BSidesNCL 2020 - Antagonistics and Bartitsu

um do hang around b's lovely if you want to follow them on twitter it's uh have you got your twitter handle there you can just quickly pop up as a slide all right so uh i don't have mentioned my twitter handler this time that's that's fine uh not a problem do do hang about if you want to ask b any questions i i guess shoot them in the slack or something and i can fire them over time and get you an answer but he's lovely thank you so much b i think we're going to move to antagonistics now but b thank you so much thank you so much scott uh cheers everyone have a nice day ahead

and again if you have any question uh be it a positive or negative in a negative perspective i'm always open to answer that thank you so much have a good excellent thanks man yeah i think we're meant to be moving to antagonistics now we're now hopefully in the right chat room yes wrong chat room sorry about that and if i put my video on and do hopefully you can see i'm not great with technical stuff but we're ready to go whenever you are

but yeah so i'll start talking and if you just want to shout at me when you're bored and you want to carry on with the exciting coding stuff and all the rest of it

right okay fair enough so do we want to start now or later absolutely do you want to introduce yourselves just quickly um right we'll just start and as i said just just kick us off uh at some point if you get bored so anyway um nice to meet you all uh my name is duncan um sorry i'm just gonna bounce up so i can actually see us on our own screen here hopefully oh wide assume never there we go that's what i want just so i can see what i'm doing right hello um as i said my name is duncan mcnulty i have the great pleasure of being the chief advisor here at bath which is the bartitsu

antagonistics forum which is a mouthful that probably doesn't mean a lot to many people bartitsu is a victorian mixed martial art i'm not going to talk about that now because i think we'll be talking about that to you in the afternoon if you're around for the afternoon section um today this morning we're going to talk about antagonistic which is really just other ways of envisaging violence on people in particular swords that's what we are interested in here so what we're going to do now for the next kind of half hour is take you on a very brief history of dueling and the plan is that we're going to take you from very early medieval right the way

through i think until about victorian period with how people handle dueling and introduce you to some swords with some demonstrations along the way um i'm joined this morning by andrew walton and uh michael whitsker who are also members of the forum here who are going to be helping me out because it's very hard to show you how to do sword fighting on your own um so yes let's start off when we're talking about dueling and this is where two people are trying to settle an argument and decide to use force to do it now the first recorded instance we have of this now obviously people will have been settling scores with fights for a long

time but the first recorded instance what we have with somebody codifying a system for doing this is actually um talhoffer who is a kind of early medieval um duelist and weapon master who's selling his services all around europe and actually it relates to probably the most extreme form of uh dueling in that it covers divorce settlements now in good catholic countries you can't divorce um so what they decided was to get around this they would really emphasize on that till death do we part so the idea was the man and the woman if they had no other recourse would fight each other to the death uh and whoever was alive was then no longer married and therefore had effectively

divorced and could go off and do whatever they wanted now and they decided that actually a man versus woman fight would be unfair so they decided to create all of these rules to try and level the playing field between the man and the woman in order to fight now sadly none of our girls were able to make it today so which one of you being a girl you're being a girl right fantastic andy andy and michael sadly aren't getting on very well uh having a few disputes have decided to separate so and the first thing they did is they um they would take the man who is who is taller and therefore that is the first thing

that is unfair so they dug a pit and buried him up to his waist in a pit yeah okay we can't dig a hole in the prohibition floor they'd get very upset with us i shouldn't say yeah the lovely backdrop we're actually in the prohibition bar in newcastle a minute which is a lovely a lovely venue for the day um so yes they put the man in a pit and they've given him a nice short club that he's going to use to attempt to bludgeon his wife and drag her into the pit and strangle her if he possibly can now the other side you have the woman who is free to move around but they also decided that women weren't

trained in the ways of war so couldn't really use a weapon so what they give her is essentially a half brick in a sock and so she's got this swinging wildly uncontrollable item that she's going to use now the problem is i'll just let that i'll keep talking whilst they try and kill each other and is that the man cannot shuffle along the floor like that and the woman's weapon is very difficult to parrot because if he blocks that it just wraps around and hits them anyway because it's on a flat piece of string and uh the man also has has the disadvantage that the attacks are coming in from above and he's trying to actually get him

