This review is going to be tough for me because I was suckin pretty bad on Sunday. Word of advise: IF YOU TAKE YOUR GIRLFRIEND TO NIAGARA FALLS, SPENDING THE WHOLE DAY AND EVENING PAINTING THE TOWN, EXPECT TO BE TOTALLY OUT OF IT FOR A SEMINAR THE NEXT DAY.
Now that I've cleared that up, here a little the review...
1st off, Jack Latorre is very good at what he does. I was impressed with his knife knowledge and style, and he was very good at presenting the material.
We started with some basic foot-work to warm up. The footwork we worked on was basic triangle stepping, stepping off the attackers line of attack, and basic weight distribution and body shifting.
Then we went over 3 basic knife stabbing angles, which was angle 5 (up into the lower midsectin) angle 8 and 9 to the opponents right and left delts.
Next was empty hand VS. knife. We went over defending empty hand vs. knife by parrying w/ back of hand and stepping properly against the attacking angles.
Once we were comfortable with that, we moved on to the knife attacker stabbing, then checking the defenders parrying hand, and stabbing again, which caused the defender to have to use the parrying techniques to defend against that.
Also, from a #5 stab we worked the basic parry-elbow strike/check-head strike-radial nerve grab on knife hand.
From that basic movement, we learned a knife lock flow set. The set was very effective because it involved not just locking the knife hand; the set was basically a counter for counter set (example: knife attacker defends the lock by doing this, so defender flows to this technique).
Then we graduated to knife VS. knife, using the same basic parrying and stabbing techniques. We then added some different cutting and locking techiniques in the same counter for counter fashion.
We also worked with an X like wrist strike/parry method.
What I found especially useful was the different knife fighting concepts, such as different knife gripping methods (and the effective fighting methods from them), fighting and stabbing concepts, etc.
In general, the methods we worked with at the seminar where very effective, particularly against knife VS. knife dueling.
Then we had a Q & A at the end, and a demo of some of the different espada y daga methods of Pekiti Tersia.
All and all, it was well worth the trip, and I look forward to training with Jack again. I highly suggest a seminar with him if you want to be a better knife fighter!
Gou Ronin: :cheers: It was good meeting you and hanging out. Your friends w/ Jaybacca and the Canada Crew, so I'm sure we'll hang and train again.
Have a good week, everyone!
