Welcome, friends.

Today I’ll be doing another AAR-as-note-review that’s been in the works for a while. Let’s get to it.

Synopsis

Shivworks Edged Weapon Overview (EWO) is a two-day, sixteen-hour course covering defensive knife techniques and the framework of wrestling and grappling necessary to employ them.

The class took place on the 11^th and 12^th of January earlier this year and was hosted by Aaron Jannetti of Knife Control Concepts at Endeavor Defense & Fitness in Hilliard, Ohio. Head jiu jitsu coach at the gym Mike Cheney and Sam Ferguson of Galo Combatives served as assistant instructors.

Not far outside of Columbus, it was about a three-hour-and-15-minute drive from southwestern PA. Tuition was $575, and I managed to get two nights at a hotel for just a hair under $200. The $40 facility fee ($20 per day) brought my total cost to around $815.

When I took ECQC in October 2024, Craig and Brian pitched EWO as being more or less the same class, but with knives instead of guns. If you’d like to skip over my notes to the part where I say whether or not I agree with that assessment, feel free to scroll down to the third-to-last heading.

Day 1

Much of the first day was devoted to the block of instruction on Managing Unknown Contacts (MUC) and developing basic wrestling competency. I covered that at greater length in my AAR for ECQC, so I’ll only give a brief recap below.

MUC covered the use of verbal requests and commands, strategic movement, and the importance of maintaining an active fence. It also went over the eye jab—a preemptive open-hand strike—and the default position, which you can read about in Shivworks September newsletter (written by yours truly).

The wrestling instruction was actually spread out over both days of the course, but I’ll talk about it now for the sake of organization. First came the three Ps of pressure, posture, and position to lay the groundwork. Then, we were introduced to the four types of attachments: the wrist and bicep tie, the underhook, and the overhook. Finally, Brian taught several techniques for stabilizing the clinch and beginning to resolve an entanglement: the arm drag, arm bundle, duck under, and split seatbelt.

While the marketing copy for EWO stresses the deployment and application of knives by the student, the course also spends some time on unarmed defense against an attacker with a knife. The primary method showcased is what they refer to as immediate action: a bicep tie on the weapon-bearing limb and underhook or overhook on the far side. The hook is used to break the opponent’s posture by either lifting or pulling, while the tie maintains distance between you and the knife. The opponent tends to respond by either pulling the knife back away from you or by muscling forward, driving the knife against your tie hand even harder. The former can create an opening to secure a split seatbelt; the latter creates an opportunity for an arm break or takedown, depending on what’s appropriate for the circumstances.

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It’s worth noting that I was almost the least skilled grappler in attendance. My peers included at least four blue belts, two purple belts, two black belts attending as students, and an over-six-foot-tall, 250-pound high school wrestler that I can only describe as built like a brick shithouse. The only other white belt was a student from another Pittsburgh gym with nine years of judo experience, whose sole reason for not having been promoted was that his coach ‘forgot’ that he hadn’t been already. A few non-grapplers were present, but overall, it was a much more seasoned crowd than ECQC in terms of formal rank.

Day 2

The majority of the second day was devoted to integrating a blade into the wrestling framework.

Newton’s Third Law of Knives to the Back

So, in a world where ranged lethal tools like handguns exist, why and when would a person use an edged weapon? I presented a few reasons in my last blog post, and I’ll expand on two of them in this AAR: ease of access and efficacy.

Simply put, the rules for in-fight weapons access (IFWA) don’t need to be adhered to as strictly as they do when drawing a pistol. Less-than-perfect timing decisions are easier to get away with. The requirement for control over the limb of your opponent closest to the tool is less stringent. With certain methods of carry and sheath orientations, a knife has a shorter distance to travel before it’s in play.

Knives can be used to get an attacker off of you and keep them off of you. The ‘get off me, stay off me’ mantra makes for a much more reasonable-sounding justification for the defensive use of a knife than, “I was trying to cut such and such a tendon or target this specific artery.” It’s certainly more understandable to normies like a jury of your peers. More on that in the next section.

If you choose to carry an edged weapon as a complement to a concealed pistol, the former can create enough space to access the latter. This brings us nicely to a discussion of how this works—or doesn’t work—in practice.

