PTI Blog

I often gets asked for recommendations of knives for self-defense use.This is usually easy to do, once I get the answers to these two questions:

1. What is legal for you in your area?

2. What will you be using the knife for when it is not put to self defense uses? (Which we can usually assume is the vast majority of the time.)

The one parameter that would often make this choice difficult was when I was asked to recommend a fixed blade for self defense with a blade of less than 4 inches. The problem here is that most fixed blade knives with sub 4” blades have correspondingly small handles. When you have large hands, this can be a problem.

The drills described in this article come from two sources. The first are the fighting principles found in the Pekiti-Tirsia system of Filipino martial arts. The second are the teaching methods I learned during my time as a defensive tactics instructor for my department.

I began training in Pekiti-Tirsia in 1975 and began teaching defensive tactics for the NY State Court system in 1987. Both of these have contributed to my understanding of how to teach this material to a wide variety of people. I have tried to structure this article so it can be adapted to any martial arts or defensive tactics program.

Several people have asked for my thoughts on the PTK Tri-V Formula that Grand Tuhon Gaje has been teaching since the mid 90s. When I first saw the Tri-V material, I saw many things that were familiar and some things that were a bit surprising.

Grand Tuhon Leo Gaje used to tell us some interesting stories about his training under his grandfather, Conrado Tortal. Several of these were about Conrado’s teaching methods.

One of these stories that I found the most interesting was about the “Thought Provoking Process.” This was a somewhat Socratic method of teaching, in that a student was asked a question about a subject, rather than being given the answer from the start. It began like this: