START DULL TO STAY SHARP

When you know you’re about to face a challenging situation, what do you do to prepare for it? In school, you’d be foolish not to take notes and study hard before an important final exam. In a professional setting, if you were tasked with giving a presentation to the board of directors at your company, you’d certainly create an outline of key points and commit your speech to memory prior to the big day. Athletes spend months or years practicing with their teams before a championship.

Consider how ridiculous it’d be to assume you’d pass that test because you brought a freshly sharpened pencil, ace the presentation because you installed the latest version of Powerpoint, or win the big game because you just bought a brand-new pair of cleats. This line of thinking sounds absurd, but it’s all too common in the self-defense field. You might have a high-end carry gun and a top-of-the-line holster, but that hardware is worthless if you lack the software to draw and hit a target reliably. The same can be said of edged weapons — you might have a knife that’s marketed as a combat tool, but have you ever actually used it in that manner? Are you positive you can deploy it consistently, or will you be fumbling with it as an attacker brutally shanks you with his own blade? The only way to answer these questions definitively is through practice, ideally in the form of sparring with a training partner.

Now, there’s a caveat to knife training. Your buddy probably won’t