Sharp Rock Bad

Getting an attacker off of us and creating space are the ultimate goals, but the exact mechanism by which knives best accomplish that is disputed. Theories vary from exsanguination to pain compliance to biomechanical demobilization via precisely targeted strikes.

It’s true enough that leaking arteries will eventually lead to loss of consciousness and that sliced-up muscles tend not to work as well. Granted. At the end of the day, though, there is no literature proving the ability of edged weapons to cause a predictable physiological response (that is, incapacitation). Certainly, assaults and murders with knives still happen and can serve as case studies, but since militaries and police departments don’t use knives, we have a lot less data on their capabilities than we do firearms.

All of this is to say that the vast majority of knife stops are psychological.

When I heard Craig and Brian make this assertion, I was a bit confused at first. In many instances of recorded violence, the victim or combatant rarely seems to have awareness that a tool is in play while strikes are being thrown and blows exchanged; often, it seems that it’s only after the proverbial dust has begun to settle and the attacker breaks off the assault that the wounded party looks down at themselves and sees they are bleeding. Frequently, they appear confused until reality sinks in.

“Isn’t that at odds with the premise that the majority of stops with a knife are psychological,” I thought? “To be psychologically stopped, doesn’t a victim—or, in our case, an attacker—have to realize that a blade is being used, or about to be used?”

Brian was kind enough to sit down with me for an informal Zoom interview in March to answer these questions and a few others. Here’s how I now understand the matter.

It’s true: it would seem that most mechanisms of psychological stoppage require some degree of nociception—the physiological capacity to feel pain—or presence of mind on the part of the stop-ee. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they must be aware a tool is in play.

Any number of things could cause a person to lose their will to fight: the feeling of blood saturating their clothes; the pain of heavy blows landing (regardless of whether they are from an empty hand or a tool-wielding hand); or the sight of severe wounds disfiguring their body.

If that sounds unreliable, that’s because it is. There’s no way of knowing which if any of these things will occur, or, if they do, whether any of them will cause the person to stop fighting. They might be under the influence of narcotics or so highly adrenalized that they are functionally impervious to pain. They may simply be so task-fixated on the fight that they fail to notice they’ve been injured. Or, they may fully understand that they are maimed or fatally wounded and simply not give a shit.

What we are seeing proven by recorded violence is not the inadequacy of knives as defensive tools, but simply the inherent unreliability of psychological stops.

Exsanguination is probably the most likely mechanism of physiological stop with a knife or pokey device. Even then, this a timer rather than a switch, and striking an artery is a matter of chance since any kind of precise targeting is more or less out of the question. Blades are thin, and a 2–3” blade is just not capable of giving us the 12–18” of penetration that allows quality pistol ammo to reach the spine. They don’t create secondary wound cavities like high-velocity projectiles, either, although that’s a nonfactor with handgun cartridges.

Edge-Driven Versus Point-Driven

While theory is important, practice is what the course is primarily concerned with. After all, when students take a class nicknamed ‘stab college,’ they expect to get their money’s worth.

EWO is a bit of a misnomer in that much of the content presented in the course is also applicable to weapons that don’t technically have a cutting edge—that is, what you might call exclusively point-driven tools.

Shivworks favors a point-driven methodology for knife work for two reasons. First, it allows a person to arm themselves with a wider variety of items. Since most of us carry at least a cheap folding knife to open boxes and mail, this might not seem like a big deal, but hopefully with all of the discussion of NPEs in the last post you can see the potential need for improvisation. And, to that end, a person has a better chance of finding environmental weapons that are pointy than they do ones that are sharp.

Second, removing edge orientation as a variable makes applying force much simpler. When using tools in a manner that favors penetration over laceration, there are really only two grips and one method of application, both of which we’ll get to shortly. Another benefit is that a dropped knife recovered in a scramble doesn’t have to be re-gripped a certain way before it can be used.

FIRMLY GRASP IT

Although I’ve mercifully had little exposure to the weird bullshido side of knife nerddom, I’ve seen things like this picture (right) that portray lots of fancy grips, many of which look anything but robust).