hit in and drag her down into the pitch and she's trying to stay out of the way and so they continue to bludgeon each other until either the woman manages to crack him across the head with a solid blow he's not doing very well today and and crack his head in and or she gets bragged down into the pit and gets strangled you guys are being very tame with this today i've seen you right okay we'll we'll oh yeah okay fair enough we'll we'll call you divorced it's okay you don't have to go home together so we have this first wave actually fighting very odd set up but this is the first recorded we have of it

of settling this disagreement now moving on from there things start to get a little bit different as we start heading through the medieval period um and we start really introducing much more interesting weapons so for example hand and a half sword we're actually now into a a kind of period of time where we can actually start doing proper damage to each other and we now start to look at predominantly well-trained fighting men settling their disagreements with with with um with swords um and at this point we really get uh the concept of might makes right now the idea with this is if you have a legal dispute with someone you can choose combat by arms

god will clearly favor whoever is right and therefore they'll win and that's how it works so it isn't being better that makes you able to survive the jewel it's being right and having god on your side at least that's theory um so you end up using these kind of swords and these bitcoin fights to be honest it's not a period we study a lot it's not particularly interesting period from my point of view so we're not going to talk about it a lot but what i will do is you take this opportunity to introduce you a little bit to what we're talking about in terms of swords and so in a sword we have a grip and the

pommel um really this is a heavy weight to balance the weapon you also use it occasionally for smacking people in the face you've got your cross guard which stops anything coming in and hitting your hand when you're using the sword and then you have the blade okay that's the important bits you need to know about the sword that we'll be talking about as we're going through um so yeah we have the kind of hand and a half sword big kind of nice sweeping motions big dramatic lunges um but we're not going to talk a lot about that but that is where we start we go through this period that might makes right where things start getting more

interesting at least from my point of view is from that kind of middle east uh medieval times we've really split into three separate categories of dueling for the next couple of hundred years and the first of them is in the military um i'm just gonna put a glove on because i'm gonna be oh is there a second saber or someone who is cheers thank you um so the first thing we're going to look at is the military now the military um very much in favor of cutting implements and they're not so much for the stabbing they like to cause big open wounds that stop people so um here we have a um sabre very traditional kind of weapon

be used as a side weapon for people using muskets even right towards the end of the dueling period and you've got a slightly curved blade which means you actually put more power into your strikes and a more guarded hand so the idea of this one is if i can get uh andy across here as an opponent is you have your your guard and this would be officers trying to settle the dual mustard so it could even be on the same side but often it was between um armies they would agree that the officers would duel and this is all about honor really this isn't about trying to kill him this is about trying to disarm him or

draw blood so that i can say i'm what now we're both officers that we're also probably both relatively high born and we don't want to actually kill each other because you know that's what the peasantry is for we send waves and waves of them to die we want to stay alive so everything we're doing at the minute is based around trying to get a nice simple hit so we start off and one person will do an attack and the other person will happily parry and then reply with an attack and that is really how the fight starts to build up going backwards and forward until somebody makes a mistake probably me because i'm talking there we go

so yeah so if an attack will get through now that is how it goes and you get this kind of back and forward of combat going on and this this happened in this space between us now of course that's fine but somebody eventually has to win and the way to ensure that it's not just with the mistake is to find ways of cheating ways of confusing my opponent or getting past him and that's really where it starts to get interesting now when we look at sabre and the predominant ones we've got is something called a beat so the first thing we're going to do is physically batter his sword out of the way so in order to do this i'm going to

start with an attack to his sword now the back third of a saber is shot so what i can do then is bring that up and through his head which is probably not enough to kill him enough to disable him whilst i come in with a larger hit and we also have the glissage which works quite well which is to actually switch down my opponent's blade to move it off lane very much the same kind of attack you bring it back in again i can go here listen i have my attack going through and also i can look to to do snoopy things like getting in a bit closer to an attack coming in i'm going to decide to parry get in

