Does effective knife defence exist?

They look more like machetes than knives
Awful that they are confident to carry such large weapons around with any risk of being stopped.

 

I've got a couple of thoughts about that:

When both people are armed, you tend to see more fencing style movements, keeping distance and moving in and out to attack. This is kind of obvious, because they don't want to get skewered while they are attacking. You also see a lot of posturing - this is like social domination with raised stakes. You see it in machete videos from developing nations as well, where they try to posture and look scary enough that their opponent will flee - lots of strikes just out of range. I think it takes a particular personality type to coldly go in and just focus on murder without any of the social dynamic and dominance play.

Yes, people do make big slashes, lunges and even overhead stabs in real life. However, they do also use much closer tactics and standing grappling, which is a lot harder to deal with. Seems like the sewing machine attack is kind of seen as a standard for defensive tactics to live up to in the MA world these days.

 

Best machete defence I saw was on an old MAP thread. I think it might have been Brazil, but the women around the two blokes with machetes picked up metal bin lids and enclosed and separated them.

Not viable around here though. Wheelie bins and recycling boxes aren't quite as handy!

 

Great question and posts. I can say I have struggled with this for a long time. I was personally attached by someone with a knife a long time ago but at the time I was already a blackbelt in Karate. I can say my training in Karate only set me up technically for a huge cut I got down to the bone on my forearm after a successful block. The mental training from Karate helped me to push through and actually end the attack with nothing more than that one cut but I was not happy as the attacker wasn't really skilled at all.

I personally called Dan Inosanto who was so gracious to talk to me, refer me to the people he considered to be the hands down experts in close quarters knife combatives and even gave me an introduction to them. Thanks to Dan I was able to train with that group specifically to shore up those lacking defense areas. That group was by far supremely secure with knife tactics. Even training with them I felt that there must be something less technical and still sound. I found the "Dog Brothers" who were an offshoot of this group and I really liked there training ideas, tactics and methodologies. I didn't formally train with them but I did train there video series. I still feel that there is simplistic method and training that could be distilled from them and have tried heading in that direction.

To date, I am still working on this process. I pray that I can find something to hand down to my students and family but I still feel there is more work to be done first.