Stick 'em, Dan'l - part 2

Whilst playing with a knife this morning, I recalled the seminar to which I went some months ago, tagged onto the end of the Barnes/Sonnon workshop in Portland. Silat teacher Mushtaq Ali offered some really basic knife training, in which he simplified that which is often made complicated.

I found this refreshing.

In that light, it occurred to me this morning that it could be made even more simple. I'll set it up, thus:

Voluntary muscles do but one thing: they contract. By means of a cleverly-designed system of tendons and bones and joints, certain levers are constructed in the human body, and by contracting, muscles move these simple machines in paths that are commonly referred to as 1) a push or 2) a pull.

By these, I mean -- and speaking in broad, general terms -- a push is an action that moves something away from one, and a pull would be an action that brings the thing toward one.
(Addendum: using anatomical terms, like origin and insertion, i.e. the fixed end of a muscle, or the body part that moves when the muscle contracts, then the push/pull thing is easier to see. Basically, moving bones toward each other in a folding-knife-closing motion is a pull; curling the hand toward the shoulder using the biceps, say; moving them apart -- opening the folder -- as in straightening the arm with the triceps, that's a push.)

A straight punch or kick, those are pushes; circular blocks might be both, first a push, then a pull.

Grab somebody by the back of the neck and yank them toward you, it's a pull -- but if you whack somebody behind you with the elbow of your same arm using the same motion, it's also a push when it passes the rubicon ...

With that in mind, then knife-fighting (all fighting, actually) is all going to consist of either a pushing motion a pulling one, or some combination thereof. Simple.

The position of the knife in one's hand will determine whether the technique will be a stab, cut, slash, slice, hit, or whatever, and for any kind of effective use, there are limits to how one can usefully grip a knife in one's hand, too.

Most of the time, holding onto the handle is probably the best idea.

The blade can be, at any given time, point up or down or any angle twixt and tween, with the edge facing at almost any quadrant on a compass, depending on what you want to do with it. Most of the time, it will probably be facing toward your attacker or yourself, or maybe at the floor or ceiling, though eventually, the point or edge will need to face some portion of the attacker, else you might as well use a stick.

That's pretty much it, insofar as mechanics go, isn't it? Not really that complex, when you think about it.

Of course, there's a trick to getting those pushes and pulls to go where you want, when you want, to deliver whichever part of the knife you want to utilize, but you know, it ain't rocket science ...