closer and then use the button my sword to smash him in the face and so that's really kind of how this works but ideally i'm not looking for a big solid hit that's going to kill him what i want to do ideally is especially if you're against somebody with a bad guard if you wrap it don't correct it wrap that over the top and just score a cut on the arm tiny little movement here so what i'm likely to do is come in with an attack and then look to cut over to the other side and just get a cut across his wrist and that's me one because i i've caused damage and that's kind of saber do you

guys want to have a quick bash with sabers um if you've got a mask on i'll let i'm conscious of trying we might have to go a little quicker and skip some stuff but yeah come at each other very quickly just be careful okay yeah that's right it's great yeah as i said we'll be trying to put in as much information as well as showing you some of what it is we're actually doing as well but from there other than the military um we also have the civilian now the civilians much prefer stabbing weapons now the reason for that is when you stab somebody you definitely kill them and without being uh two of what's the word i'm looking for

euphemistic at this time in the morning it only takes two fingers of penetration to kill somebody if i can get a blade two fingers worth into somebody's chest i'm hitting internal organs so whether that's the heart the lungs something that's gonna cause permanent damage so if i can run somebody through they're dead i have one that is a great way of dealing with it the problem is they won't die instantly they can probably carry on for a little while whilst they bleed out or stop breathing which means that's great in a situation where i kill i step back there's people around there were rules that's all done but not so great on a battlefield when i

stab him he pulls himself up the sword and smashes my head in and we both die so military much prefer a trauma weapon if i slice somebody's chest open they might live from it when they're probably not going to carry on fighting civilians prefer something much more deadly but uh less able to actually have stopping power um yeah whoever is doing rapier so um so the idea of the rapier and this is what we get into your three musketeers rather than i supposed to say where you want to think more your sharks crusades if anybody's a fan of the vernon cromwell i'm not great with my authors um but uh yeah when we're looking at rapier

we've moved much more to a point orientated weapon so what i'm looking to do is catch my opponent's blade move it offline and then find the line that my weapon can get in in the clock and the idea is we're both fighting for this middle line um if i do nothing and just walk forward before i reach him he will stab me because he has the middle line if i can take the middle line so now my blade on the middle line and his has been moved off slightly if i just walk forward now i'm safe and he's dead so again we have the same situation where one person will attack the other person will carry come back

with their own attack and the whole thing starts i i enveloped there that was cheating for this early at the time um so we just get that kind of back and forth going again where the blades are moving around and you'll notice there's much less clanging much more rasping metal as we're fighting through control over that middle light the great thing that makes this different is the lunge it means that i can quite happily out of distance of him and put in this long lunge where i can quite happily run him through and recover it was really the invention of that technique that allows point oriented things to come from the foreground now we still have if we want to use it

we still got a beat we still got a glissade but now we start having more fun things like disengages so this time i can go to stab him on one line as he goes to parry i dip my point underneath up to the other side and continue that attack completely missing his blade all together oh sorry i was wrong so that i can come underneath his blade and attack quite happily so we have disengages we have beats we have all of these things i can start building them together so i can wait for him to overreact on his parry then disengage and then kill him so all of these tricks start to build up we also have envelopes where if he comes

in for an attack and i parry i might decide instead of wanting it here i want his blade over this side and then continue um so we have all of these kind of things we also have the opportunity i'm going to switch around for visibility we can also start looking at things like disarms which are quite fun so if i've got an attack coming in i can look to block that attack step in and take my opponent's pummel from there i can actually just use my own hips i can push him out of the way and take his weapon off him it's very flashy and the other my other favorite flashy one um just a logo on this side again that's

fine so if i take it here this time i grab it but step the other way rather than controlling him and turning this way i pull him back this way and bring my blade up controlling his sword out the way stabbing him through the face which is very pretty and the other great thing about uh about regular is it brings in the offhand weaponry so now we can start looking at using two weapons at the same time so now i have an offhand dagger a main gosh and my sword this allows me if an attack comes in to decide how i want to deal with it i can parry it with my dagger so simultaneously i can

be attacking with the rescue i can parry with the sword and then do my attack with the dagger i also have options if he's coming in with like giant overhead swings if he's a more brutal kind i can use a double parry and then come off that double tarry looking to attack here i could also do a really nice convoluted things like when the attack comes in i can take that go ahead just straight line yeah so i can do a parry down here envelope as we talked about before pass it off to the dagger bind with the dagger and then continue through with my lunch to give you an idea of the speed that

