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Unarmed Knife Defense

Facing a knife attack when unarmed is perhaps the most challenging of all personal safety situations. Knife defense is a critical aspect of personal safety, involving techniques and strategies to protect yourself from potential harm in a knife attack. Effective knife defense emphasizes situational awareness, allowing you to identify potential threats, take preemptive measures when possible, and employ effective reactive measures when forced to defend oneself.

This program presents key principles that include:

  1. Recognition skills
  2. Preventive actions
  3. Protective actions from knife strikes
  4. Protective actions from grab-n-stab attacks
  5. How to injure your assailant without exchanging strikes
  6. How to catch an arm in motion
  7. Various means of grabbing
  8. Ways to force your assailant to release the knife
  9. Takedowns when they are appropriate

Developing proficiency in these skills empowers individuals to respond effectively in high-stress situations, prioritizing personal safety and minimizing the potential for harm.

Knife for Self-Defense

This program aims to achieve the best possible outcomes in violent circumstances. To do that, we must become tactically sound and legally defensible from criminal prosecution and civil suits. This program covers three phases of self-defense: Preparation before an attack, self-defense when under attack, and post-incident protocols after an attack.

  1. Considerations on using a knife for self-defense
  2. Reasonable use of force
  3. De-escalating conflicts
  4. Managing challengers
  5. Confrontations with criminals
  6. Knife types and selection
  7. How to draw, deploy, and handle a knife
  8. How to strike in forward hold
  9. How to strike in reverse hold
  10. How to access during unarmed attacks
  11. How to access during knife attacks
  12. How to access during grab-n-stab style of attacks
  13. Defensive use of the knife in a forward hold
  14. Defensive use of the knife in a reverse hold
  15. What to do immediately following an attack and
  16. What to do if you are arrested for defending yourself

Tactical Knife Fighting - Core Skills

AMOK!’s Core Skills Program is designed to teach you how to dominate and gain control in chaos and will train you to become fighting-functional faster than any other method. In teaching over 1000 seminars in 25 countries, Tom Sotis faced off with over 10,000 fighters from all corners of the globe and his experience has driven AMOK!’s forward evolution of functionality. No other knife method comes close to this.

Fight-Based Activities
Unlike dance-like methods using flowy drills that don’t resemble fighting, AMOK! activities are fight-based with broken rhythm and true intention – just as in real fights. It goes against the logic and purpose of training to practice in ways that don’t resemble the actual event.

Fighting Tactics
The program begins by clearly identifying the attacking and countering tactics so you will understand exactly what tactics are and how they spawn techniques.

Tactical Fighting
You will learn to fight and to replicate the consequences of striking and/or being struck in the Empty Hand, the Weapon Hand, in Either Leg, or by Multiple Torso hits.

Tactical Exercises
You will learn to Isolate each tactic to explore both executing it and countering it in real-time, followed up with a “no-repeat” tactical exercise that develops unpredictability.

Sparring Configurations
You will Spar to experiment with fighting in the different configurations of dynamic combat when changing the lead foot, which hand is holding the weapon, whether the weapons are held in forward or reverse hold, when the height between you changes, when the length of the weapons vary, and when mutual grabs occur.

Practice and Training
Each fighting tactic has a pair of performance-enhancing videos that Isolates each tactic and then explore various techniques to identify and repair each individual’s unique “functional disconnects”.

Tactical Knife Fighting - Comprehensive

World-renowned and respected, AMOK!’s Tactical Knife Fighting program is designed to teach you how to dominate and gain control in chaos and trains you to become functional faster than any other method. This program contains everything in the Core Skills program plus fourteen additional tactical skills with 86 lessons and covers:

1. Handling – how to carry, draw, deploy, and handling techniques
2. Gripping – the pros and cons of different grips
3. Striking – how to strike in forward and reverse hold
4. Accessing – safely draw & deploy while under attack
5. Tactics – attacking, countering, isolations, and unpredictability
6. Dueling – Paying tactical consequences for mistakes
7. Sparring – dueling in different configurations for adaptation
8. Practice – activities to improve your functional skill
9. Training – activities to improve your physical attributes
10. Footwork – gaining advantages through counter-footwork
11. Countering – detailed progression of counter-striking
12. Reverse Hold – details on the particulars of reverse grip
13. Impact Striking – adding hand strikes and kicks into your knifework
14. Quartering – tactics for controlling position: inside/outside, high/low
15. Set-ups – setting Up functional bridge traps
16. Timing Traps – exploiting opportunities during free exchange striking
17. Adaptation – managing a spontaneous environment
18. Disarming – catching a moving hand and causing it to release the knife
19. Takedowns – using your knife to assist or effect takedowns
20. Skill Development – about practice and training opportunities