Escrima Concepts

Blade Awareness

Beware of Illusions

BLADE AWARENESS PROGRAMMES + ARTICLE BELOW

Many people have a fascination and fear for knives and our Blade Awareness courses designed by Escrima Concepts has three programmes of progression to help build a healthy respect for knives by dispelling many myths and false belief but still giving us some hope when confronted by them. Each course is around four hours long totalling up to twelve hours to complete the programme.

No one can promise anything when it comes to dealing with knives or edged weapons as one wise quote states:

"When two men fight with knives prepare two graves but if there is a winner you may find him in hospital"

Many people teach knives to ensure a seminar circuit based on gimmicks and fancy techniques. The danger is that people eventually concentrate on the techniques on control and begin to turn it into play whereas the real danger is before the control stage and this is where it often goes wrong.

The problems with most knife training are the student’s perception combined their patience, skill, experience and sense of fun. This can be further explained by stating many people get bored with basic movement drills and want to rush the beginning of each exercise to get to the drills, the locks, the disarms, the take-downs and the fun. Often Escrima Concepts have seen people train to lose for fun. If you do not get the beginning right with knives there is no fun and you will not be able to do the drills and disarms, etc unless you are very lucky and how many people want to rely on luck alone?

In Europe we have been studying and training with all kinds of weapons in our system of Escrima for over thirty years and we understand the danger when dealing with real knives. Training with wooden or plastic ones do not have the same effect as live blades, as if you get cut you should bleed but it is not possible to do this in training so how can we progress? How do we add realism for both offender and defender in given situations? Our answer to the problem is to attend our courses.

In our first course (Blade Awareness Level One) we practice some basic control techniques to analyse if they work or not or what is the percentage of success? We evaluate and explain the body mechanics and weapon mechanics working together and check the movement combined with stress and fear control. The target areas at this stage are based more on stabbing and cutting to the body and getting familiar and confident in how, why and when to move by using our Concepts.

The second course (Blade Awareness Level Two) is to test that the lessons of Level One has been practised and understood and to deal with a more varied attack all around the body and to analyse as individuals what we can make work under stress.

The third course (Blade Awareness Level Three) is to test that the lessons of Levels One and Two have been practised and understood and to take them into an environmental context. This is the time to also deal with different weapons or a combination of weapons to evaluate what works for an individual or a certain occupation combined with the life-threat based on levels of emergency.

Our aim is to tell the truth about knives and to avoid false impressions through the understanding of how the body and weapons work in different environments and in stressful conditions, then we can learn about ourselves more and what we are prepared to do in order to survive.

When all the courses have been taken we hope that you never have to test the outcome, but if that day does arrive we endeavour to give you some hope and increase your percentage of success.

These three courses can be designed to be trained over one weekend which we have found to be more beneficial for many participants due to their different time constraints.

In certain circumstances on completing both the practical and the theory of all the above permission may be granted for individuals or professional agencies to run these courses themselves under our guidelines.

EC's Input to Recent Discussions Concerning Medieval and Modern Day Knife Attitudes/Concepts/Theories and Techniques

Most people’s fears are attacks concerning knives and rapes (which often go hand-in-hand). It has been stated that people are more scared of knives than guns as they cannot understand the pain with bullets even though they understand you are more likely to die - they believe its because knives, razors and even paper cuts are set in our memory bank and pain is associated - hence the fascination and why people make money teaching illusions (past and present) by feeding the fear.

Knife/dagger-fighting is as serious now as it has always been (even with better medical conditions) so we do not believe in our past that people would recklessly attack - they want to avoid or win a fight, not just survive it, as you could still die from simple wounds.

A do-or-die situation may increase your bravery/fear and risks to kill your opponent to avoid death - but if the cut kills too then no one has won hence the phrase dig two graves - does this now influence how we fight today because in a do-or-die situation the winner may survive in hospital? Better to train for no injuries but accept it will happen if it’s a life and death situation but don't train to die or accept injury - it’s a product of a fight not the intention.

