This hubpage is dedicated to martial arts practiced relating to knife fighting, both using a knife for-self defense and defending yourself against a knife attack. You will find various online resources relating to this subject. It is in no way meant to promote violence or to encourage the use of weapons against innocent people. If this is what interests you then please go away.

Getting into a violent confrontation involving a knife will always be highly dangerous, no matter how well trained you are, so the most important thing anyone should always remember about knife defense is that your first choice should be to run away. But unfortunately escaping from the situation isn't always possible, and so you may have to stand and fight to protect yourself or your loved ones. If you find yourself in an awful situation like this then fortunately there are a few very simple things that you can do to significantly increase your chances of getting out of it without serious injury. This article is not intended as a comprehensive guide, and reading it will not make you an expert, but it may just make the crucial difference if the worst happens.

The first thing, and the simplest thing, that you have to do is reduce the target area of your body that your attacker has to aim for. You can do this simly by turning side-on to your attacker, rather than facing them. This makes make you a smaller target and also makes dodging out the way of an attack easier.

The next thing that you should do is to focus on protecting the most vital areas of your body. Obviously you don't want to be stabbed or slashed at all, but getting hit in some areas of the body are much worse than other. The main area you need to protect is the neck, which is a common target and will lead to a critical injury if hit. In actual fact it is very simple to make 100% certain that you wont get hit in the neck - all you have to do is to raised your shoulder up as if in a shrug and tuck your chin down, so that your shoulders are covering your neck.

Step three is bring your hands up in a 'guard' position. The natural instinct is to hold up your hands with the palms facing outwards towards your attacker, but this is totally wrong. Cuts to the back of the forearm may hurt and leave an ugly scar, but they won't kill you, whereas a cut to the inside of the forearm where there are arteries may well kill you. And that leads me on to my final point. To put it bluntly you can't get hit on the forearm and in the chest with the same knife at the same time. Knowing that being hit on the back of the forearm is much more survivable than getting hit elsewhere, if you can't escape and get out of the way, the best thing is generally to deliberately push your forearm onto the blade of the knife when someone tries to stab or slash you, to make certain you are not hit anywhere more damaging. If you can you should do this with one arm, punch as hard as you posibly can with the other arm, then make another attempt to escape from danger.

In different ways this ebook is both very good and very bad. Alexander Popov is ex Russian special forces, and belonged to a sabotage unit who specialised in using knife to make silent kills behind enemy lines. There is absolutely no dounting that he is one of the worlds top authorities in martial arts using a knife, and this really shines through in the quality and the depth and breadth of this work. On the other hand his english is quite poor, making this a stilted and sometimes hard to follow read, and it is also full of techniques that are quite specific to the military which are very interesting to read but not particularly relevant to modern self defense applications. Overall well worth reading though and if you want to check it out for yourself then you can get a free trial download here.