Street-Fighting-Techniques.info

Here is what I believe to be the most effective defense and disarming technique against someone trying to stab you in the torso. This post follows on from my earlier one ‘The Basics of Knife Defense‘ and assumes that you have adopted the defensive stance described there, so I suggest you read that one first if you haven’t read it already.

One of the most important thing in blocking a knife (or bottle or other sharp object) attack is that you need to use a solid, powerful and reliable block. The crossed arms of the knife defense stance come in useful here as it allows for a natural double arm block. Simultaneously bend over slighlty, moving your belly and side away from your attacker, whilst bringing both arms down hard onto the attacking arm or your opponent. Your arms should remain crossed, coming down is a scissors like movement so that when they hit they trap knife arm of the attacker between your hands. This is a very reliable block because it doesn’t require to much accuracy, it is an instinctive movement working with your natural reactions, and it has a lot of strength behind it.

But blocking a knife attack is not enough; you also need to disarm them and take away the knife to stop them coming straight back at you. Assuming that the attack is right handed you should grab hold of their wrist with your right hand. If they attack with the left you also grab with your left. You have to be quite quick to perform this disarm, so it is worth mentioning that if you don’t get a good grab straight away you need to back off and get out of their striking range as quickly as possible. When you make the grab you should be trying to place your thumb so that it runs down the back of their hand, while you fingers should be as close as possible to the wrist joint where the arm meets the hand, on the inside of the arm.

As soon as you have hold of them lean back and pull towards you to straighten their arm as much as possible, whilst simultaneously uncrossing your arms, bringing your holding arm round in a semi-circle and turning it over so that the back of your hand is facing the floor.  This movement should turn over their arm so that their elbow is pointing upwards. At this point you have a hold, and only need to apply pressure for a double lock. Pushing with your thumb on the back of their hand applies a writs lock, whilst using your other hand to push down on the elbow gives you a painful arm lock.

You must remember that the wrist and arm lock are not done for their own sake, but just to make them drop the knife. The second you have the lock, if they don’t drop the weapon automatically, you should shout at them to drop it, and the second they do you should let go of them and grab the weapon yourself.

As soon as I get the chance I will put together a video of this technique, as well as others for attacks to different areas of the body, and add it here, but for now hopefully this description has given you a clear enough picture for you to get a good feel for the technique.