Clothing, seasons, emotions, training, fitness, age, occupations, distractions, the company with you and/or with your opponent and the environment make a difference. We would treat anyone who had a knife (and have done) as very dangerous and life threatening. Learning to understand movement and weapons are very important as most of Europe is now a knife culture and death from knives happens everyday via the statistics that police and security/armed forces (who we consult) often publish. Someone trying to warn/cut/frighten you is very different than someone who wants to kill you - but how do you know the difference and how do you react and what is the stress/fear and unknown everyday factors that influence the fight?

If we train only with the past in mind and say rush in because of armour and protective clothing or if modern security does the same because of stab vests etc - does this training influence, help or hinder a real situation without protection? If we attack the attack by aiming at the wrist/forearm how does this work if they wear a big puffer jacket and gloves - what if the edged weapon is long? So what do we do as both options are tactical but both are risky - we cannot do nothing - so we train but what are we training - controlling the knife or the man - do we fight the man or the knife - how do we prepare and what is at hand to use cloak/coat/shoe/belt/shield/brick/table/chair etc or do we have nothing - is the environment our friend or our enemy or both?

To copy and imitate past and present teachers may be good and may work, or get you killed - so we must train ourselves to react, respond, read a situation and have a strategy - this is a personal thing that cannot be copied - but to understand with our bodies and emotions we can be guided and helped by old and modern masters but we fight for ourselves in our time.

We assume we are all civilised and do not carry knives so we are starting at a disadvantage (our ancestors were perhaps always armed and society accepted this) - one with a knife or both with a knife what strategies change or do they - are we concerned with killing, survival and/or prison how far do we go to survive or win - does correct training give you a choice?

On the other hand we also train selective people how to use a knife and get the job done quickly this training learns us more about opportunities and weaknesses - so in some cases to learn how to use the knife and highlight all areas of vulnerability helps the mind-set to recognise a type of attack and intension - it also proves all our concepts.

Our concerns are the drills that get you killed with knives that many Escrima and weapon systems give that show great hand movements but bad body mechanics and no strategy the drills become fun and a game but the game takes over and many learn and pay to die for a good day out. They also forget that the attacker has more than a knife he has other options of attack too. We often let people grab our hands/arms to put locks on us or try to take our knives and we stop them by using other parts of our body or stop them with movement to highlight false illusions that are taught far too often - they controlled our knife attack but still lost just because of movement and other options.

The chances are we may die but there is a difference between a strategy to fight and a suicidal desperation defence/attack. We never think about defence we think of interfering to enable our attack, there is a huge difference and removes some fear/stress but not caution.

We believe bad knife drills cause more problems - same as weapon competitions can create bad habits - its silly holding up a winners medal by training unwisely for protected competition and making stupid mistakes in reality for a medal made of cheap metal. Who really knows how good our old masters were and did they re-evaluate but never wrote more? How good are modern knife teachers have they actual experiences to prove their training techniques/theories/concepts? We have changed our system several times in 30 years - what we did when we started now looks very bad to what our instructors now do - but that is progression and did our ancestors progress but never had time to express new ideas?

Knives are scary, painful, stressful and frightening and any training old and new should respect this - however something to do is better than nothing as we need some small hope or no one would leave their homes. We believe correct training and understanding movement and using strategy by understanding the area of the fight (controlling the space) allows a better chance than doing nothing and learning tricks (we understand what to trade to gain advantage/survival but still train to remove/reduce/prevent injuries) - we also understand the need for life blade work training but we have then to be aware of the dangers and possible illusions from life blade techniques/theories as we have to understand the same concerns for wooden and rubber knife training.

We can not promise survival or an injury free fight but it would up your percentage factor and change your thought process - which we think our ancestors would have used everyday as the acceptance of weapons and death was understood more than most civilised people today - but don't bet on this.

Train (past and present) with reality in mind for today, to avoid bad habits when you may need your skills for real. Train for all occasions and wish for none.