In this groundbreaking new book. Ralph Thorn differentiates between "circus" knife throwing and combat knife throwing, and reveals his style of knife throwing suitable for actual combat and knife fights. This thorough collection delivers powerful, reality-based self-defense methods from one of the world's best-known weapons experts. Combining the books Knife Fighting, Knife Throwing for Combat; Basic Stick Fighting for Combat; and Knife Self-Defense for Combat in one volume for the first time, this complete edition teaches aspiring martial artists dozens of knife-attack and counterattack techniques, psychological and physical visualization methods of unconventional paramilitary warfare, the use of the stick as a weapon of survival, and more than 30 separate methods for.
In the study of unconventional warfare, few names carry as much weight as Michael D. The shadowy hand-to-hand combat pioneer died under mysterious circumstances, but before meeting a violent, fiery death in an unexplained plane crash in Nicaragua, he penned Knife Self-Defence for Combat, the definitive guide to controlling and disarming a knife attacker and a must-have for any paramilitary operative.
Previously unavailable to the general public on the open market, this modern mercenary's favorite contains more than 30 fully. Paladin has obtained exclusive reprint rights to this classic originally published by Leatherneck magazine , which was the Marine bible of unarmed combat. Emphasizing the practice aspect of bayonet, knife and stick fighting, this rare volume also provides short courses in unarmed combat and knife throwing.
For academic study only. It teaches you how to defend against an assailant. Complete and Comprehensive Knife Fighting Instruction With over photographs and easy-to-follow instructions, this comprehensive book cuts through the guess work and teaches you the most practical and effective knife fighting techniques for real-world survival.
The book starts with an extensive safety review, then moves on to the basic techniques of dagger fighting, starting with grip and body postures. Readers will then learn about the basic actions of cuts, parries, blocks, and disarms. In these pages you will learn about the fundamentals of the sport and gain insight into some of the greatest professional knife throwers—the men who paved the way for the modern day thrower.
Have you ever been threatened or worried how to protect yourself or your family? What would you do if one day someone in your family accidently opened the door to the wrong person? Would it help if at that moment you could call upon the training, wisdom and perhaps the courage of an elite Special Forces professional? The use of the stick, long or short, as a weapon of survival, including disarming techniques, is presented in this second volume on combat training by Michael D.
Ki power, proper grip, visualization and breath control are explained as important elements in surviving attacks. One of the best ways to stay protected during an unwanted situation is by learning knife fighting. The trick, then, is just to always stand the same distanceaway for each of these throws and to throw them so that theknife always revolves at the same rate of speed. You thushave, say, a one-half-spin throw you use at 4' 6", a full-spinthrow that you throw from 9 feet, a spin-and-a-half at 12 feet,and so on, with various tricks and variations thrown in no punintended for variety.
Unless you are able to vary this rate ofspeed at which the blade rotates, which leads to far lydiscouraged, the areas in between these set distances arc ig nored. It should be noted that the rate of speed of this rotationis not the same as the speed at which the knife travels to thetarget, just how fast it is flipping over itself as it does so,though both must remain constant in this method of throwing.
Professionals, while they throw very accurately at still targets,always throw from a same few measured distances. Throwingfrom in between them would cramp their style and result in theknife bouncing off the target; it is therefore considered point less pun intended. Only at a distance of a pace or so, they say, is it possible tosimply hold a knife by the handlefalsely assumed, I sup pose, by the naive masses of a bread-buttering public to be theonly way to hold a gosh-dam knife — and throw it point-firstand get a stick.
Even from mere feet away the knife will spinaround enough to cause it to hit with the flat of the blade orthe butt of the handle. The throwing knives you see advertisedas such, aside from being nearly handleless and guardless, areobviously balanced to have their weight disproportionately inthe front end, just to turn over in the air- rotate- morequickly and predictably.
Similarly, the sport is closely linked to hatchet throwing,where the weight of the weapon is distributed likewise acomparatively light handle with a heavy head. All this obvi ously means that it is impossible to stick any target if any oneof three conditions occurs: a. This iseasy enough to prevent at the circus, but in fighting or huntingsituations these are not entirely unlikely events, and the practi cal uses of knife throwing are thus rightly relegated not to thearts of combat or survival but to the art of performance, wheregirls attach themselves to spinning wooden wheels whilerhinestone cowboys standing a couple of steps away definetheir silhouettes in flashing metal; where celluloid Bowieknives regularly fly end-over-end for forty feet, evidently inblissful ignorance of their ineffectiveness in the real world,and cause instant death to mustachioed serial villains wearingblack hats.
Combat Knife ThrowingA New Approach to Knife Throwing and Knife FightingIntroducing Spear-Style and Combat Knife Throwing45ground, and then end the conflict according to the dictates ofyour conscience, for you are now doubly armed while he isdisarmed and at your mercy.
