Advice for a potential homeless guy?
Inbox
6:14 AM (9 hours ago)
to me
"The people best equipped to translate their sports combat doctrine into an empty hand verses knife situation are non-Muay Thai—kick boxers and southpaw boxers."
Why?
In a modern martial arts context, empty hand fighting is REAL and weapon training is PLAY.
In a survival setting, like my lame old ass trying to defend against a pack of Groes with a cane, or against a spic with a knife, empty hand fighting is PLAY and the weapon is REAL.
Southpaw boxers, through experience, i have noted, immediately are as good with a knife as any one trained extensively in non contact knife use. This is because the knife fighter leads with his right hand and the unarmed defender better had as well, because his heart is on his left, right in front of that knife hand. Orthodox boxers take an extra 2 hours of sparring to catch up. This knife training helps them box southpaw and deal with southpaws.
In a survey of over 314 knife encounters only 2 were left handed knife uses. This is a lower incidence than left to right dexterity, with 1 lefty in 20 the old rule.
In my original survey, the men who did best unarmed against the knife, were kick boxers, old school kickboxers from hard style karate that kicked straight and at a distance. Muay Thai generally takes these kicking arts apart for the same reason that Muay Thai is suicide against a knife: you are square, you switch leads, you follow through with kicks, you keep you trunk right there, where this cracker can stab you while you are kicking him. Leota Machida with a knife—that's what you want. Then take away the knife and he will have the time and measure to deal with it long enough to pick up a chair [the best weapon against the knife being the bar stool or light frame chair] or run.
This is now a knife situation. Put a weapon to hand within 2 beats, or, most likely, DIE.
Shooting victims die at about a third of the rate of stabbing victims.
Time and measure in boxing and Muay Thai are as close to time and measure in knife and karate. One reason why I knew that Libra was a Muay Thai influenced means of murdering unarmed people using an ice pick grip to assist in in kick boxing and knife grappling, was my extensive experience training men in knife who come from empty hand arts. i have more experience with this in contact sparring than anyone. This is one reason i can't walk, i have stretched and twisted my femoral nerves in thousands of hours of drilling and sparring and fighting. It is another means of determining that we live on a faɡɡot planet.
The men from empty hand that are the best with knives are Jeet Kune Do men, who tend not to do well in MMA, but excel in knife, do well with stick and sword, and have the best record in street survival, including knife encounters. An exception is a JKD guy who went over to BJJ, locked a triangle on a spic in a bar fight in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and lost various vital organs to multiple stabs.
Just as BJJ and Muay Thai are superior in the cage to boxing and karate, the later are superior in weapon encounters by just as wide a margin.
If you are kicking a man armed with a knife, you better use the shoe, not the shin, and forget all about the knee and the elbow.
Imagine being held in a Muay Thai plum with a knife in your hand?
You stab him before he knees you, while he is kneeing you and again after he knees you, and he still thinks you can't punch, does not even know he's dead.
Spleen [if he survives he'll eventually die of a weakened immune system], under the floating rib, reach around to the kidney [kill] or lung [disabling] while he sinks in the knee, when he drops the knee put it in his heart [kill]. Or, just stab him in the neck, twist, cut out, and walk away while he dies on his feet.
Fuck him.
If he is beating you up with some art while you are minding your own business, then he just committed suicide and deserved his portion of Fate.
The thing is, the Muay Thai guy and the boxer, they don't know I have a knife until they grab, punch or kick me. Once they do that, my knife is in even if my nose is on the wrong side of this rattle trap mug. Most of the nastiest stabbings are of a man who is beating the piss out of another and does not understand why this twerp is punching him in the gut. If this makes no sense, read The Logic of Steel.
If you want to train and spar and even fight in any of the above mentioned arts, seek an invite to the East Tennessee Man Weekend in May.
In the end, anyone can get good with a knife. It is usually used effectively to kill with ZERO training. A knife makes any man into Mike Tyson. The statement you quoted is referencing the time it will take to get up to speed with a knife based on your parent art, which is probably empty hand of some sort. It also assumes most or all of your contact training is in an empty hand art. I have lost numerous machete duels to kicks, not round kicks, but front snap kicks. i have lost stick fights to side kicks but never round kicks. If you are going to give me a head shot with a stick so you can kick my leg or body, I'll take the trade, even with masks on. Without gear, your kick hurts, maybe disables, my stick stroke KILLS.
With a knife?
Jesus, i won't even go to sleep when my little Eskimo wife is mad at me, because she has a letter opener next to the bed!
Any art that says the knife is just an accessory or an extension of the hand is mistaken as much as if John L. Sullivan would have been mistaken if he assumed that Billy the Kid's use of the gun was merely an extension of his fist and that The Kid could gain respect without his gun. The Knife, when it is introduced, as with the gun, is a Hiroshima moment—that time when THE WEAPON becomes God and we are under its ire, either as priest or apostate.