Shivworks teaches a total of two grips that are aptly named thumb-side and pinky-side, respectively, and which are more or less self-explanatory. Critically, both grips prescribe a fist closed with a tucked thumb. ‘Capping’ the pommel with one’s thumb in a pinky-side grip and resting the thumb on the spine of the blade in a thumb-side grip are both to be avoided.

The reason for this is that, as Chris Fry of PFC Training points out in the below-linked article, not tucking the thumb leaves a “noticeable gap between the thumb and fingers [which] is weak, especially if lateral force is applied toward the gap.” Placing the thumb anywhere other than on the side of the fist leaves an opening that compromises the strength of the grip.

“Conventional and Unconventional Knife Grips” by Chris Fry, Personal Defense Network

Of course, perching the thumb on the spine of the blade also poses an obvious safety problem with reverse-edge knives like the Clinch Pick. Finally, defensive knife use does not require a high degree of precision or dexterity with the blade. To paraphrase Craig, “this is not whittling, carving, or cutting fruit—you are a monkey with a screwdriver.”

Targeting

Just because we can’t count on a physiological stop with a knife doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give ourselves the best chance of causing one. To that end, Craig briefly outlined some targets of opportunity to strike when the chance arises: the circumference of the neck, the lower back, the axillary areas, the inner biceps where the brachial arteries run, and of course, the ‘horseshoe’ of plumbing that runs from one knee to the other up through the thighs, groin, and perineum. As the famous saying goes, you can’t tourniquet a taint.

TECHNIQUE!

While a lot of cyclic, gross-motor-skills butthole stabbing occurred during the evolutions, Craig and Brian went over some slightly more technical strikes, one point-driven—a knife jab, with both thumb-side and pinky-side grips—and a few for edgework.

To recap, after we’ve accomplished ‘get off me,’ the goal transitions to ‘stay off me.’ The strategy to achieve that goal is headhunting: jabs to the face at what the Shivworks cadre term rimshot distance, at which neither person can touch the other without moving their feet. In other words, just beyond arm’s length.

When the knife is held in a thumb-side grip, the bottom of the fist stays anchored to the hip with the point toward the opponent when not jabbing; this way, if your opponent decides to crash into you, they’ll impale themselves in so doing. The other hand forms a sort of ‘cougar paw’ that stays in contact with the side of the head—something like what Craig says is called the Philly Shell in boxing. When striking, the knife is meant to come up in a straight line from the hip to the target and turn palm-down at the last second.

When the knife is held in a pinky-side grip, it can be kept near the chin with the point toward your opponent when idle. The back hand is held in contact with the face in a low guard as described above. The pinky-side jab itself is described as a hammer fist without a broken wrist (abduction), the only difference from the common MMA strike being that there is now a knife in the fist.

Compared to just extending the arm, turning the shoulder and torso and bending the lead knee slightly not only generates more power but also gives the person striking an extra few inches of reach. This applies to jabs with both grips.

As stated earlier, edgework is secondary to point work in the Shivworks doctrine; it is used only against extremities, the rationale being that if we are close enough to slash or cut the body, use of the point for penetration would be more effective and is, therefore, preferred.

Taking a stab through the cheek, maxilla, or nose definitely sounds demoralizing, but it’s likely an attacker will lead with their arms to attach themselves by grabbing onto your clothing or hair to pummel you or use a pokey device of their own. This is when lashing out with the edge can make sense.

Here, edge orientation does have a bearing on technique. As such, the cuts available for use are dictated by knife design and the grip used.

Strikes with a conventional-edge thumb-side grip involve what Craig referred to as a ‘choo-choo train’ motion like an oscillating piston, somewhere between punching and chopping. Rather than speed from slashing in broad, sweeping strokes, this cut relies on the power from the arm and large muscle groups of the back plus the sharpness of the blade to create deep lacerations. The movement is the same with a pinky-side grip for both conventional- and reverse-edge blades.

Craig also demonstrated the reverse-edge thumb-side cut on a foam roller, which he described as a jab with a subtle hooking motion at full extension.

At the end of the day, there’s no need to overcomplicate things. The grip you’ll probably use will be either the one you draw your own knife with or however you recover a knife in a scramble, whether it’s yours or a bad guy’s.

That’s also one pro of exclusively penetration-oriented tools or punch daggers. Sure, your options for edgework are limited or nonexistent, but you only have one technique: put the pointy end in the meaty bits. No further thought required.

