5 FIGHT FALLACIES

No matter which category a particular system belongs to — traditional martial arts, reality-based self-defense, modern combatives — almost all instructors of those systems teach methods for stopping a blade-wielding psycho. Or at least they think they do. Before you start sending me hate mail and planning a cancel campaign, let me explain.

You see, almost all knife-defense techniques work great in theory. They also work on a compliant student in the safe confines of the dojo. But when applied in a life-or-death situation, many of them amount to responses that I like to call “death by martial arts myth.”

That’s because many knife-defense methods are based on fight fallacies. In other words, they train you to respond to attacks that a criminal with a knife will never use, and that could leave you mortally wounded during a real encounter

This article is not meant to criticize any particular style but rather to present a reality check for martial artists who are serious about fending off a knife attack. To that end, I’ll examine five of the most common knife-defense training methodologies in an effort to see