actually goes out yeah and he's run through quite happily so we have the dagger quite a nice offhand weapon we also have [ __ ] cheers i'll just grab another vanity so this time it's a small shield now i'm not going to hide behind this as i would do like a a medieval shield instead i'm either going to push that you'll notice the more i push it forward the more of me is hidden behind it and then it becomes about angles so if i hold it here he can't hit my head he can go over the top of it but he can't actually hit my head so i'm using the fact that there's angles there

i'm also going to hold it slightly sideways and use this edge here to power it so when he comes in with an attack i'm actually going to punch into it and parry and that allows me to deliver my attack in the same plane yeah the other thing is we have a very exposed hand position i mean there is a guard over the top of there but it's very easy if my guard goes low for the back of my hand to become accessible to a little cut and as i said all you've got to do to cut and to win the fight is to cut so what i might do is as an attack comes in

is i might decide to cover my hand with my with with the uh the shield so that i'm actually covered i can punch that

so before before you kebab someone all live on stream um i just uh we are gonna have to move on to another speaker but you guys are going to come back and do some pretty impressive stuff i believe we're going to carry on doing stuff for you yeah we'll be back later on this afternoon i'm aware that time's a bit short so obviously moving on and we'll be looking at doing more kind of punching and kicking and grappling and kind of close unarmed work this afternoon all right do you know what i'm i'm i'm signed up for that one yeah i absolutely love it listen thanks guys that was that was awesome um i did laugh a lot because you're just

kicking the [ __ ] you tell her and i love that i think that's a grand that's what we're here for we're here to take all the bruises and entertain you it's not a b-side unless someone gets a [ __ ] kick out of them consensually um yes yeah i'm safe saying consensual it's important yes exactly um and that was that was pretty cool um i absolutely loved it that that's my day made uh so they use get you back later on and we'll be kind of strangling each other and throwing each other for your entertainment as well so yeah yeah 4 15 p.m if anybody just wants to just chime in for the bartitsu

absolutely worthwhile yeah we'll be back to do another session for you yeah grand listen thanks very much good day um it's you know it's been great being part of this thanks man bartitsu dudes i'm doing some more bartitsu i can make my camera work and everything hopefully [Music] hello and slight costume change from this morning and and uh yes for the next little while we will be beating each other up for your entertainment so please do um again when you you get bored of our blood and violence and feel free to call us into our halt um but again my name's duncan um i'm the chief instructor at the artisan antagonistics forum and i have andrew walton and michael with

you're here with me today giving me a hand um in fact they're going to be doing all the hard work and i'm just going to be talking to this section which is lovely so the bartitsu that we do the partition outfit is a victorian mixed martial art the very quick history of it is gentleman martin wright and was an engineer goes out to japan to work on the railroads and whilst he's out there he learns jujitsu one of the first westerners to learn so when he comes back to london he brings a couple of jiu jitsu people with him and he adds in feudalism so bare knuckle boxing and french kickboxing so that um adds in

some uh cane fighting that comes from a kind of french swiss guy and malcolm x all this together sticks his name on it makes it an itsu at the end so that it sounds japanese and sells well and that's how you get bar jitsu and so what i'm going to do is very quickly take a rundown of each of the components so you can get an idea of what it is we actually do so i think in the background you can see the two of them already starting to line up with a bit of fighting and so this is pugilism largely you'll notice rather than the modern day boxing guard their hands are much more expended out

in front of them the reason for that is if you're not wearing boxing gloves and somebody punches you in the arm you punch yourself in the face so the hands stay nice and far away from your head and you'll notice that a lot of the time they'll just be looking to move that hand aside as it comes in and look to reply with an attack of their own now it doesn't look like you'd have a lot of power in that just simple extension and attack we have something called a drop step right if you want to do a drop set first let's add just you can see the difference so the idea is rather than than

the power coming from the arm we're actually going to lift the foot and drop down into it so actually all of that power is being generated by full body weight so yeah you're not gonna do it so rather than just a little tap it comes in with a lot more power and so you're able to do much quite strong hits and the idea would be we keep people at guard and then you smash them in the nose when they get close enough to do that all right let's draw and drop that down and carry on um no the the other advantages to futuralism is you don't want to just stand there and trade blows with the other guy

