In the discussion on Blueguns, Dan Cosgrove pointed me to a product called the Shocknife. I just spent some time on their website and then Googling about it, so I thought I’d offer up my opinion on it.

Initial thought: one helluva training aid.

The big movement in martial arts the past 20 years or so has been more towards “realistic” fighting. I’d pin the start of it on the Gracie’s and the original UFC for starting the movement to “put up or shut up”. 🙂 But even then, much of that is sport, so a corollary movement is for more realistic “combat arts”. The main upshot here is wanting to train as close as you can to a real fight yet keeping some measure of restraint because we are learning, we are training, we all have jobs to go to the next day, etc.. It all depends what you’re wanting out of martial arts (e.g. health, fitness, self-defense). In this case, it’s not about competition but actual fighting/combat and trying to find what works and what doesn’t in a real fight.

Consequently, you want to make your training as close as you can to real life. For example, in defensive handgun training you can use Airsoft guns in force-on-force (FoF) scenarios; it’s great because you actually get shot at, but with the right safety gear it’s nothing harmful. However, the sting of the pellet hitting your skin is a telling thing and a learning experience. Plus what these things do is help to bring out mental, emotional, and other factors that help to simulate a situation closer to real life. That is, if you know this is nothing but practice and a “safe” training environment, you’re going to approach it differently whether you consciously make that decision or not. But if you can put stress in there, if you can do things that raise your heart rate, raise your breathing rate, cause an adrenaline dump, these help to bring up the training. It can help you see how you’ll really react when the brain shuts down and the body kicks in. It can help you see that fine motor skills disappear and gross motor skills are all you have. But it can also help you learn to work and function in that state, instead of just “locking up”.

So that’s where something like this Shocknife comes into play. It kicks up the stress. Now, I only just learned about this product and I’m only going off what I see online about it. But from what I can see, the shock it delivers isn’t truly painful but you do feel it and it is enough to make your body want to naturally avoid it. Consequently, it appears to be a good tool for training — jacks up the “realism” factor because you don’t want to get shocked just like you don’t want to get cut. Plus unlike previously mentioned “knife training” techniques such as chalked rubber knives or magic markers, this one lets you know when you get hit, where, and how. It seems to be quite clear.

What also is quite telling is The Dog Brothers use Shocknife. That’s quite a testimonial.

Again, I haven’t used one but I sure would like to. It seems like it makes for a great training tool.