Cheap Knife Sparring Kit

It's dark times, and you wanna train in good old fashioned knife fighting. But like everyone else, you are broke right now. What can you do? In the land of the most advanced knife fighting technique, sometimes they just spar with empty plastic Mountain Dew bottles and sun glasses:

But we can do better than that affordably here in the USA. Basically what you are going to need is two hard-rubber sparring-knives, two pairs of cheap street-hockey gloves, and two sets of safety goggles. First the most popular hard-rubber safety-knife in these parts is a Cold Steel brand "Rubber Tanto" that hurt a little when you get hit with them, but not nearly as bad as if you had been hit by a wood or steel trainer instead:

Those usually go for around $10 each, so two will cost you $20.

The primary target in a knife duel is the other person's hands. If you nail their weapon hand, they may drop their blade, they may loose their will to fight once injured, their dripping blood starts leaving DNA evidence that reveals their identity and their hand becomes slippery making it harder to use that hand to fight with. So of course when knife sparring it's important to do hand targeting, so the most important protective equipment is for the hands. What seems to work best for most people around here are cheap street hokey gloves:

You can get a really cheap pair for around $25 each, x2 = $50.

Now from here you are going to have to decide between going cheap or going for head shots. If you are going for head shots, you are going to need two lower end fencing masks, which you can usually find for about $70 each if you can look around. But we are talking cheap here, so we are going to NOT spar with face shots, and instead only get safety goggles. (No, it is NOT safe to spar without safety goggles even if you are forbidding face shots. Accidents happen - a lot - and you will poke someone's eye out if your are not careful):

You can usually get two pairs of safety goggles for under $15. So the total price of this kit would be $85 + tax, or under $100 anyways ($15 +$50 +$20.) 

The next step will be to start sparring. It is OK to go light, especially at first as you get used to it. If you want extra armor on your arms or torso, just layer up with whatever coats or jackets you need to until you feel comfortable getting hacked and stabbed with a piece of hard rubber at that level of protection. You can use less and less layers the better you get and the more your pain tolerance improves. Also, 99 cent mouth pieces and groin protection is not a bad idea.

It is not OK to stop-and-go, you should keep going at it continuously throughout your sparring rounds (which should be between 90 seconds and 3 minutes,) and not spend too much time talking. As far as technique goes, the main thing is most of the time your knife and your feet should be moving, and if one stops moving for any reason, the other should stay moving. 

I highly recommend you record your sparring, and before the next time you get together to spar, review your last sparring and decide what you want to work on next time you spar. At Tres Espadas we are known for being a knife-first sparring club. We do knife before anything else, before stick, before dirty boxing, before sword, before spear, before anything. The most important reason for knife-first is the evasive movement knife sparring teaches. It teaches movement with both footwork and with weapon movement. As your knife sparring skills improve, you can experiment sparring with a wider range of self defense scenarios, but make sure you have adequate safety equipment when you do so: