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Iain Abernethy
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Ground fighting against a knife attack

Wim Demeere discusses a very graphic video that clearly shows why the ground is not a good place to be when third parties (in this case one armed with a knife) can get involved. As Wim makes clear, the footage is gruesome and viewer discretion is strongly advised. However, it does make very clear that one-on-one unarmed fighting methods and tactics will not fare well when transposed to a civilian self-protection context.

WARNING: GRAPHIC VIDEO - NOT SUITABLE FOR UNDER 18s

https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=caf_1425147486

Link to the video and Wim’s excellent discussion on it: http://www.wimsblog.com/2015/03/ground-fighting-against-a-knife-attack/

Awareness and a healthy attitude to personal safety are key. We must always do what we can to avoid conflict. But if we can’t then we need to ensure what we are teaching and practising will actually keep people safe from society’s violent minority. In a self-protection context, anyone teaching ground fighting as anything other than an “everything else has failed, regain the feet ASAP insurance policy” would do well to watch this video and see how quickly things can go wrong on the floor (regardless of how effective ground fighting can be in one-on-one contexts).

Ground fighting as play and combative sport is hugely enjoyable and good for mental and physical health. It is high level physical chess that helps develop a flexible and strong body. It has many benefits away from self-protection, but when looking at keeping ourselves safe from the violence of others ground fighting should never be a choice. If we do end up on the floor, then it is regaining our feet we should be looking for, not gaining holds or submissions. As this video makes clear, every second we are on the floor is a second too long.

We need to remember that we don’t always have a choice though. If we have no ground skills at all, then regaining the feet could be very difficult. As I’ve said before, to me, ground fighting (for self-protection) is to the martial artist what crash-landing is to the airplane pilot: It’s a skill they need for when everything else has gone wrong, but it’s not a skill they would ever opt to use.

All the best,

Iain

Ando
Ando's picture

Horrifying.

I agree 100%. PLAN A: Fight to stay on your feet. PLAN B: Fight to get back on your feet. There's just no debating this one.

Marc
Marc's picture

In addition to the gruesomeness of the violence shown and all the correct points made about ground fighting, I'd like to note that the video shows another gruesome thing: The person who's been stabbed and is thus probably suffering immensly lies on the ground in plain view off passers-by. And what do passers-by do? They pass by.

As an aside: The fight at the beginning of the video looks a bit like an at least semi-consensual fight. None of the two parties seem to make an actual attempt to escape.  

Iain Abernethy
Iain Abernethy's picture

Marc wrote:
The person who's been stabbed and is thus probably suffering immensely lies on the ground in plain view off passers-by. And what do passers-by do? They pass by.

Yep. People will do that. As the clip shows, some walk past; others pull a knife and get involved. Passer-by can help, harm or simply pass-by. There is no way of knowing and training and tactics need to take that into account.

Marc wrote:
As an aside: The fight at the beginning of the video looks a bit like an at least semi-consensual fight. None of the two parties seem to make an actual attempt to escape.

That’s true. We don’t know how things got started, but it looks like escape is not an option being pursued by either party … and we can see the result of that.

One of the problems with “fight training” masquerading as self-protection is that their two very different goals get obscured:

Fighting: Win the fight

Self-Protection: Avoid Harm

In broad general terms, self-protection is not about “winning the fight” but “not losing the fight” … and one of the most effective ways to not lose the fight is don’t fight!

If all we have is fight training, then that’s the only skill we have. Real self-protection training needs to include live “fight to flee” drills so this much needed skill is practised, honed and applied.

All the best,

Iain

Mikeseishin-do
Mikeseishin-do's picture

Marc wrote:

The person who's been stabbed and is thus probably suffering immensly lies on the ground in plain view off passers-by. And what do passers-by do? They pass by.

There is very interesting concept actually regarding by-standers. Its called by-stander intervention, studies found that the more people there were, the less inclined people where to intervene! Seems bizzare right? Sometimes people arn't comfortable with intervening in situations such as this, sometimes they assume others will rush to the indivduals aid, sometimes they just dont care! The mind is an odd thing.

I also agree with whats been said already, we should fight to escape rather than fight to win, we should always attempt to keep an altercation where its is more feasible to escape, i.e. On your feet, running is hard whilst on your back afterall. Even for those who are comfortable on the floor, the most experienced know that the aim is not lock and grapple, its to create opportunity for escape/end the scenario!

