When to Use a Jacket to Defend Yourself

Series Summary

If the tug attacking you with a knife realizes that you don’t have any weapons of your own, they will think they have the advantage. All you have is the clothes on your back to match a ten-inch steel blade. Hand over your wallet, or for that matter your life, because the script has already been written. You’ve lost the battle before it even got started.

Not so fast, that is if the clothes on your back happen to include a hoodie or a jacket. Because used the right way, this article of clothing can be an effective way to defend yourself.

In this series of martial arts self defense videos, Tres Tew shows you how to defend yourself against a knife-wielding attacker with a hoodie sweatshirt or a jacket. He begins by explaining the rationale behind what at first may sound like a far fetched idea. The basic self-defense plan is to use your hoodie to entangle or distract your attacker. But this series takes you far beyond these principles. Learn how to ward off stabs even when the assailant is attempting to stick you with their knife. Once you have the attacker sufficiently confused, you can also use the jacket to choke them. Watch this series of videos and you will feel well-armed with out any traditional weapons at all!

Video Transcript

"Tres Tew here, I'm an instructor at Yshua's Ryu Martial Arts on behalf of Expert Village I'm going to be showing you how to use your jacket or your hooded sweat shirt in a defense situation. I'd like to talk to you a little bit about using your jacket or hoodie as a defensive weapon. You would want to use this in a situation where an attacker pulled a knife on you. The reason being, in medieval situations, excuse me, in medieval times, in the dark ages a lot of their armor was padded, just simply padded cloth. And that similar concept can be applied here. If he is coming in with a knife thrust that is going to be less deadly to me than my open skin. So what I am going to want to do is just kind of protect myself and there are several different ways I'm going to be showing you how to do this and they are very effective. But, keeping my body protected through using a padded type of shield or armor so that when he is coming in the basic principle is I want to use my jacket as a protective means so that I can get rid of the threat of the knife. Again, that is when you would want to use either your jacket or your hoodie in a self defense situation."