi the most commonly practiced martial art in the world, but it is practiced more than all other martial arts combined. On one hand this is bad news for humanity because of quality control problems in Tai Chi, but on the other hand there is opportunity here because Tai Chi is rife with potential martial arts application for those who do free sparring. For example, in the following MMA Shredded video, more of the techniques than not are expressed in Yang style forms, especially #2:
I am active LDS and a descendant of polygamists, and I do not think that the founder of the religion, Joseph Smith Jr. was a polygamist. As a Brigham Young fan I do not think that this creates a "succession crisis" for the mainstream Salt Lake LDS Church, and I do not think Brigham Young was a "fallen prophet." I think prophets make big mistakes all the time, and that Brigham Young was aware of his own limitations as a prophet.
Brigham Young knew that his way of leading the Church and his spiritual gifts as a prophet were different from Joseph Smith Jr's. Brigham Young stated in the context of the Utah War that was beginning:
"...They have not as good a man to deal with as they had when they had Joseph Smith. I do not profess to be very good. I will try to take care of number one, and if it is wicked for me to try to preserve myself, I shall persist in it; for I am intending to take care of myself... I am not going to interpret dreams; for I don't profess to be such a Prophet as were Joseph Smith and Daniel; but I am a Yankee guesser..." https://journalofdiscourses.com/5/17
Brigham Young led The Church in a very violent and racist era of American history. In the context of African American slavery, extermination orders, the US Military mobilizing against his people and bloody civil war, Brigham Young's sins (talking women into joining a harem, saying black people can join the church but only with limited access, having some strange interpretations of Genesis, rewriting Church history and coming up with doctrinal justifications for violence) do not seem relatively serious compared to the evils of his day. In today's world such actions would be unforgivable, but the Mormon people (a few of them black themselves) were in a run and gun battle for their survival in those days.
It is really clear that all of Joseph Smith Jr.'s public comments on polygamy before he died were against the practice, and emphatically so. He would have people excommunicated for it and then publicly describe exactly why they were excommunicated. The Book of Mormon itself is strangely anti-racist (with some of the prophets being racist and then as the book goes on those racist views are corrected by other prophets, God, etc.) It is also overtly anti-Polygamist, with the practice being condemned as "abominable."
There's supposedly a verse in the middle of an anti-polygamy rant in Jacob Chapter 2 v 30 that says "For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things." But in previous verses he just called it a "whoredom" and "abomination," so since God doesn't command people to do whoredoms and abominations, that verse must necessarily be interpreted as something like "If you are my followers and I want you to have a ton of kids, believe me, you will. Otherwise you need to avoid abominations and whoredoms anyways." No one in the vast period of time covered in the Book of Mormon is commanded to do polygamy by God.
Most of the characters focused on in the Book of Mormon believe they have descended from Israelites escaping Jerusalem in around 600 BC. In that same chapter of Jacob in the Book of Mormon, God calls David and Solomon's polygamy "...abominable before me..." Verse 30's supposed justification of polygamy particularly does not make sense in this context, because of math. The average married woman without birth control will have about 8 kids. Solomon had 700 wives. This means for Solomon to be able to keep that birth rate up to average, he needed to have 5,600 children. Similar problem by the way with Brigham Young's own polygamy. Even if only 25 of Brigham Young's 55 wives were both fertile and seducable, Brigham Young needed to have at least 200 children for his polygamy to keep up with the monogamous average... but he only had 57 children... that is only one child per wife instead of 8!
And about polygamy in the Bible, I can't find a clear case of anyone being commanded to do it. In general "going after many wives" is frowned upon in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, Christian congregation leaders are required to both be married AND to have only one wife. Taken as an over all work, The Bible frowns on polygamy as less than ideal if not sinful.
Most of the women claiming to be Joseph Smith Jr.'s wives during his lifetime made those claims decades after he was dead. Their husbands were none other than Brigham Young himself and Heber C. Kimball, his right hand man. At around this time these two had to demonstrate that polygamy was part of their religion, because they were under the scrutiny of the USA, and thus were highly motivated to prove Joseph Smith Jr. practiced polygamy. Evidence suggests they rewrote history in order to protect themselves and the Mormon people from the invading forces of the US government.
Section 132 is basically in two parts, the part that is compatible with the rest of the D&C, and the part that is sex-pirate crazy. Versus 1-20 read something like this, "in regards to your questions about polygamy, understand that a one on one marriage between a man and a woman sealed together for eternity is the stuff Gods are made from." Then, no joke, starting in verse 21 the writing style totally changes to what I can only describe as a very horny pirate, who by the end of the chapter is threatening to kill Emma, "...I will destroy her..."