Hindsight is one of the greatest gifts regarding judgment. I wish regularly to have forsight rather than hindsight.

But still life is full of tradgedies and it makes you think if it hand just been done differenbtly what would be the outcome?

Interesting video though.

Thanks,

Mike.

mosul
mosul's picture

Yuck!

Now imagine you were there. With your level of training and experience. What did you do?

Most of the by standers are probably in shock, they are commuters or tourists or other general public. They have every excuse not to get involved. You have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours training a response for this kind of thing. Okay its not you or yours but that is someones son, brother or father lying on the floor and you just stood and watched it happen. Or did you?

Alex.M
Alex.M's picture

Mikeseishin-do wrote:

Marc wrote:

The person who's been stabbed and is thus probably suffering immensly lies on the ground in plain view off passers-by. And what do passers-by do? They pass by.

There is very interesting concept actually regarding by-standers. Its called by-stander intervention, studies found that the more people there were, the less inclined people where to intervene! Seems bizzare right? Sometimes people arn't comfortable with intervening in situations such as this, sometimes they assume others will rush to the indivduals aid, sometimes they just dont care! The mind is an odd thing.

I also agree with whats been said already, we should fight to escape rather than fight to win, we should always attempt to keep an altercation where its is more feasible to escape, i.e. On your feet, running is hard whilst on your back afterall. Even for those who are comfortable on the floor, the most experienced know that the aim is not lock and grapple, its to create opportunity for escape/end the scenario!

Hindsight is one of the greatest gifts regarding judgment. I wish regularly to have forsight rather than hindsight.

But still life is full of tradgedies and it makes you think if it hand just been done differenbtly what would be the outcome?

Interesting video though.

Thanks,

Mike.

I just wanted to add regarding the problem with groups of by-standers and how to address it. This was a piece of advice that was given back in college to me and my fellow students during a psychology class by our professor (who had previously worked as a FBI profiler and had familiarity with cases involving bystander behaviour):

"Call a specific member of the group out! Establish eye-contact with them, refer to an item of clothing that they're wearing ie hey you lady with the red shirt, call the cops!" (verbatim obviously). I'd like to add personally that if you can add a physical motion, such as literally pointing at the person in question, that lessens any chance of confusion as to who you're calling out. This helps establish a connection between you and a person so they are no longer "under the spell" of group think and has to take personal responsibility, and you've given them a specific task to perform which helps them deal with the confusion and fear because you are forcing them to use their higher cognitive function. They will naturally be feeling confused and quite possibly afraid when witnessing a traumatic situation - remember that certain events may be traumatic for the witness too."

I remember many years ago two of my roommates back in college (I was away on winter break at the time) had an experience that reflected this. Both of my roommates, let's call them Roy and Miller for kicks, where in our apartment, it was a weekend night. A guy who lived in the same apartment building, busted into our apartment drunk out of his mind and started fighting Roy shouting that Roy needed to "get the eff out of his apartment!" (in his drunken confusion he'd not realized that he lived on a different floor, and so thought that two people had broken into his home). Roy, who had (and still has obviously) a Law Enforcement background managed to wrestle the guy to the ground. Here's the curious thing though.

Miller witness the guy busting into the apartment, and the fight and the wrestling, and didn't do anything. It wasn't until Roy shouted at him to call the cops, that he snapped out of it and proceeded to call 911. After explaining the situation they both managed to hold the guy down together until cops came and dealt with the situation.

1) Call someone out with specifics, so there's no confusion as to WHO you are calling out.

2) Give them a specific task to perform and remember KISS "keep it simple stupid" - a stressful situation will make it hard for you to dish out tricky tasks too, so it'll behoove you as well to use simple commands, and it'll make it easier for them to perform simple tasks.

Sometimes, this kind of "calling out" can result in the members of the group - other than the person you specifically called out - taking indivual responsibility and mobilizing to assist you and/or whoever you are trying to protect. I don't know to what degree this "call 'em out" strategy is common knowledge but I hope we can all share this rather useful tool with as many people as possible that don't already know about it - My wife was the first person I told as soon as I learned about it (followed by friends and family - though that's not exactly a discussion topic for a child's birthday party, ey?)

