Clubb Chimera Martial Arts : CCMA

 

Junior

 

 

Richard Barnes kindly took the first segment of the CCMA children’s class tonight. Richard was my assistant coach for almost two years and helped me develop many of the ideas that we carry on today. During those early days we used to buzz at the end of the session with what we had discovered in teaching the children – and letting them teach us. He visits from time to time, occasionally sits on my grading panel and is best known these days for his internet work and shared podcasts with Geoff Thompson.

 

Richard had the children work the fence during his segment. The focus was mainly on the angry or aggressive fence. He also used our method of class appraisal. After a drill has been covered volunteers step forward to demonstrate the drill. They are then grilled by their peers as to what was good and what they believe could be improved. The drill was simple fence work at its most revealing – in short, control of your personal space.

 

We then went back onto the programme we have been following over the past few weeks. Last week I focused on some basics of stand-up grappling and this week we looked at groundwork. My purple sash took the warm-up and focused on ground work warm-up drills. Then I ran through some simple transitional pins, which they covered individually and then as a flow drill. This progressed onto the bridging and snaking (shrimping) defences from the back. The final stage was to put the pins and escapes under pressure with a specific drill. Two minute rounds were set where the person underneath’s objective is to escape as many times within the round and the person pinning is to do his best to stay on top. Lower grades did grappling only whereas the more advanced were permitted to strike.

 

The class finished on breathing exercises.

 

Senior

 

We wound everything back to the beginning again and the basics of self defence hard skills. We put Strategy One back under the microscope. Strategy One deals with creating and maintaining distance. The tactics of Strategy One are escape, the fence, striking, pushing and use of anything that exploits or increases distance from an enemy. The strategies are derived from soft (non-physical) and hard (physical) skill principles, which comes from the fertile ground of common sense, as in intuition and obvious data.

 

I had a blue sash take the warm-up and then focused everything towards anaerobic training. The idea is to replicate the effects of adrenaline on the body. This included sprinting, agility and a number of specific exercises, such as sprawls, that focus on the legs – what Peter Consterdine (co-founder of the British Combat Association) calls the second pair of lungs. Interestingly I found that later more specific exercises, particularly those that involved direct pressure and non-compliance from a training partner still hit the student’s harder than these solo activities. You can’t beat emotional content seems to be the lesson here.

 

In order to do this we went for a cover drill AKA “The Tunnel of Death”! A group of students surround one of their colleagues all armed with focus mitts. One student, with focus mitts, breaches the comfort zone of the selected student. The selected student uses a pre-emptive strike and is immediately set upon by the other pad holders. He then makes best his escape covering and striking as he goes.

 

We then put the pre-emptive strike under pressure. This is the way I have found that the pre-emptive strike is best proven. We test against it, but under fair clinical conditions. Two protagonists wear full-face head guards. They get as close as they instinctively feel comfortable, the range when an attack is most likely to be launched, and stand with their hands by their sides. Two other students control the action. One has his hands hidden behind each student’s back and will touch the back of one of the students who he chooses to make the pre-emptive strike. This physical prompt is best way to defeat hesitation in a striker rather than just calling out the command. The other student controls the distance, as after a couple of still shots, despite the contact being strictly controlled, students are likely to instinctively go to sparring distance. The drill is done from a standing stationary position, replicating the nature of the pre-fight.

 

Every technique you deliver from this position, or indeed any position, will either come on a straight line or a curve. Therefore you will either prefer a straight strike or a curved one. We cultivate the preference you use from this position and drill it against the focus mitts. This is what the students did as the first part of our current standard warm-up drill. The pad holder must hold pads firmly to provide a degree of feedback from a full force strike. The previous drill obviously cannot be done at anything much from low contact, so the pad drill acts as an overlap method. The pad holder must keep the target up as he approaches the striker. This is opposed to the pad holder just putting the target up, as in a movement flash/proactive drill, as a big point is for the striker to know when the right moment will be to strike. The striker only hits the pad once the pad holder touches his fence/breaches his personal space barrier. Role play can be added with the pad holder using aggression/deception to put the striker under more pressure. The focus mitt holder must move in the direction the force is going in order to replicate the nature of a struck person’s response. The target is covered once the pad holder decides the strike is confirmed. We also covered moving targets, referencing the target and then the whole first segment of the standard warm-up by using the transitions from the ground, seated and knees.  

 

As promised in previous lessons we got onto the “add-ons”. These are the “dirty tricks”, if you will, so beloved of many members of RBSD culture to the point where I think they are a type of pornography. The internet and martial arts magazines are often full of grimacing people biting each other, pulling ears, striking the groin, gouging eyes, pinching the skin and doing virtually anything not permitted in mainstream mixed martial arts fighting. These methods can be useful to create leverage, but I do not believe they are the immediate equalizer someone can pull out against a half-decent grappler or striker. They require little training and what should be remembered is a person in a decent position in a fight can also do them to you, so they are not always the “hey presto!” escapes many a seminar teacher likes to present them as. Pain compliance and psychological reaction, which often go along with these tactics, is not something I like to rely on. They are a bonus, but not the main goal.

 

For example, in this instance we used the anti-grappling tactic of eye gouges with the thumbs as a Strategy One tactic against a grappler. The gouge is used as the eye sockets provide good purchase to move the head, but as soon as a sufficient gap is created headbutts, elbows and hand striking can be introduced. Generally speaking you don’t want to stay with the eye gouge for too long. The eyes when squeezed shut are surprisingly resilient to pressure and so is a pumped-up attacker who will instinctively grapple with your arms to remove your thumbs from his eyes. The force for the eye gouge is delivered the same way as an upward knee, uppercut and various other techniques whereby the gouger gathers himself under the gouge to getter maximum control of the head. The drill was applied on focus mitts at full force and then against a head guarded attacker who went from 50% resistance to 100%.

 

We then concentrated on another anti-grappling defence, this time focusing on the low line: the sprawl. Sprawling is found in any grappling art that deals with low line attacks. The sprawler needs to commit full on by pushing his hips down to break the grip on his legs and to retain his balance/take advantage of the attacker’s now prone position. This was done with varying degrees of resistance and extra areas of application for more experienced students.

 

The class’s physical section was finished with a circle attack, similar to the Animal Day format, but with a very short time limit. One person stands in the middle of a rotating circle of possible attackers. His name is called by an attacker and then he is immediately tackled. If taken down he has 20 seconds to escape and get back to his feet. The rules are Strategy One versus Strategy Two: striker/pusher/sprawler/gouger versus grappler.

 

Discussion: I have been asked by a few people about cross training. Cross training forms the second level of CCMA’s “Hierarchy of Training”. Many people cross train, but unfortunately they just add techniques without a thought to how they fit in the grand scheme of things. By adopting a principle or a concept-centred approach the student learns to use cross training as a way to improve their attributes and gain experience rather than just add styles together. This is part of the CCMA individualistic approach.