Sharon Friedman – Vigilance and Tranquility

To learn to work with a knife well you need to be unseen. A lazy pro will not show you the knife before he gets his job done so here goes. Stand in front of each other and look straight forward without breaking your natural standing posture. Stand so close as to be able to hit the body without being seen by the person in front of you. Take turns hitting without giving the hit away by moving the shoulders or wincing and so on. Now add to that trying to deflect the hit and later on body movement by turning and sliding to avoid the hit. Once you did this with fists go for the knife and practice some more. Don’t be fooled by the speed. Move naturally and let the fear and the joy of the game serve you instead of you serving them. After this stationary drill move to walking. One walks toward the other and goes to work in order to kill the other and does NOT stop until either the other is down or he is down. you have to play till the end. Be carefull to stab and slash inside the other so he learn to move well and not just dance on the tip of the knife. Consider you are cutting bread for a sandwich. Are you stroking the bread crust or cutting in. Do the actual work.  to finish this and attain a more realistic sense of reality try defending your life against a person with two knives. don’t count the number of surface cuts but count the number of ending strokes and mind your fingers and forearm tendons…

And have a good weekend