Selection

On the topic of what blades are best suited to self-defense, Craig’s advice was limited and practical: “there will never be a folder that’s as convenient to deploy as a fixed[-blade] knife.”

There are simply too many steps, too many points of failure, and too many adjustments to grip that need to be made before work can commence. Even with workarounds like the Emerson Wave feature, Spyderco’s trademark round hole, or the thumb plate like the one on the Cold Steel AK-47 knife shown above, shit happens. Draws get fouled. Locking mechanisms fail. Assisted-open and out-the-front (OTF) knives aren’t foolproof, either.

If you are legally restricted to carrying a folding knife or choose to do so for the convenient form factor, the post below—again by Chris Fry—provides some good guidance.

“Selecting A Tactical Folding Knife” by Chris Fry, MDTS Training

Craig said he favors two blade orientations for carry: vertical and accessible by either hand, or downward diagonal in the manner of the Clinch Pick.

Legality has the final word in the context of selecting a knife for self-defense. After perusing the statutes in my home state of Pennsylvania (which I do not recommend doing for pleasure), it doesn’t appear that there’s any current restrictions on fixed-blade knives versus folding knives, blade length, opening or locking mechanisms, or concealment versus open carry. Suffice it to say that that is not the case for every state, and cities may have their own ordinances.

As always, caveat emptor. Laws on what knives you can own, carry, and how (or if) you can do so are even more varied and convoluted than gun laws. I’m not a lawyer. Then again, as Mark Smith says, “I’m not your real dad,” so do whatever you’re willing to accept the potential consequences of, I guess.

EWO Versus ECQC

One difference between EWO and ECQC was the setup for the evolutions.

To recap, in Shivworks terminology, evolutions are a competitive, nonconsensual training modality that gets a student as close to a full-energy, full-speed fight as is safely possible without going to a bar and antagonizing drunks until someone takes a swing at you.

Evolutions can be either positional—meaning the participants start with prescribed attachments or in spatial relationships dictated by the instructors—or full-spectrum, which simulates an entire criminal assault from managing an unknown contact to resolution.

In ECQC the first evolution was one-on-one, positional, and took place first in the class, and the three-person evolution that followed the next day was the only full-spectrum iteration. However, in EWO, the only full-spectrum evolution took place on day one and, by contrast, was one-on-one.

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It wasn’t just the setup of the evolutions that differed from ECQC: their ‘vibe,’ for lack of a better word, was different, too.

ECQC felt more like a cognitive test, with more variation in how the MUC stage of the encounter played out. In my ECQC evolution as the ‘good guy,’ the situation didn’t escalate to violence at all. In my peers’, the defender was sometimes able to leverage the distance advantage of the sim gun to prevent the hostile parties from closing to grappling range.

No one stepping into the EWO Thunderdome for the full-spectrum evolutions had any illusions that the scenario would end in anything but violence—at least, if the way they actually played out is any indication. I think this was more a product of students’ mindsets than it was any kind of atmosphere purposefully created by Craig and Brian, but it is interesting to note. As alluded to above, I also think the absence of any distance tools biased things in favor of physical resolution.

While perhaps not to the same level as a shoothouse-style course where target discrimination and engagement problems are the main focus, ECQC seemed to draw upon students’ decision-making skills much more than EWO.

ECQC was heavier on roleplaying, distance management, and legal consideration (even though, as I said in part 2 of my AAR for that course, a participant who makes an imprudent use of force decision doesn’t ‘lose’ the evolution). The evolutions in EWO were less cerebral, more visceral.

Does that mean that the experience was less valuable? I can emphatically say, no.

To explain why, let me backtrack briefly to day 1.

Takeaways

During one of his Socratic dialogues, Craig posed a question: why don’t people train in a way that reflects the realities of the criminal assault paradigm—unequal initiative, unproportional armament, close range, and multiple attackers?

