Ernie Kirk’s Stick and Knife Seminar

Ernie Kirk conducted a stick and knife seminar on Saturday. And as is the case with his seminars, there is a lot of material to cover. Essentially, the seminar covered unarmed stick attack defenses, stick against stick offenses and defenses, unarmed knife defenses, knife against knife defenses and stick against knife defenses. None of the techniques was elaborate; they were very basic. As a matter-of-fact, several of the techniques were akin to hand defenses. The only difference was that the fighting range (distance) was extended between combatants due to the added length of the weapon.

Drills Outdoors

• Practiced swinging a stick from various angles.
  
  
• Practiced the timing of our partner’s swings and burst in to touch his shoulder trying not to be hit.
  
  
• Our partner held a tombstone pad overhead and we had to strike it rapidly 20 times. Then our partner held the tombstone pad vertically and we had to strike it rapidly 20 times horizontally in one direction and then rapidly 20 times horizontally in the other direction.
  
  
• Our partner held the tombstone pad out in front of her and moved toward us. The object was to try to touch us with the pad while we struck the pad trying to maintain the proper striking range.
  
  
• Practiced unarmed stick defense against an overhead swing.
  
  
• Practiced unarmed stick defense against a horizontal swing.
  
  
• The class was split into two groups. One group was armed with sticks and the other group was unarmed. The armed group maneuvered amongst the unarmed group and made random attacks against it.

Drills Indoors

• Our partners attacked us with a stick while our backs were against a wall.
  
  
• We were put into groups of six, one person had his back against a wall and was attacked, one at a time, by the other five persons with no break in the attacks.
  
  
• Practiced close quarter short range punching by doing some hockey-style fighting (dirty boxing) with our partner holding one focus mitt.
  
  
• Similar to the above close quarter drill except we stabbed the focus mitt with a training knife instead of punching it.
  
  
• Practiced another close quarter drill that involved punching our partner and blocking her knife attack attempts.
  
  
• While standing stationary, we allowed our partner to stab us continuously in order to have an idea of how many times a person can be stabbed within 30 seconds. The number was in the seventies.
  
  
• Practiced unarmed knife defenses with our partner.
  
  
• Practiced unarmed knife defenses against a group of people, one at a time, with no break in the attacks.
  
  
• Practiced some defenses while seated in a chair. 
  
  
• Armed with a knife, we practiced knife defenses against our partner’s knife attacks. Scary stuff!
  
  
• Practiced stick defenses against knife attacks. Our partner wore headgear and one boxing glove to hold the knife.
  
  
• Ernie conducted a demonstration with one person wearing boxing gloves and the other person wearing headgear and carrying a concealed knife. As the person wearing the boxing gloves executed a barrage of punches against the person with the concealed knife, the person taking the beating deployed his knife and made several stabs to the body of the gloved person.
  
  Lessons learned: (1) Free yourself from a narrow focus of attention. (2) Be able to divide your attention and be alert to all pertinent information that may increase your ability to react and function at a higher level. (3) Take notice of the actions your adversary takes with other parts of his body.
  
  
• Stick sparring wearing headgear and armed with padded training sticks.

As I stated earlier, there was a lot of material to cover and Ernie actually had more to give, but ran out of time. Again, nothing was elaborate. The techniques were very basic and easy to perform.