There has been a flood of knife combatives manuals published in the last few years, some good and some pretty marginal. For the most part, I generally recommend you read them all, absorb anything useful, but don't count on a book to actually make you competent with a blade. It takes physical training to really learn the motor skills needed to survive an edged weapon confrontation. While I haven't changed that opinion, Richard Ryan's new book is definitely one of the better texts I've run across to base an introductory training program on.

Chapters cover The Real World, The Science of the Blade, The Art of the Cut, Defense and Counterattack, Blade Tactics, Blade Strategies, Deadly Mistakes and more.

Ryan also produced Gunsite's first knife training video. His new book has some harsh things to say about a magazine reviewer of this tape who commented that the Ryan Dynamic Combat Knife Fighting Stance was a "modification of the old military stance. While the reviewer is not named, you might say I know him better than anyone around! Going to my library, I dug out the Army's FM-21-150 1963, FM 21 -1 501971 and FM-21 -1 50 1 992 to refresh my memory. Most of us Vietnam types trained out of the 1963 edition of the manual and I still feel the basic fight stance there is close to the Ryan stance. The same goes for the 1971 manual, but the current 1992 field manual is more like what Ryan calls the "military stance." I have since trained with Ryan at the Gunsite Edged Weapons Symposium and will agree his stance is superior to the "old" military.

Buy Master of the Blade

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