Okay . . . firstly I’ll go with the caveat that this is all in my experience. Others may differ; it’s like going to school. Lots of people go to high school; they often do very different things.
When I started out as a no-belt (hadn’t gotten my white yet), I went to practice between two and five times a week, depending on what I had time for and what my parents had time for. Each practice was around an hour long, and we were told that it was good to get to practice early so’s we could stretch and such. That part didn’t change. As I advanced in belts I’d say I started going once or twice a week more, so that I was about up to four or so nights a week.
Practice went like this when I was up into the higher-belts under black (and up through black):
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Bow to instructor and flags, firstly. Then stretch for ten or fifteen minutes. Sometimes this was preceded or replaced with a few (5-10) laps around the room, which was itself about . . . 40 feet by 80 or so feet.
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25-50 punches in horseback-riding stance. Take a look at someone riding a horse and you’ll get a good idea of how the lower body looks. If you still need help I can try to take a picture of myself in it this weekend, but no promises. Those punches, by the way, take less than a minute. Still. If you want to go for a “this will impress readers” bit, I can time myself doing X punches.
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Going up and down the dojo (practice room) doing things like back-hook kicks, tornado kicks (both axe and roundhouse), and various combinations (I can give you a list of moves if you want; it won’t be total, but it’ll give you a good idea of the number of things you learn in two years).
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Sparring once a week or so, in pads (which are another topic I’ll address below).
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Occasional work with the “punching bag”. Think flying sidekicks, tornado kicks and other show-off moves.
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Practicing forms (you have to memorize them to get to the next belt level), one-step sparring (think . . . brief choreographed move. VERY brief), and whatever kicking combination you have to know for the next belt level.
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News, information, updates and such.
Now, all this is subject to some flexibility. For example, right after I advanced in belts, instead of practicing my form I’d be learning it. Same with the one-step sparring and kicking combinations. The one thing we didn’t practice were the blue-book answers (there was a book of most of the forms, some basic history and terminology questions, and the one-step sparring and kicking combinations), which were a less integral part of the testing for belt advancement.
As far as taking out someone with a knife . . . youch. That really, truly depends on the person. And the person with the knife:-) I’d say that right now, with two years of training under my belt from several years ago, I’d be able to handle the AVERAGE person with a knife. If said person is instructed in the art of using one they most likely already know how I’m going (to try) to take it away. Here’s how I’d do it, though, assuming the person’s right-handed:
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Put your nondominant hand on their knife-weilding wrist, grabbing it partly at the wrist and partly at the forearm. This is the prevent them from swinging it around at you. And yes, you’ll have to hold on hard.
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Take your dominant hand and place it on their elbow. Now push slightly down and away from you with hand 1 and up and away with hand 2. By this time you’re either stabbed them in the shoulder, they’ve dropped the knife, or they curled it back up. Here’s where it gets important:
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Keep pushing. Step into it. If you’ve done it right you’re putting a fair amount of pressure on their shoulder and this is causing some amount of imbalance. They’ll stagger and fall down if it’s done right. If you want to get ultra fancy you can put your left foot behind their right foot and trip them more quickly.
This is a move/series of moves I learned over a year into my training. Initially it was designed for someone who’s punching you, but any stabbing motion will do. If they have a motion that’s sweeping side-to-side … ::digging through his back o’ tricks:: here you rely on speed more than anything else. You either want to time it so that you can hit their arm as it’s going away from you or block their arm and stun them. In either case you want to start hitting or such fairly soon, to take advantage of a stunned knifeperson. Horseback riding stance and a few punches to the gut or solar plexus (chest) should do it. Or you just grab their wrist and do as I told above.
I can’t, off the top of my head, think of any movie where this is done. But it is rather simple once you have it down. Looks hard but it’s remarkably easy.
Did I miss anything?