In a knife attack everything depends on your reaction time and your coordination. In situation A he strikes and in that instance you must react and counter. Its nothing like a knife drill, you don’t know how he is going to attack and therefore you don’t know how you are going to respond. You must see the attack; your brain must process the information and then send the appropriate response to your muscles via your nervous system. Problem is people’s computers (brains) often don’t process the info fast enough so they get cut before they can respond. In situation A your attacker is in full control as he has that element of surprise that you have to account for and respond to. In situation B he must respond to your attack so he does not have full control and it will depend on how fast his computer is to strike you before you strike him. Personally I think there is a higher chance of success in situation B. If you think about it knife drills are not realistic at all, you are calm because it’s a fake knife, you know how he is going to attack, he often makes his attack obvious, you know the counter, you are standing in the ready position etc etc. Now that is a BIG advantage and in a real situation you won’t have any of those advantages. Some people who can defend themselves in these situations might believe that they can do it just as easy in real life, big mistake.
I can't add too much to what these other gentlemen have said except to tell an old story my father heard from his father... One day Sullivan came into work bruised and battered. His eyes were black. One arm was broken. His pants looked like they were hiding a pair of young cabbages. "Sullivan, what happened to you?" asked his boss. "Well, last Saturday I was in bed with Mrs. Murphy when in comes Murphy with a mothering great shillealagh in his hand and lays about me most unmercifully." "Couldn't you have fought back? What did you have in your hand?" "Nothing but Mrs. Murphy's ****, a thing of beauty in itself, but not worth a darn in a fight."
A good one Todd Now can I send you a bill for a new keyboard? My new fresh coffee is all over it Tristan
Tristan, I think of it in the same way as a computer crashing, too much information to process and the computer can’t handle it so it slows down or completely crashes (brain freeze) and needs to reboot. If this happens to you in a real fight by the time you snap out of it you could be looking down at the hilt of a blade sticking out of your stomach. It is true that by continuous drilling some of the movements will be ingrained into the body, we call that muscle memory. Of course muscle does not have memory but what is meant by that is that the movements are held and remembered by the subconscious memory i.e. it can become instinct or habit if practiced enough. The reason why a human has brain freeze in those situations is because the human is analysing the situation too much, trying to take in all that information and analyze it. The left side of the brain is good at analyzing things but this takes time and in a real fight you don’t have that time. An animal does not analyze the situation if you attack it, it just reacts. In a fight you need to use the right side of the brain which is instinctive. The way we should learn martial arts is to learn the moves and drills with the left side of the brain and apply the moves in a real life situation through the right side of the brain i.e. learn analytically and apply instinctively. The human has two types of vision, peripheral and central vision. The analytical part of the brain is activated whenever you look at something with central vision. Let’s say you pick a flower out of the ground and you look at it with central vision. Your brain is busy mapping out the fine details of the flower and committing it to memory. It is scanning the flower and examining it in an analytical manner which takes time to process. The way to switch off the analytical part of your brain is to switch from central vision to peripheral vision. In a fight situation you should immediately switch to peripheral vision and this will prevent brain freeze from happening.
