Hock Hockheim January 2019 class AAR

On January 19 and 20, 2019, KR Training hosted Hock Hockheim, a Texas-based trainer that has taught all over the world over the past several decades.

Hock’s best known within the martial arts training community. He’s written many books and produced many videos, not just instructional materials, but also personal memoirs of his time as a military policeman and time spent as a detective in Texas, and a few books of fiction set at the turn of the 19th century.

He’s also one of the trainers that started offering truly integrated courses back in the 1990’s. He calls his program Hand, Stick, Knife, Gun. What he brought to KR Training was a 14 hour overview of that curriculum in a seminar format.

Day one included his version of the “mindset” lecture common in many defensive and use of force classes. His program uses the phrase “Force Necessary” as the guiding principle. The goal is to make students proficient in all the options so they can apply them appropriately, whether the situation is restraining an angry friend or relative or defending against an armed attacker intent on killing you.


Learning the arm bar

We spent some time learning arm bars in response to a variety of attacks, with discussion about what you can do after you get the arm bar. Day one also included a lot of knife and counter-knife material.

I was too busy training most of day 1 to take many pictures. That’s an indicator the class was fast paced and kept the students involved all the time.

Day two added in the stick and the gun, but mostly focused on adding gun skills, since the majority of students attending were more likely to have a gun or a small knife with them than a stick.

Discussing knife characteristics

Hock uses rubber band guns for a lot of the gun work. That may seem like a silly idea, but the ones he had allowed the user to fire 2-3 shots from a retention or body index (no sights) position. They can be used in any building without concern about damage to walls, furniture or people, and provide a little more realism than a non-firing ‘red gun’ or even a laser gun like the SIRT, since projectiles were actually flying. For the sort of close range work we were doing in class, they worked very well.

Ground skills were also integrated, as just about any drill could go to the ground. We got out my blue mats and put them to good use.


Sprinkled throughout the course were stories and anecdotes that tied back to the material we were learning. Hock’s a very entertaining speaker and writer. At the end of class I purchased several of his books, some to read for fun, one (Fighting Words) to read and review as part of my Historical Handgun program.

Like many courses we offer, there’s a one day and two day option. We had more people attending on Saturday (when I wasn’t taking pictures) than on Sunday.

The content of the course fit very well with the material we teach and what is taught by other trainers that I host and Hock’s material, because it can be done indoors, is “weather proof”. Look for another visit from Hock to KR Training in January 2020.

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