As critics have looked into 132 there are numerous problems with dates. The sealing power being revealed in 127 and 128, years after Joseph supposedly started using it according to 132. William Clayton is supposedly in October writing down Joseph's revelation, when he was fired as Joseph's scribe the February before for stealing money.
Some of the people spreading rumors about polygamy were specifically doing it to try to kill Joseph. Polygamy was introduced to the community through notorious scoundrel John C. Bennet. John had abandoned his family to come to live with the Mormons, and as soon as he was able to gain some status started using his plural wife scheme to seduce Mormon women. Joseph had him excommunicated but John saw himself as a rival leader of the Mormon movement, and continued to spread rumors of plural marriage regarding Joseph as to enrage the locals into wanting to kill Joseph.
It goes on and on like this... since I was a child it made sense that Brigham Young was a polygamist based on his behavior, but not Joseph Smith Jr. When the DNA came out against Joseph Smith Jr. being the baby daddy I took a controversial troll stance against the position. Now the position that he was a polygamist is not making any sense at all anymore...
There are important LDS theological concepts at play here:
Again, we don't believe in ex Nihilo, so that creation is the act seizing chaos and organizing it into order.
We don't believe in infallibility of any mortal or scripture written down by mortals. Every mortal is a work in progress for God trying to help a sinful chaotic being become a good being of His order.
This is true of prophets as well as the rest of us.
This is true of our community as time goes on generation after generation.
This is evident in our doctrine of "continuing revelation."
But more importantly this is evident in our doctrine of "personal revelation." The "first principles and ordinances of the gospel" are:
Faith in Jesus Christ
Repentance
Baptism
Gift of the Holy Ghost (source of personal revelation.)
Isn't interesting how 4 is not "strict obedience to the will of the Prophet"? During the era of mainstream LDS polygamy, over 2/3 of Mormons ignored Brigham Young's hellfire and brimstone sermons about how important it was to do plural marriage. Most just said "no thanks," and passed on it. Many of them had met if not known Joseph Smith Jr. personally, who once said:
"…God is not a respecter of persons; we all have the same privilege. … We believe that we have a right to revelations, visions, and dreams from God, our Heavenly Father; and light and intelligence, through the gift of the Holy Ghost, in the name of Jesus Christ, on all subjects pertaining to our spiritual welfare; if it so be that we keep His commandments, so as to render ourselves worthy in His sight." (Chapter 10: Prayer and Personal Revelation, Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith, 2007.)
In the end, the Prophet Gordon B. Hinkley openly disagreed with the Prophet Brigham Young on the doctrine of polygamy. This justified all those who had disregarded Brigham Young's suggestions to engage in polygamy. The lesson for LDS and non LDS alike is simple: don't be a lemming. God gave you a conscience, and He expects you to use it.
The activist (open source) game development team I am on has recently unleashed a tittle wave of productivity and are about to complete one project we have been working on for over 10 years (2nd Edition of the Squawk Role-Playing Game.) But maybe the most important project I have been working on lately is the Resilience Role-Playing Game, which I am hoping to have a hard-copy book version of this year. One insider knows there is a significant creative difference between how the online version looks and what the final product will look like, and has question this decision.
While the book uses photographs and a lot of them, the website only uses illustrations. Each and every photograph is being personally vetted by me to make sure it's 100% legally legit before I use it (we've been doing this open-source thing since the mid 90's and have a lot of experience with copyleft.) Yet I refuse to use photos on the website because of the Ghetty Images "extortion scheme."
Ghetty Images (or someone on behalf Ghetty Images) has some kind of bot that constantly crawls the web looking for people who use images that Ghetty Images considers themselves to have control of. Once they find such an image, if that website does not have a pre-existing agreement with them, Ghetty Images sends a letter to the web provider shutting down the website. Ghetty Images always asks for thousands of dollars to establish an agreement with them so that your website isn't shut down. The trick is they ask for a few thousand dollars less than it would take for you to get a lawyer. This has never happened to one of my projects, but it did happen to minority immigrant friends of mine who own an auto glass repair shop in Seattle in the late some time around 2009.
The image in question was:
from a website that specifically gave anyone on the internet permission to use the image (Ghetty Images has a way of purchasing rights to collections of these kinds of images,) and
was heavily modified as to without that permission be within the terms of "fair use."
However the Ghetty Images bot discovered the photo, and the ACCUSATION was made. The ACCUSATION does the damage regardless of guilt or innocence.
When I was doing an internship in the Education programs at the King County Jail on 5th Ave in Seattle (2003-2004) through Americorps, I saw numerous people do something called "a plea for time served." Let's say a cop ACCUSED you of some wrong doing and throws you in jail. While you wait for your lawyer, the more law abiding you are, the more damage is being done to your career and your family by your absence as time goes on. After you have had some time to simmer in jail for a while, the prosecutor offers you a deal: say you are guilty, and we'll let you out of jail now, no more questions asked. If you are a career criminal with money you fight it, and probably win against their usually weak case. But if you are a law abiding working class citizen, you take that plea before you lose any more of time from your job or family than you already have.
