Take a knife off a man in about a second — or keep training with me free until you can.
Ninety days, and the guarantee is the whole offer: do the work — the courses, two classes a week, the reps — and if you can't do it at the end, you keep training with me for a full year of classes at no cost. About two hundred and fifty of them.
Nine questions, about two minutes · Vince reads every one · start any day
It isn't techniques. It's not freezing.
Nobody lies awake wanting a wrist lock. What they want is to know that if a man gets within arm's reach with something in his hand, they won't just stand there. And what they want after that — though almost nobody says it out loud — is to be the one in the room who can do the thing everybody else believes is impossible.
Every system teaches this for about a minute a week.
Time your last class. Warm-up, drills, forms, sparring — and on a good day the weapon that's already on you got two minutes. That's two percent. Thirty classes to accumulate a single focused hour, and most systems won't open the subject until black belt, four or five years in. You could be the best boxer alive and have no idea what to do when a knife is already across your throat. That isn't an insult — it's arithmetic.
Putting physics back into weapons defense
Not sparring. Not theory. One continuous, four-step response built for the moment the weapon is already there.
You only get one bite of the apple!
Beat the freeze — a trained, instant response to the weapon before his brain catches up.
85% of the disarm IS the distraction. It will give you all the time you need. Overload his attention so he never sees the counter coming.
Redirect and dominate the weapon-holding arm so it can never track back to you.
Because we're using fulcrums, leverage and structure to strip the weapon — strength is not necessary. It will look as if he is giving you the weapon. Clean, controlled, final.
Level one, and it starts on day one
Four positions, each broken down across ten short videos — every variation, every drill, every mistake corrected. This is the first of six levels, and it's where everybody starts.
The techniques that made a million people stop scrolling.
Viewers already treat these breakdowns as practical, credible, and worth practicing.
Love this stuff keep showing these little defensive moves over and over.
Most of the time I think videos like this are bullshit but I believe this guy could actually do this without getting killed.
Spent over forty years in martial arts and combatives, and I must say these are the best weapons defense vids on the internet. Salute and thanks for the knowledge.
You look so natural true to life as if you were born marcial arts fighter.
Awesome stuff, teaching and practicing with family... tough times ahead potentially.
Very informative and nicely displayed, thank you W.D.A.
Phenomenal video and teacher, this instructor relaxly clothed as a normal citizen explains the correct principle and strategy better than these traditional GI cladded wannabes that many times miss the point.
He takes time to explain what is the principle that makes the technique work and the general strategy. No foreign languages, no meaningless mysticism, no crazy salutes, no crazy clothing just pure knowledge.
It kind of reminds me of when a Tech genius billionaire called Steve Jobs showed up with a black T-shirt and jeans expertly explaining a masterpiece of creative technology, very relaxed, very casual, no fluff.
This Gentleman understand the concept or the principles. It's not just for train a bunch of random techniques; going deep inside the reason why we do things the way we do.
This type of knife defense if so important. And It's so easy once you practice the right technique.
Being a correctional officer for 25 years; True a good knife fighter won't attack you like that. However when you're in that position this technique work great. I use this particular technique all the time. Works every time. GREAT TECHNIQUE GUYS!!!!!!
Hello my friends, since I found you here on YT I have read the comments of some people, they are saying that your technike don't work but honestly don't care.
I'm a fighter, I am with fighter every day and we are having a lot of fun testing your way to do things. Like I said in another occasion: It works, purely! So thank you for sharing with us.
So awesome! I never considered taking a weapon class like this but will soon.
That was awesome and this method bears the ring of truth, in my experience.
I'm a musician by training among other things. Enjoyed seeing you get close to full speed here. But I see where your actions are tied to an internal Rhythm and I'm the beat that you decide to hit the drum you hit the drum and the gun is in your hand.
Bro this old man is str8 killer I love it teach me the ways your a OH.
I have seen a few videos these last few days and I am quite impressed. You take your time to explain the principle instead of showing random techniques, I come from the world that the principle is the main thing, the technique is an illustration of the principle.
Can you do a brief video on your background it seems quite solid, well learned. I see other instructors attacking techniques from other systems but they do not show them correctly that only shows that they do not understand the principle behind the technique.
Another great video. Thank you for breaking this down. Practice, practice, practice.
