How To Fight Off a KNIFE Attacker With Your FEET [Must Watch!]

You’re in the worst possible position.

You are on your back and unarmed.

Maybe you’re in a gun free zone …

Or maybe your gun was knocked out of your hand before this …

Imagine that, for whatever reason, an attacker is trying to stab you to death and you’re unarmed on your back.

How do you protect yourself? Today you’re going to see exactly how you can do this and how it was used successfully by a would-be victim woman in the Dominican Republic.

On Your Back, Unarmed, Is a Bad Place To Be. But It’s NOT Hopeless.

As I’ve written before, if you have a gun you should know how to fight from your back. That’s because … well … life happens and in a self-defense situation you never know what could go wrong.

Murphy’s law right?

So assume the worse.

You’re on your back and you’re unarmed.

What do you do?

Luckily, This Strategy Doesn’t Require Any Training. Once You See This Video ONCE, You’ll “Get” How To Do It!

I actually showed my wife video of how this technique works after I saw it because I knew immediately that it was something that could help her in the worst-case scenario and that she could pick it up just from watching the video.

So what is it?

The “Street Guard”. In short, keeping your legs between you and your attacker and kicking with your feet.

Sounds simple enough right?

It is. Basically.

Let me share with you a good video that explains the actual strategy, then we’ll look at a real life example where it was actually used to keep a would-be victim alive from a knife wielding attacker.

What’s even better is that I’m 99% sure that the would-be-victim that fought her attacker off using this strategy had ZERO training in the technique. That’s what makes it powerful.

First, here’s how to use your feet to keep an attacker off you in a self-defense context. The following video is from a well known Brazilian Jiu Jitsu teacher online:

Actual Video Shows How This Saved a Woman’s Life

Hat tip to Greg Ellifritz for the link to this page where Greg said this about the technique:

“I first saw this technique in a ground fighting seminar taught by Royce Gracie. Royce advised dropping to the ground and kicking if a knife wielding attacker had you backed into a corner and you couldn’t escape. It seems useful in that context. It may also be useful for those of you with absolutely no empty hand fighting skills. While I think that other tactics will work better, those other tactics require training and practice. This one doesn’t.” (emphasis mine)

At this link, you can see a video with a breakdown by John from Active Self Protection on how this helped a woman fight off a knife attacker.

I can’t embed the video here, but it basically starts with the guy trying to stab the woman and she’s on her back and already fighting back with her legs.

Notice how this position looks a lot like the “Street Guard” described in the previous video when her feet connect with his hips, her legs are fully extended here and the best he could do is cut or stab at her legs, but she doesn’t keep them in this position she starts kicking like pedaling a bicycle:

She keeps kicking with her legs at him, without even really having a plan but it’s keeping distance between her and the guy with the knife. In short, it’s working:

And she keeps doing it until the guy gets frustrated and runs away:

On ActiveSelfProtection, John breaks it down further and gives some good tips to include these:

1. A Knife attack does not often happen like you’ve seen in Hollywood. They are brutal, fast, and mean. Stabbing attacks do not generally come from slashes or from any notice whatsoever, but tend to come from concealment and repeatedly stab at a rate of 2-3 stabs per second. THAT is the kind of knife attack you need to be prepared for. That kind of ferocity is not often seen in most combatives or martial arts training, but it is what is necessary.

2. The old adage says that the loser of a knife fight dies at the scene while the winner dies on the way to the hospital. That said, the first rule of a knife attack is “don’t get stabbed!” Just like we don’t want to get shot in a gunfight, we don’t want to get stabbed in a knife attack. If you get to the hospital with a pulse there’s over a 92% chance you’ll live through the encounter, so keep fighting even if you do get hurt! 

3. It’s important to be trained and ready to protect yourself against a knife attack as it is against an attack with a firearm. FBI homicide data says that about 4 times the number of people are killed with handguns as with knives, but since gunshots are about four times more fatal than knife wounds, it means the number of attacks are probably similar! (if you look at the FBI data, hands and feet kill a lot of people, too!) This leads us to the principle that we must be ready for knife attacks that begin at close distance, and have the empty-handed skills to defend ourselves.

You can check out his full breakdown on the page and I recommend you do so you can see the girl in the Dominican Republic fighting off her attacker, but what really makes me like this strategy is that, like Greg says, it can be used by anyone — even if you have no martial arts training whatsoever — to defend yourself from what is a horrible position to be in against someone wanting to stab you to death.

Please share this with anyone you know who may not have any training because it could save their life. Also, please share it with the women in your life because they’re often the targets of predators.