It's the ACCUSATION that does the damage.
Back to Ghetty Images, if a lawyer typically costs $7,000 in your area, then they will ask for $3,000 to $5,000. And that's just it, law abiding working class people get criminal records in Seattle constantly for the crime of not having $7,000 to pay a decent lawyer who isn't in the cop's pocket. (Public defenders rely on the court system to give them referrals. The prosecutor is part of that system, and too many victories is going to encourage that court system to direct their referrals elsewhere.)
There's a lot of problems in Seattle with housing, addiction, income and healthcare, but those problems all impact rich and poor to one degree or another. What the rich never feel is the raw, pure injustice that happens when you can't afford your own lawyer. I know a lot of people don't like hearing this, but the difference between a have and a have not is only about $7,000.
The moral of the story is this: pick your battles. You can die on almost any hill you want to die on. However, you need to reserve your personal resources for whatever matters most to you in your life, which is probably not some hill a loud personality is waving a flag on the top of.
On one hand Yang style Tai Chi is the style that popularized Tai Chi throughout the world. On the other hand Yang style paid a very significant price in doing so, and now is sometimes no longer considered a martial art but a form of Chinese yoga descended from martial arts. This price was paid intentionally by the Master who was guilty of the worst selling-out in all of martial arts history, Yang Chen Fu.
According to Doc Fai Wong's book "Tai Chi Chuan's Internal Secrets" (pages 8 -10) Yang Chen Fu had two totally different types of students. One type of student was serious about fighting and was usually training to become a Tai Chi instructor themselves, what you could call an insider student. Everyone else was learning a watered down form of Tai Chi that was based on forms and didn't get seriously into the other aspects of Tai Chi training, who we could call outsider students. (Doc Fai Wong's master was Hu Yuen Chow, who's master was Yang Chen Fu AS AN INSIDER.)
Insider students AND previous generations of Yang style practitioners training happened in two phases, each about 4 years long:
The first phase was mostly static postures. If you know much about Tai Chi then you are of course familiar with standing meditation, but this was only one part. Basically every move in Tai Chi forms has a static version. Imagine holding each posture for 30 minutes at a time, just as if each move were a standing meditation posture in it's own right. MY sifu (Vern Miller, who's master was Doc Fai Wong) actually did a version of this making us hold each posture for only 5 to 10 minutes, and it was so intense that it was the 2nd time in my life I have sweated out of my ears (the first time was cross training in a variation of Kyokushin.)
ONLY after having done that kind of training for the first four years, would they start doing ANY forms at ALL. In addition to forms, free sparring, push hands, and training with weapons was all highly emphasized. No insider's training was complete until they had mastered all 8 years of training.
Outsider students only did forms, without the 4 year foundation training of static postures and without the free sparring in years 5 through 8. From this I personally deduce that Yang Chen Fu wouldn't have much cared how good the "form" of his outsider students was, which would explain why there are so many bad versions of Yang style out there that lack decent structure for functionality or application.
IF you are trying to practice Yang style Tai Chi as a martial art, here are some things you must include in your training:
You must be serious about standing mediation, otherwise you can't be said to be doing serious Yang style.
You must be doing two partner exercises with a high level of resistance called "push hands," or else you can't be said to be practicing Tai Chi with physical martial arts skill.
You must be doing free sparring, otherwise you can't be said to be doing any serious form of martial art.
You must include some type of weapon training, as Tai Chi applies to weapons as much as it does to empty hands.
I have heard many credible Yang stylists criticize photographs of Yang Chen Fu's technique, saying that those photos do not represent the structure he taught to his insider students. To really practice serious Yang Style it is wise for us to consider the technique of his insider students, and the technique of Yang stylists from outside of the Yang Chen Fu lineage.
This is not to discourage you from trying to study Yang style. Remember some of the greatest styles of Tai Chi are break offs of Yang Style, such as Wu style and Sun style, both of those having a better reputation than Yang style. Beyond this Tai Chi has been around longer than Yang style. Even older styles such as Chen style and Wudang Dan Pai are evolutions of earlier systems of Tai Chi going back before the 1300's.
All Martial Arts Change from one generation to the next, either for the better or for the worse. The next generation of Tai Chi will be better than what we learned, or it will be worse than what we learned, based on how we practice it and what we pass on. Just like Yang Chen Fu damaged the efficacy of Tai Chi in order to popularize Tai Chi, we can improve on outdated practices and make Tai Chi better than it ever was before.