Keep it up. I like the pinky move. Not sure how secure I am with the right hand grab. I honestly don't know how loose a man's fists are when surprised. Either way... impressive techniques that I have never seen before, and that is rare.
As a Hapkido practitioner, I appreciate this and would like to see more of these detailed videos. Thank you.
Good stuff - keep'em coming!
Excellent techniques...I love it...
These posts and self defense techniques are enormously helpful and empowering. Please keep posting!
Great training video. It's so painful. Be careful with your partner. Don't break their wrist's.
So so so real! Not like all of these outerspace super commandos showing bullshit that will get you deleted! Thanks for this keep up the awesome work!
I really have to laugh-not at the video or the techniques being shown, but at the comments, most of which are from people who have zero training.
A lot of people have a bunch to criticize about these techniques but I'd like to hear what they have to say when their joints are being manipulated and their wishing their toes were just a bit longer to try and alleviate the pain.
Very detailed. Thank you. Greetings from Hurth near Cologne, Germany.
Outstanding.
I'm practising navaja Style Fight since the early 80's and have still the opinion that you better don't fight a person with a knife even if you have also one. If you can better leave but sometimes you can not leave the situation so you have to fight against a knife.
I'm thankful and proud we have someone like you, teaching us great methods to protect us from mayor injuries, so thank you. I'm a big follower.
This is great. You'll get the comments saying this never happens in a real fight' etc. But if you look at real footage of situations, this is Exactly the sort of thing that happens, being threatened with a blade at odd angles. Love it.
This guy I love him. He's one of the real gems. Thanks for being so darn candid! It so much fake stuff on the tube and every where. How can I become a student?
Excellent and thank you from the U.K where knife crimes are predominant. I will practice with my 27 years and older sons using ONLY A SAFE NON HARMFUL stage knife. Cheers guys.
Let me save some people the trouble.
If you're not going to come to two classes a week for ninety days, don't do this. If what you want is to watch videos and feel prepared, don't do this either — there are cheaper ways to feel prepared.
And if you're looking for a fight system — striking, sparring, conditioning, competition — this isn't that and never has been. There is no rolling, no sparring and no getting hit anywhere in it.
What's left is a fairly specific person: someone who has worked out that the weapon is the gap in what they know, and who will actually turn up twice a week to close it. If that's you, the rest of this is for you.
Three things happen
We work out where you actually are
That's the call. What happened, what you've trained, what you want to be able to do. Twenty-five years of teaching this means I can tell inside ten minutes what's going to take you longest — and I'd rather know that before you start than after.
Everything opens on day one, and the path through it is mapped
Six levels, 24 courses, about 150 videos. Nothing drips and nothing waits. Month one is distance and timing, month two is the disarms themselves, month three is doing it under pressure. You are never wondering what to do next.
Somebody watches you every week until it's automatic
Five live classes a week plus Saturday from the floor, and six private hours one to one. That's the part no video can do. You can learn the movement from a screen — you cannot see what you're doing wrong.
Two hours a week with us. Ten minutes a day on your own.
No gym, no mats, no drive, and nothing you have to give up to make room for it. The classes run on Zoom five nights a week plus Saturday, so you take the two that fit. And you don't quit your dojo, your range or your instructor — this bolts onto whatever you already do.
Meet Your Instructors
Four chief instructors. A combined 200+ years of martial arts experience. All focused on one thing.
Chief Instructor & Founder
Vincent Waterhouse
A 10th-degree black belt with over 25 years focused specifically on defending against armed attackers. He trained in Shanghai, founded the Weapons Defense Academy, and was named Grand Master of the Year — and he's taught these exact disarms to an audience of over 1,000,000.
His method strips self-defense down to what actually works under the worst-case pressure of a knife, gun, or club — no decade of martial arts required.
- 10th-Degree Black Belt
- 50+ Years Martial Arts Experience
- Grand Master of the Year
- Jujitsu America Black Belt Hall of Fame
Chief Instructor & Founder
Vincent Waterhouse
A 10th-degree black belt with over 25 years focused specifically on defending against armed attackers. He trained in Shanghai, founded the Weapons Defense Academy, and was named Grand Master of the Year — and he's taught these exact disarms to an audience of over 1,000,000.
His method strips self-defense down to what actually works under the worst-case pressure of a knife, gun, or club — no decade of martial arts required.