XXXFigure 2Like other types oj performers, circus knife throwers must "hittheir marks "they can only throw from set locations. Figure 3Throwing a knife point-first at a target, like you would a spear, isOnly those ignorant of the basic mechanics of knife titrow ing could believe in such a thing as this latter.
They are proba easy if the knife is balanced and gripped properly. And any garding the usefulness of this style of knife throwing as a selfdefense or survival tool. If you getcircular, self-perpetuating process. That assumption is, again,only this: that a knife leaving a human hand must tumble un into a knife fight keep your knife in your hand, and if somegraciously end-over-end through the air if it is thrown any dis tance not measured in inches, as Moses declared from thefool tries to throw his at you, simply put an arm block in frontof your face, take one step forward or back, watch the butt-endof his blade bounce harmlessly off your arm and hit thethrowing instructions and learn to throw them in this way, in amountaintop and Sir Isaac Newton decreed into law, and that'.
In fact, it is perfectly possible and very easy to change thebalance of a knife or sword of nearly any reasonable size roughly, from hunting-knife size up to 30 inches so that itwill fly point-first at a target several yards away without thepoint ever dropping more than slightly, let alone rotating circularly; that is, so that it will fly the way a spear or arrowflies.
It is therefore perfectly possible to hit a target point-firstwith a knife from any range that your arm strength will allow,with a multiplicity of arm angles overhand, underhand, sidearm, even around-the-back whether it, or you, or both aremoving in any direction as you do so. These targets can be hithard enough to do them very serious damage, including instantfatal damage if you hit the right spots on a living target. It is furthermore perfectly possible though not quite aseasy to balance and throw that same knife in such a way as tobe able to control the rate of speed at which it rotates in the airwithout seriously compromising the velocity with which it ap proaches the target.
Thus, by varying that rate of speed, youcan hit any target point-first from any distance equal to or lessIntroducing Spear-Style and Combat Knife Throwing7because practiced knife throwers of the circus style simply donot believe it, and people unfamiliar with knife throwing donot even realize that circus-style throwers cannot in fact sim ply throw knives from variable distances the way one wouldany other object.
I will not further insult your intelligence bystating the desirability of being able to throw a knife in muchthe same way you would throw a ball or, more ominously,shoot a bullet. None of this takes any special equipment ortalent — only some practice, a roll or two of tape, and a knifewith its weight more in the handle end than the blade end. This method, to say the least, changes the equation of theutility of knife throwing in life-or-dcath situations.
It also hasthe benefit of making it a heck of a lot more fun to do, whichwill lead to gelling that necessary practice more painlessly if,perhaps, not less injuriously!
My inspiration for putting my quiverfull of knife-slinging techniques into writing is twofold: One, Iwant to make people aware of the nonsensical, self-imposedlimitations of circus throwing, a style which even the majorityof its adherents admit is useful only for entertainment pur than the maximum range your ability gives you — again, notposes. Most of the advice given out by these types of throwersis, from the point of view of my experience, nearly totally use just the artificial set distances that circus throwers almost al ways stand at and throw from due to the inherent limitations ofless to the layman at best, or dangerously ignorant and wrongtheir style, but also that far vaster territory in between thoseset points.
A glaring example of this would be the lunaticassertion in one pamphlet that the best combat throw is theIt is not at all impossible, by using either of these two meth backhand. It is categorically, inarguably, undeniably the worst,for at least four reasons I know of and will make clear in theods, to throw knives from real-time, real-life variable dis tances and angles, the same simple way you would throw achapter on combat.
Forgive the repetition of thisvery simple concept, but it seems necessary to emphasize thising, low velocity, leaves the thrower in poor defensive posi that it leaves one unable to significantly adjust the throwingangle to a moving target. Two, I have a passion for knifethrowing that I want others to share, and I am convinced that if.
I loved playing withited from the start by this inferior style that dominates the ac tivity, more of them might find it appealing enough to try. Af knives almost from the cradle and had often tried throwing or dinary folding and hunting knives even as a preadolcsccntter all, my style leads to greater power, mobility, range, and even then I could juggle three of them at a time and 1 stillconsistency in hitting things point-first than circus throwingever could.
I had given up on knife throwing when, not solong after, 1 accidentally broke the handle from a cheap swordI had by whacking the thing at shrubbery or some such.
I madea new handle of duct tape, wrapped right around the back endof the blade itself instead of the no longer existent tang, so 1could salvage it as an improvised machete. The tang of aknife is the part of the blade that extends down into the han dle. Playing with this new toy, I discovered that this much largerknife, since it rotated at a slower rate, was not only easier totoss and catch while juggling but much easier to control than asmaller knife when 1 threw it at things, especially if 1 threw itPersonally, I rejected circus throwing from my first encoun underhand instead of overhand.
Even more importantly, sim ter with it simply because I hit upon my own throwing styleply by experimenting with the location and amount of tape onand the concomitant methodology in actualizing itmy homemade handles, I discovered that I could so stabilizethe flight of the knife that it could travel virtually in a straight- fancywords for wrapping tape on bayonet blades and chucking themat trees!