because then it comes down to who can take the most hits ideally what we want to do is block and reply or ideally not be there at all in the first place so we use a technique called slipping where we'll move out of the way and actually apply an attack in the same time without actually carrying anything which allows us to to get in and get very quick coming in um are you doing all right slipping yeah so um so yeah the feudalism works a lot we also do a lot of stuff with our elbows as well because um it's we're not confined by the rules of modern day boxing so there's nothing to stop us using the elbow so one of the

techniques we'll use will be when a fist comes in you'll catch it and actually drag your elbow up through the other person's hand because if you can break their hand they're not going to keep punching you with it and that opens them up for counter attacks as well so you get a lot of elbow techniques coming in we also have something called dirty boxing which is totally banned in in modern day boxing but if they get too close they'll move from this kind of boxing into a full-on clinch and once you're in these kind of techniques um this is all considered part of boxing so they will be punching each other in space trying to escape pulling away and

grabbing each other hitting each other in the kidneys and all kinds of stuff that's totally not allowed in modern day boxing and for perfectly acceptable in bare knuckle boxing with what we're doing here now as well as this we're also bringing in french to that so we're looking at kickboxing um which suddenly gets you'll suddenly see kick starting to develop here now we don't tend to do high big kicks as you see in something um like taekwondo or something simply because those become very easy to grab and once you've got hold of somebody's leg up here you can do horrible horrible things to them whilst they bounce around on the other leg so most of the kicks tend to be below

the waist and if we're going to hit them above the waist we'll use our fists um and realistically we've never needed to kick higher than uh let's call it the the family area um if you can land a solid blow there with a kick the fight is probably over so a lot of the kicks are used to hold their opponent today so when somebody's coming in they'll use a kick to stop them getting in close so it's used a lot to control range it's also used a lot of the time and to come in with uh attacks to the knees and trying to break the other person's stance that you can then throw them when you move into graphic um

particularly the french love things in threes so one standard attack is to attack the front knee jump through it at the back knee and then the third attack comes up between the legs to the fork and the opponent drops down pretty quickly and that combines very nicely with the cuddles mostly because you use your hands for the top line using your legs for the bottom line and you can attack on both legs playing spanish simultaneously so the third part we then go into is jiu-jitsu so this is more what we're looking at throws and things so this works a lot with somebody grabbing somebody and and then you would be looking at a thunderbird what can you go

there we go so what we're looking for is when somebody grabs you you can do very simple techniques where you take hold of weak jointed areas and it's all about then exploiting the mechanics of the human body from here and i push the arm locks the shoulder locks and i have complete control over the body and likewise if i go the other way rather than going for the little finger i can exploit the thumb it's quite a weak actual joint in here and this time everything wraps up but i've still got control of my opponent we also have situations where um i may not actually want to hurt somebody this is the drunk uncle at a party

it's called escorting a gentleman out of the room but if i can get the arm rather than doing anything painful i can loop it over and hyperextend it across here from now on he will go where i tell him to go and i can quite happily escort him out of the room um without actually causing any further fuss or without causing any damage to him which is all very nice but realistically if we're using it in a fight um we need something a bit more dramatic than just these little manipulations and so we go to bigger things such as uh do you guys want to work on some takedowns you want here so what we're looking at here is um

where you're taking away somebody's stats and letting them fall in behind them so you'll notice he's going through taking the leg out and down and he goes to the floor now you can do these relatively dramatically we think of them in two terms we have takedowns where you're just making somebody fall over you're not really trying to hurt them this is about controlling somebody uh the other option is to throw them and we're not going to do that because it's a concrete floor here and that's really bad for everybody involved um but you can do throws where you literally pick people up and drop them and that's much more violent and we're actually using the floor

essentially as an improvised weapon okay yeah they're very hard there so that's where the jiu-jitsu component comes in so what we've now got is a system where we can use our hands we can use our feet um for kickboxing and then if they're getting too close we're going to switch instantly to the jiu jitsu which ties in nicely with boxing we can get into the dirty box and that bring in our jiu jitsu and start doing our trips now of course if somebody is further away than um fist and hand range we start looking at improvised weaponry now the primary one we use is a walking stick do you guys have pains who did okay