- 10th-Degree Black Belt
- 50+ Years Martial Arts Experience
- Grand Master of the Year
- Jujitsu America Black Belt Hall of Fame
Chief Instructor & Co-Founder
Prof. Dave Castoldi
Co-founder of the Weapons Defense Academy and one of the most decorated jujitsu masters alive. Prof. Castoldi spent 60+ years developing a system of street self-defense by adding weapons defense to Wally Jay's Small Circle Jujitsu — and his fingerprints are on every technique we teach.
When Prof. Castoldi demonstrates a disarm, the biggest men in the room become believers in about three seconds.
- 10th Degree Black Belt — Castoldi's Jujitsu
- 9th Degree Black Belt — Jujitsu America
- 8th Degree Black Belt — Small Circle Jujitsu
- 60+ Years Martial Arts Experience
Chief Instructor & Co-Founder
Prof. Bob Stines
Soke (founder) of Sanshin-Ryu Jujitsu — a curriculum now recognized in 67 countries — and a former world champion competitor with a professional record of 35-5-1 with 17 knockouts. Prof. Stines brings a rare combination: academic martial arts depth and real competitive fire.
He fought in Chuck Norris' World Combat League and still teaches with that same intensity.
- 10th Dan — Sanshin-Ryu Jujitsu (Founder / Soke)
- President, American Sports Jujitsu League
- 1991 WSKF World Karate Champion
- Pro Record 35-5-1, 17 KOs
Chief Instructor & Co-Founder
Prof. Saul "Randy" DeArcia
If you ever doubted that size doesn't matter — one round with Randy will end that debate. At 5'6" and 150 lbs, he is the living proof of every principle this system is built on. He is also the engine behind the Academy's weapons library: constantly finding, testing, and memorializing new defenses.
He will kick ass on the biggest guys out there and teach you how to do the same thing.
- 8th Degree Black Belt — Castoldi's Jujitsu
- Co-Founder, Weapons Defense Academy
- 25+ Years Martial Arts Experience
- Living proof that technique beats size every time
Somewhere this morning, a parent paid for Spanish 101.
More than two hundred American colleges charge over $50,000 a year. Two semesters, five classes each — about five thousand dollars a class. Fifteen weeks, three hours a week. Forty-five hours in a lecture hall, and then the book goes on a shelf for twenty years. Nobody blinks at that. It's just what education costs.
Ninety days here is about a hundred and ten hours — sixty-five live classes, thirteen Saturdays on the floor, and six of them alone with me. Then the classes keep coming for a year. And you don't put it on a shelf; it's on you for the rest of your life, and it works the one day you need it.
It's priced like a single university class. I don't put the number on a page, because a number means nothing until you know what's behind it. We go through it on the call.
I've got answers
Do I need any martial arts experience?
It doesn't matter, and that isn't a sales line — it's just how this works. What Vince has spent twenty-five years developing is unarmed defense against an attacker who already has a weapon: a knife, a gun, a club. Most martial arts systems, and most military and law enforcement programs, spend very little time on it, because their operators carry their own weapons and work in teams — a SEAL with six teammates and four guns rarely finds himself alone against a knife. So even elite professionals have this gap, and they know it. If you've trained twenty, thirty, forty years, this is a direct add-on to what you already know; Vince isn't asking you to abandon your system, he's filling the one hole almost every system leaves open. And if you have no training at all, that's fine too — sometimes easier. We start you at the top: weapon defense first. Once you understand how to take a weapon away using leverage, distraction and body mechanics, everything else falls into place underneath it. Think of it as starting at 6th-degree black belt and working your way down.
I'm not big or strong. Will this actually work for me?
Size and strength matter when nobody's trained — the bigger man wins that coin flip, right up until training enters the picture. Navy SEALs aren't big guys. A little girl can grab a big man's finger, put a fulcrum on it and drop him to his knees, because the bigger you are the longer the lever. That isn't a metaphor, it's physics. Think about a 300-pound refrigerator: you can't pick it up, but you can tip it to its balance point and hold it there with one finger. Find that point and weight becomes irrelevant. That's exactly what this teaches — where to strike, what to grab, how to take someone off balance and put their weapon hand somewhere it can't recover from. Strength is the last thing you need once you understand the fulcrum.
I'm in my sixties. Is my body going to handle this?
