Knife Fighting Courses and Common Misunderstandings

Targeting templates 

A friend just went to a seminar hosted by Sayoc and his thoughts were overall positive and his negatives I will address.

1. Violence?
2. Targeting templates and accuracy

These were the big ones and I think they are important to address to understand.

Violence in the world of knife fighting is paramount. If a blade is pulled on you it is extremely dangerous and can cause real damage REAL FAST. There is a common term “the 21 foot rule” https://lawofficer.com/exclusive/21footrule/ that states when a cop has a holstered weapon a bad guy with a knife can fatally injure the good with the knife before the good guy can draw his weapon and accurately fire his gun. Now if you are unarmed or even armed, and the guy has a knife how are you going to effectively stop the bad guy. The first answer is violence of action. In the military we called them immediate action drills or IA drills. When x happened we would practice to respond immediately with y. This increases survival odds a great deal. 

Once Violence has begun you are not going to be able to de-escalate or retreat until the violence is dealt with. The best way to deal with violence is precise overwhelming violence. Having a plan or response and using extreme intelligently delivered violence to solve the problem is probably the safest course of action. Once the threat is no longer a threat quit applying violence. Violence does not equal anger it just means overwhelm and dominate. Violence is a tool, and you need to understand it. 

This leads to the second problem my friend had. “It seems that trying to be that accurate with a template would leave to stress freeze response,” and “It seems the target drills don’t incorporate what is happening with bad guys appendages or if he is moving his head etc.”

The template that my friend saw was from Sayoc the 3 of 9 template https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pophQZ2JJk so we will work with this one.

The targeting templates work for a couple of reasons. They allow you to have an immediate action to a large set of problems and they allow you to pick up anywhere in the flow of the template. Just because it starts with right hand jugular it does not mean you will start there in real life. If the guys head is ducked and he is swinging a blade at you, you may start further into the template but once you start you have an immediate attack strategy. Do, it violently and practice it.

Remember that as you practice your actions angles and dellivery of your weapons become faster and more accurate. You have to start somewhere and that is where targeting templates work. They work at the beginning so you begin to understand how things happen, or can happen. If you train something like Sayoc you will see that they have a few begining places to start from. They have targeting templates like the above 3 of 9 and pantatukan stuff that begins from punches and knife feeds or good blade attacks. Whatever your system it will start you somewhere like that. Do the drills until they are rote, but understand they are drills to teach you immediate action when you are attacked.  Train have fun and critically think about both.