My peers offered several potential reasons, speculating that it could be because:

• It’s not affirming. Building skills and learning how to problem-solve require conscious incompetence, which doesn’t make us feel warm and fuzzy inside.
• It looks militaristic, which can turn off law enforcement brass when considering what courses they’re willing to pay to send their officers to. I’m sure some are more concerned about the social and political ramifications of police officers being seen training in way that looks visually aggressive and violent than they are with what skills their subordinates will actually need to survive.
• Of the perceived risk of injury. I’m coming off of a recent surgery myself, so I empathize with the concern. But if you take care of your body and stay mentally present during training, the risk is often not as great as it might look from the outside. The actual level of inherent risk is worth it.
• Under pressure, there are no guarantees. Training against resistance does not lend itself to works-every-time techniques or strategies, which—when compared to solo kata or demonstrations against cooperative ukes—may seem like unreliability to bullshido practitioners. No system is 100% effective; some just hold up better or worse than others (or not at all) when things get shitty.
• Improvement and the effectiveness of teaching are hard to measure. If the goal is to suck less—to get stabbed less, beaten down less, shot less, to survive better—how easy is that to make empirical? Arguably, not very.

It’s these last two points that make EWO such a valuable learning experience.

Evolutions don’t have winners and losers per se; they continue until the instructors decide a disposition has been reached. Successes are usually marred by at least a few mistakes, and even the poorest performances tend to have some redeeming aspects. As such, victory and defeat are less black-and-white and more shades of gray.

Still, the outcomes in ECQC’s seemed much more definitive.

EWO isn’t about winning more. It’s about sucking less. The question is, to what extent can you salvage the situation when you start having already lost? How well can you mitigate damage to yourself while dishing out as much as possible to the other guy(s) in a scenario where no one is coming out unscathed?

After the obvious best-case scenarios of avoiding violence altogether through deselection or de-escalation, what everyone wants is a way to win that’s slick, fast, and clean—one that lets us make it through to the other side without a scratch, ideally. We see the problem in time, recognize it for what it is, take action, and triumph decisively.

Total victories do happen in the real world. But you can’t help but imagine the alternative: even when the ‘violence’ is only a tame simulation acted out in a padded room by participants exercising restraint, the mind extrapolates. And it paints a brutal picture.

EWO forces you to square yourself with the possibility that the fight for your life might not be over in a flash with a few well-placed pistol rounds. It might be a knock-down, drag-out brawl at bad breath distance with bigger, stronger dudes who have the jump on you, where it takes everything you have to stay conscious and upright, but still ends with you needing stitches and transfusions. MUC is, as Craig says, to “keep things from getting shitty.” But they might get shitty anyway.

And the only way out is through.

Conclusion

So, which should you take: Extreme Close-Quarters Concepts or Edged Weapons Overview? You won’t be surprised to hear that I strongly encourage you to take both. I plan on attending both courses again regularly throughout my training journey. But, since real people have limited time and funds, I’ll give an actual answer.

If I could only take one, I would take ECQC—especially as a beginner. Although the portion of the class devoted to groundwork was small in comparison to the time spent on wrestling, the fact that it wasn’t included in EWO means ECQC gets the recc from me. Plus, if you’re already carrying a firearm, the retention shooting and elbow pin/arm destruction techniques are far more critical to your overall ability to defend yourself without being a liability. The disarming practice and carfighting were added bonuses.

One could argue that EWO might have less value for someone who has already decided they are never going to carry a knife or pokey device as a defensive tool. Even then:

• The instruction that deals with MUC, wrestling, and knife defense is universally applicable.
• Knives are part of the modern weaponized environment we live in, so I think it makes sense to know how to use one to stop a threat if the need arises.
• Taking EWO might very well change your mind. A tool that’s extremely difficult to prevent access to, hard to disarm someone of, and that forces the other party to shift from inflicting damage to damage control seems like a good one to have once you’ve had to deal with it from the receiving end.

Personally, EWO made it even clearer that striking is a transferable skill that I should pursue to be well-rounded as a self-defender. The fluidity of movement and looseness of my peers that had some boxing or Muay Thai experience is something that I sorely lack: several of them pointed out how tense I was in comparison, especially in my shoulders and traps. That’s definitely a habit I need to break.

I’m looking forward to getting back on the mats following a several-month injury hiatus. Having some fun in street clothes with my Clanton Combatives red gun and Clinch Pick trainer will feel like coming home after so long away from Stout. I may be writing about my surgery drama as it relates to grappling and shooting in the future, but maybe not. That’s all for today. Thanks for reading!