Vince is 69, with a rebuilt back, a rebuilt shoulder and a rebuilt hip, and he trains two to four hours a day. He isn't the hero of that story — he's the evidence. There's no rolling, no sparring, no getting hit, no road work and no footwork you can't do. You step in once, about a foot. The work is done by leverage, not by you, and the motion that puts a man in real trouble is sometimes less than a quarter of an inch.
Do I need a training partner?
It helps enormously, and it doesn't have to be a martial artist — it can be your wife, your brother, your son, a friend. One rule: the person holding the weapon controls the pain, not you, and you start far slower than feels useful. The Filipino martial artists say slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. One of our students, a man in his fifties, drills with his 75-year-old mother; he describes touching her hand like touching a butterfly wing, so softly the wing would never be damaged. He gets better every session. Go too hard too soon and your partner will never train with you again — and they'd be right.
How is this different from a regular self-defense or karate class?
It doesn't compete with any other system — it adds to them. Taekwondo, boxing, Muay Thai, Krav Maga, military combatives: all of it is good. The difference is that almost none of them spend serious time on unarmed defense against a weapon that's already within arm's reach, and almost all of them save it for black belt. Think of the best cardiothoracic surgeon in the world — a career operating on hearts, and then your daughter's boyfriend says his eye hurts and he shrugs, because that isn't what he does. Mike Tyson might be the greatest boxer who ever lived, but when someone puts a gun to his head, boxing doesn't help. That's the gap. Vince has spent twenty-five years filling that one gap and nothing else. No fluff, no filler — and technique, once you know it, is like a magic trick. Once you see how it works, it becomes simple.
How does the guarantee work?
Do the ninety days — go through the courses, come to at least two classes a week, use your private hours, put in the reps. If you can't do it at the end of that, you keep training with Vince free for a full year of classes. That's about two hundred and fifty of them. He can promise that because he isn't handing you a video library and disappearing; he sees you every week. If you showed up and did the work and it hasn't happened, that's on him and he'll finish the job.
Is any of this legal?
It's a fair question and almost nobody in this category can answer it properly. Vince is an admitted attorney in Florida and New York. What we teach is a response to a weapon that is already on you or within arm's reach — and where the line sits is part of the instruction, not an afterthought.
Does this cover more than knives?
Knife, gun and club, and the same four-step system runs through all of it. Level 1 alone is four complete courses covering knife across the throat, knife to the side of the neck, knife to the stomach and knife pointed at the throat — each with multiple disarm variations, body-mechanics drills and empty-hand applications. By Level 2 you're adding body movement, the club, and a threat that's moving. Levels 3 and 4 bring in knife from behind, slashing attacks, and gun threats to the head and stomach. The full curriculum runs to hundreds of variations — standing, moving, one attacker, several, close range, back against a wall. Once you understand the principle, every new threat is just another application of the same motion.
Who is Vince Waterhouse?
A 10th-degree black belt with more than fifty years in martial arts, the last twenty-five spent on one specialty: disarming an attacker when the weapon is already within arm's reach or on your skin. He trained in Shanghai from 1979 to 1981 under Master Xu Guo Ming, and was the first Caucasian student permitted to train at the legendary Jing Wu Athletic Association after the Second World War. He holds a 9th-degree in Castoldi Ju Jitsu, founded the Weapons Defense Academy in 1999, was named Grand Master of the Year by the American Sports Jujitsu League in 2019 and inducted into the Jujitsu America Black Belt Hall of Fame the same year. His videos reach a combined audience of over a million followers. He still trains and teaches two to four hours a day, every day — and he is an admitted attorney in Florida and New York.
Where is the Academy, and can I train in person?
Bonita Springs, Florida — about twenty-five minutes from Fort Myers airport. In-person group and private training is included in the program as a credit you use whenever you like; it never expires and it rolls over year to year. Everything else runs live on Zoom five nights a week plus Saturday morning from the Academy floor, so you can do the whole thing from anywhere in the world and come down when it suits you.
There's a short application. Nine questions, about two minutes, and I read them myself.
If it's a fit, we'll get on a call and map the whole thing out — what you do first, what it costs, how long it takes. If it isn't, I'll tell you that plainly and point you at the free material so you can make a start on your own at no cost. I'd rather do that than sell you something you shouldn't buy.
— Vince
Ninety days. Or you keep training free.
That's the whole thing. Do the work and you'll take a knife, a gun or a club off a man faster than anyone you will ever meet — and the man you take it from will laugh, because he won't believe how easy it was.