Continued and constant rotational change for Knife defense and takedowns.

Locks too, but the title is crowded enough.

See that doofus dressed like your grand mothers couch? That’s me. I helped pose and play around with progressions for this book.

Now I can go into details about everything taught in the book, which is not only a system on how to defend against a knife, but a general system of controlling the body through the limbs.

However I am going to focus specifically on one principle: When a Practitioner has a piece of their opponent attached to them, it’s best to step, and rotate constantly in one direction or do constant shifts in rotation. You feel resistance? Step again and continue the rotation anyway, change direction and continue to rotate as much as possible.

You get the idea I hope.

To explore this principle from the book, let’s examine the single leg take down.

To do single leg, whether head inside or head outside, will often be taught to ‘c-step’ then drop the shoulder and turn. That’s great, it involves a step and rotation. So far so good.

However Often when that fails, people stop the rotation. Don’t. Keep going, rotate ahead of them as they hop and frame.

DC doing rotations and turns along with a step out.

“But what if he keeps jumping around as I rotate? I try to turn to stay ahead, but he’s timing it.”

That’s when you suddenly change direction and rotate the other way. THe single leg takedown vanishes, but to compensate they give you a whole bunch of other stuff. All competent wrestlers will chain wrestle, many just stop or get flustered when they hit a dead end. The step, rotation, direction change, rotate pattern simply keeps you from being ‘stuck’ and your always keeping them off balance. As long as they are off balance, the chain is there. Sometimes they even give up the back. This works as long as you have an attachment or they are attached to you.

Many people who shoot, assuming their penetration step is deep enough, often negate sprawls by changing position through a turn or a step and turn.

“But Adeel, what if they frame with their hands or get a neck tie as a shoot or dive?”

Believe it or not, shucking a frame and neck tie requires a….that’s right! Rotation! Yes there is the shuck motion that’s a little upward in force, but much of it is he rotation around the centre. If your driving in with force, they can’t frame or neck tie in a way to prevent shucking without allowing the take down to happen. It’s there if you have enough pressure.

The frame and neck tie is an attachment. If a rotation doesn’t get rid of it, chances are they are not really attached.

Some general food for thought. This isn’t perfect, martial arts is complicated. THe stuff I’m talking about above can fail if your timing is off, if someone turns with you, if they keep you from getting a piece of them.
But to actually pull off many things, you need a step and rotation, and so many techniques and defenses prevent a step and rotation. It’s not something your opponents wants you to be able to do, so they don’t allow it.

“Oh yeah? It’s not perfect? Well fuck you then! Why do I need to know this?”

But if you understand this concept, you can problem solve tecniques or tactices you employ when doing any kind of grappling, whether you sieze a hand striking at you with an over hook. Intercept a knife thrust, or you lock on a neck tie, manpulating them becomes easy when you simplify it in terms of rotations and steps.

Of course we can do a deep study just on the single leg, where we can look a liftings. High crotches, lifts on the hips for techniques such as O-Goshi or a hip toss. Rotation is not the only tool to study in improving take downs.

It’s just the one I picked to write about.

On a similar but different topic, the book and teacher where I got this concept from can be found here:

https://www.amazon.ca/Watch-Out-Pointy-End-Enforcement/product-reviews/0995975728/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewopt_sr?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews&filterByStar=five_star&pageNumber=1

There are many reasons you would want to read it, lots of principles and concepts. But the most important is being able to sieze a knife hand, because knives move fast, hard to catch, hard to block. But I’ve played with the system in the book, if you train it right you can greatly increase your chances of controlling a stabbing arm.