Marc
Marc's picture

Alex.M wrote:

1) Call someone out with specifics, so there's no confusion as to WHO you are calling out.

2) Give them a specific task to perform and remember KISS "keep it simple stupid" - a stressful situation will make it hard for you to dish out tricky tasks too, so it'll behoove you as well to use simple commands, and it'll make it easier for them to perform simple tasks.

I don't know to what degree this "call 'em out" strategy is common knowledge but I hope we can all share this rather useful tool with as many people as possible that don't already know about it.

That strategy was exactly what I have been taught in first aid courses. First aid situations are the same in this respect. No violence, but the same freeze effect in by-standers.

I'd highly recommend taking first aid courses every few years. Just like with our self-defense training, in a stressful and confusing first aid situation you will fall back on what you trained to do. If you did train nothing you will fall back on just that: you'll freeze. At least learn how to place an emergency call. That's first-aid, too. By the way, for most of us, a first aid situation is much more probable than a self-defense situation.

Take care

Marc

Alex.M
Alex.M's picture

Marc wrote:

That strategy was exactly what I have been taught in first aid courses. First aid situations are the same in this respect. No violence, but the same freeze effect in by-standers.

I'd highly recommend taking first aid courses every few years. Just like with our self-defense training, in a stressful and confusing first aid situation you will fall back on what you trained to do. If you did train nothing you will fall back on just that: you'll freeze. At least learn how to place an emergency call. That's first-aid, too. By the way, for most of us, a first aid situation is much more probable than a self-defense situation.

Take care

Marc

That's a very important point - we do what we're trained to do in stressful situations, which is why we do things like fire drills in school and such. Anybody can figure out intellectually that you're supposed to hit the fire alarm and go to a safe zone, but you have to really physically go through it in order to have a chance at performing it during high stress. Can you imagine what it would be like if kids didn't have fire drills and a fire broke out?

Taking first aid courses with some regularity is a very good recommendation - I haven't taken one in the last 5 years and I can tell you that I wouldn't be able to do much more than call emergency services, because of the freeze factor. An important factor to understand is that we all freeze or act according to our stress-training (barring the odd, freakish, super anomaly of a human being of course) so looking at a video and asking "how come no one did this or that? I sure would!" Is statistically an untrue statement based on a lack of self awareness at best, and highly dangerous at it's worst.

And as you pointed out, we're more likely to come across a first aid situation in our day-to-day (unless you have a very unlucky day-to-day).

Tau
Tau's picture

First Aid and Self Defence. There's an interesting comparison (and I hasten to add that I don't disagree with the above)

- Don't freeze, do something

- Keep it simple. Stick to fundamentals

- Don't rely on onlookers to do anything helpful. They have the potential to be highly dangerous

- Maintain awareness

- Stick to priorities

- Be prepared to explain your actions

Paul_D
Paul_D's picture

Ando wrote:

There's just no debating this one.

Clearly you don't post in other forums which have BJJ practitioners ;-)

Iain Abernethy
Iain Abernethy's picture

Paul_D wrote:
Clearly you don't post in other forums which have BJJ practitioners ;-)

Ahh, the joys of tribalism in martial arts :-) When you have “solution” seeking to redefine problem, so “solution” is falsely validated you always have problems. Karate does this when all attacks are made into long-range, formal and choreographed exchanges i.e. “If we pretend violence looks and works like this, then what we do works … see!” I have seen BJJ do this too when it comes to things like multiple enemies, weapons, etc.

Both BJJ and Karate are good arts, but they need honest and objective practitioners when it comes to self-defence.

All martial arts can avoid this “self-deception” is we go, “What’s the true problem? Right, got it. This will be the optimum solution then.” Instead what we often have is, “Right, this is my art and it’s perfect in every way. If reality suggests otherwise, then I need to reinvent reality.” The trouble is that reality does not give one solitary s### about what you think it should be. It is what it is, and forever will be. As the above video makes very clear.

All the best,

Iain

Iain Abernethy
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Came across this on my friend Jamie Clubb's website. Seems apt:

"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." — George Orwell (1946)

Mark B
Mark B's picture

I like that. For battlefield substitute with car park, shopping precinct, pub toilets etc.