By the time I got old enough to contract a diseaseall — even when thrown overhand this time by the skinnyparticular to adults, the one which leads us to stop tinkeringarm of a pound boy. Within a couple of years I hadeven learned to throw much smaller knives, many of them just'in half of Appalachia.
On Judgment Day, I had better hopethe predictably broken remnants of my swords and bayonet. This in turn led to myrejecting the parameters internalized by the knife throwers andknife fighters in all the books and magazines, and to makingnew rules for my new game. For years I thought that, because 1 grew up throwing knivesin this seemingly unique style that I developed, it would benearly impossible for me to verbalize my methods and to thusshow others how to duplicate them.
Not only is my throwingso habitual and automatic that I am probably not even con sciously aware of many of the things I do, but it is now nearlytwo decades since I was first learning to throw. How would Iever be able to relate it to a beginner when everything 1 haddone with knives since my early teens had been aimed at mak ing knife throwing such a reflex with me that my very nervesand muscles cannot remember a time when I could not do it?
This thinking of mine ended recently through anotheraccidental epiphany. As usual, I threw much less in thesummer due to the heat, and when I started throwing moreagain in the fall I overdid it and made my throwing arm sore. As a result, I somehow found myself doing something I havealmost never done: throwing left-handed. Thingslike stance, grip, arm angle, balance, release, and developingvelocity. I furthermore realized: If Ican do it lefty and I am improving at a surprising rate , itreally is easy enough to be teachable.
At the very least, it iseasy relative to the complications of the circus style. Introducing Spear-Style and Combat Knife ThrowingIII can teach others to do it the same way I am teaching theother side of my body, since the observations I make whilethrowing left-handed apply almost perfectly to a rank begin ner.
Certainly I am not a physical freak, just an ordinary-sizedman in his thirties with fairly coordinated hands and feet, whogrew up carousing through the woods with a blade or three inhis hand. Actually, I still do that, so like some bizarro-worldPeter Pan, maybe I never grew up. Regardless, only now,thanks to belatedly rediscovering my own spirit of inquiry,have I even discovered that I can throw left-handed!
While this tract, then, is of unfortunate necessity often aboutme and my experience — since, while I suspect I am not en tirely alone, to my direct knowledge 1 am the only person whothrows this way — it is much more about the possibilities ofknife throwing that do exist. These have been denied by allsuch baseless assumptions as I find even myself, who ought toknow better, making, and by the evident total lack of eitherathleticism or experimentation from those in print who callthemselves experts on knife throwing.
It is intended to inspireothers not so much to slavishly imitate my style as to identifyand transcend all these silly limitations and continue what Ionly start here. If this became a re ality, it would change in short order the whole concept of thecorrect way to throw, and by extension, fight with, knives. More accurately, I deny that there is one correct way, only acorrect general approach that I try to present here, an approachthat encourages as many ways to throw knives as there are fu ture knife throwers.
And if this is all only a tempest in a tea pot, I am merely trying to say that you can pour out the wholetepid brew of the past and make a hundred flavors of coffee. Phillips, both of whom gave much needed assistance inproducing this book though in entirely divergent ways. Chapter OneBalancing a Knifefor ThrowingPerhaps the easiest way to understand the basics of the styleof knife throwing described here, especially if you are alreadyfamiliar with conventional knife throwing, is to first realizewhy it bears no resemblance to hatchet throwing.
Hatchets,and for that matter Bowie-type knives, are tools intended forpurposes entirely different from throwing. As chopping andcutting instruments, they are much heavier in the front endthan in the handle end. Conventional knife throwing seems to have evolved entirelyfrom attempts to throw ordinary hunting or fighting knives,perhaps as a campfire pastime, without changing their balance. Obviously a frontiersman, soldier, or hunter of the pastwould not have wanted to alter the balance and thus perform ance of one of his most precious tools just for the purposes ofsport, and certainly throwing hunting-type knives or hatchetsare useless for anything but sport.
What is remarkable is that even as knife throwing became amore specialized activity and moved into a comer of the enter tainment industry, there seems to have been no effort tochange the basic balance of the knives used so that their rela tively heavy front end would not immediately start droppingas soon as they were thrown.
A mass-produced, conventional circus-style throwing knife is symmetrical weight-wise inthat its balance point is generally as close to its center as pos sible, but this does not address the basic problem. Theseknives still turn over themselves as they fly through the air;they just turn tighter circles instead of lopsided egg-shaped el lipses, as hatchets or Bowie knives do.
This is an other verse in the song that was playing while they were rear ranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
If you are going to abandon the use of a knife as a tool en tirely and balance it specifically for throwing, why in theworld should you still remain limited by the natural flight pat tern of knives that are meant to remain as tools, and are bal anced to remain in the hand?
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