um so a walking stick the first thing to realize when you're trying to use a walking stick as a weapon is that it isn't the sword there's nothing protecting my hand so if i parry things like a sword things slide down and damage my hand so everything's done from a very high guard across the top just be very careful so a lot of it is swinging attached here if you guys just want to go for it so they'll be parrying across and then coming in with the taps that go over the top so you're going to see a lot of these kind of tip-top motions um also the important thing is if it's not a sword

we don't have an edge which means i can hit the back of it the side of it whenever needed so one option is i can swing over at the top and where it would normally be actually swing over the top and strike down quite low with the end of it but my hand is very high above their parry and if they've come everything goes above trying to stop me hitting them in the head my next attack goes low between the legs with with a reply so um we've got these kind of attacks you've also got things like if you've got a hook on the end and you're able to use that to entangle your opponent's leg so what you're

looking for is a parry they'll take a parry and grab the hand and then use the hook to actually catch behind the leg and pull them off balance and once they're down there you can then bludgeon them quite happily at your own leisure and so there's those kind of different tactics you've got when it came that you use with the books as well now one of the things that people don't know about tipsy well other than like everything nobody's ever heard of it but one of the things is it was heavily involved in the suffragette movement and a lot of women were getting arrested so there was a group called pacquiao's bodyguards who were actually trained in

bartitsu to protect the suspect now they didn't tend to use walking sticks what they intended to use was an umbrella um now you probably don't need to paint for this bit um now the umbrella is a useful weapon for slapping somebody with and because it's got lots of nice spongy bits in however it has a metal rod right the way down the middle with with the spike so if you use it a bit more like a set bayonet you can stab somebody with it quite effectively now you can actually use this if sorry if somebody was to attack you can use it to defend and then this opens up the under arm or the the armpit

which can then be used to strike into amps numbing the whole arm if somebody does that too often that they still haven't got the message the other option is to take that which aim a little bit lower between the legs at which point they will very much get the message so you're able to use things like an umbrella as well as a relatively good self-defense thinking even against something like a grab if michael if you do a double grab then uh just step back take a couple of steps back so you're actually on screen so if uh michael does a double grab you can see andrew's able to put the umbrella up between the arms

and actually twist the attacker off him before he then delivers his own attack so using things like that as well and we also have the option for what we call incidental weapons you want to borrow my handbrake if you want to throw things around and when somebody is actually uh preparing to do an attack we can use whatever we have at hand if we can't use it as an improvised weapon or use it as a distraction technique towards andrew to try and attack michael's able to essentially lob his hat at it so whilst he is trying to recover because if something comes at your face you automatically block it and then tom will him quite happily

close the ground and take the initiative a huge thing about bartitsu is what they call trying to disturb my opponent's equilibrium without them disturbing mine which means taking the initiative getting in and performing the attacks like you guys are doing in the background how much time have i got left i'm just i'm rushing through stuff today oh is there anybody on the other end i don't have a uh we have a keynote at 16 45 so you've got about 10 minutes to continue kicking the crap out of one another i'm loving this one right so um losing buttons that's always a good sign so we're able to then start combining some of these things together do you

guys want to um go into a bit more of the scoring just yet show some of the kind of techniques um all right yeah okay okay that sounds good um so we're able to use a lot of these techniques in combination so what you'll find is and i suspect will happen here they'll start off very much with um they'll start off at what we call extended range so this is um kane distance they can't actually hit each other in kickboxing they're going to be looking to land blows with the k now however should that in such a time get too close they can quite happily switch to punches and kicks um as they go you can go a bit harder thank

you guys it's all right um so yeah they might be looking in this case i suspect michael will be looking to keep the distance because he's taller whilst i suspect andrew is trying to close in and take this to a closer range so instantly we've gone from kicking or if we're getting in closer it'll instantly go to grappling as well and so the real power is to be able to switch from one particular part of the art to another as you see we're now into grappling um and boxing they're fighting to a position to see if you can get one of them on the ground we'll hold it there i'm not going to go into

groundwork today but you can see them taking adapting to the situation so you use whatever you have at hand to start with and whether that's a handful of pocket change logged in somebody's face that you can get closing if they're getting closer you can switch instantly you've got your boxing you've got your elbows knees you've got your feet you can use all of these and if it gets closer and again you're into your grappling you're looking for position you're throwing people kicking people over the shoulder all of these kind of techniques that we've got as well and i would say one thing just to finish off then since one of the things we actually teach is

very much focused on um self defense um and this is one of the things people ask me most often is the what if you are mugged by somebody with a knife what's the cool move that disarms this situation or is your and this is one of the things that i say to everybody who comes and drink with me whatever you have in your wallet is probably not worth risking your life for if i check in my wallet now i've got a fiver some credit cards a picture of my daughter none of this is stuff that i'm gonna worry about too much so the thing is if somebody asks me for my wallet or they're going to stab me

yeah they've got a straight razor because people carry those these days i will give them my wallet that is the best self-defense in this situation the trick is how you give it to them because the thing is if i hand him this he's now got it i'm still standing really close to him what i want to do is create again a moment where i'm in control of the situation so i'm going to take this and i'm going to give him my wallet now he's got a decision does he want my wallet or does he want me whilst he's picking up my wallet i'm this way and i'm trying to find my way to somewhere that's populated or

whatever so a lot of people are looking for very funky ways of taking down people they're heavily armed but a lot of self-defense is about situational awareness and de-escalating the situation and getting out of there alive that is a win so take well we do teach just in case you know techniques for if somebody comes with a knife where you start kind of looking for those kind of wraps bring them in and control the hand and the weapon very close although that seems very counter-intuitive that i'm always putting the knife to my neck from here i have all of the power because he close in and then i can just twist until i take control of the

situation um but normally if you can get out of the situation and that's that's always my advice when it comes to self-defense types of things but anyway bartitsu was a big thing in victorian england um and then it kind of disappeared for about 50 years and nobody heard of it um until there were references to it in um shakespeare sherlock holmes completely wrong thing one of his books the the um uh case of the empty house sherlock holmes makes his brand return um and he has to explain how he survived his big fight with moriarty at the rack and by calls and he says i i knew buritsu and then people started asking what is

this thing and suddenly through this over the last kind of 30 years people have recreated what bartitsu is so we're now carrying that on teaching some of those techniques as a self-defense system and continuing that project on of going what works how do we actually make techniques work so a lot of what we do is actually learning a technique and then trying to make it work there's no point knowing a flowery technique if it doesn't do anything so we tend to be much more get in there get scrappy throw people around because that's how you know things actually work so hopefully that's that's been some level of entertainment we're happy to answer any questions or anything if

anybody's got any um or we're happy just to have whatever time's left these do a lot clubs out of each other for your entertainment if you want i'm not hearing anything so you guys just want to punch each other until the time's up it's all good

oh you'll see again they're very much trying to keep each other at range to find the range that works for them there's a lot of these kind of kicks that are going low and they're not actually landing where they're just trying to control the distance and then a lot of what you're seeing is these single punches landing um and then that's giving somebody the advantage and they're just piling on with that with everything they've got after that um you can't get a bit knackered after i've made them fight for this one but it's quite fun so yeah that's really what we do we train um every week we train in doing bartitsu and we train in antagonistics

for those of you here this morning and we split our time roughly equally between us we're doing a bit less of at the minute due to covid bit hard to do grappling and maintain social distancing a bit easier if you've got a couple of swords between you um but yes hopefully we've given you some idea of what we do you've provided some entertainment with blood drink and uh yeah i think you're about to head on to a keynote speak at this point if i'm right yeah yeah absolutely okay um ray redacted is going to be up soon yeah yeah let's round of applause for these guys i absolutely loved it i even went got my top hat i

tried to find a cane no one in the house is willing to get the [ __ ] kicked out of them so that's important yeah well yeah so we're all we're always willing to to help out wherever we can we do have study groups around the uk there are other people doing bartitsu as well um but yes we are in newcastle every week we we meet up in prohibition upstairs and and knock lumps out of each other