04.03.09 Class Diary Entry

Mar 6th, 2009 by Jamie Clubb

Juniors grappling at a grading

Juniors

Last weekend I trained at another one of Mo Teague’s insightful and gruelling Red Flag Days. The all day seminars mainly contain several circuits of functional fitness exercises designed to take everyone to their physical and limits in order to re-set their perceptions of fitness and personal achievement. The seminars also include cutting (and I would say “bleeding”) edge training methods and concepts that Mo has been using to train fighters, law enforcement officers, security personnel, special operations servicemen and civilians at his full time marital arts gym in Weymouth.

Whenever I train away, especially at other people’s seminars, courses, and workshops, I like to bring the best knowledge back to the class. The purpose of this is twofold. For a start I am practicing what I preach, teach to learn. The best way to retain information is to teach it as quickly as possible. So whenever I train away with a great coach, as I have done recently with Mo Teague, I bring the best drills and ideas back to our classes so I can go over them myself. Secondly my students get the benefit of learning what I have learnt and testing the said information.

At present the juniors are focusing quite a lot on their MMA attribute training. It is not that we don’t cover realistic self defence. As my previous journal entries will testify we go back to our roots on a regular basis and go through it thoroughly. It is more a case that they need to develop their functional fitness and increase their cross training sphere. So today we began with some grappling exercises such as mirroring and sprawling, which is a great isolation exercise and part of our normal proactive pad drills. Then I had the juniors grapple each other for the back position. This is a tactic Mo puts at the top of grappling positional hierarchy and I would agree.

Then I moved them all back into stand-up training, focusing mainly on boxing techniques. Mo taught us a new method for improving speed and reactions on the focus mitts that makes the pad-holder even more proactive. As well as testing your partner’s guard, flashing them targets, giving them footwork and postures to mirror, and feeding them physical prompts, you can now parry any strike you feel was telegraphed. I love anything that makes training more “live” and prompts self-coaching, so this new method is here to stay for a long time yet! We also introduced the first eight punches from Mo’s eleven punch combination. Our core training does not hinge on combinations and has a bare minimum of prearranged work in favour of instinctive training methods. Nevertheless, combinations and prearranged drills should not be overlooked and serve a definite training purpose so long as you don’t fixate on them or allow them to become an end unto themselves. This combination was great for improving speed and dexterity. After the combination work the whole class brought the free pad-work training together and included the kicks, sprawls and footwork.

The physical side of the lesson was finished with Mo’s bodyguard game, a method used for improving angles of attack. It is a three partner game where one person tries to fight passed another in order to reach a third person. It can be done as a grappling or a striking exercise.

The class was finished with revision on the five tenets: Respect, Awareness, Courage, Discipline and Open Mind.

Seniors

The senior class focused on the “reality-based” information on offer in Mo Teague’s seminar. Like the junior class this nicely followed from last week’s work. The seniors are currently focusing on what I term as the “add-ons”. These are the dirty and illegal tactics used to build on the foundations of efficient striking and grappling applications. Some clubs and associations see these tactics as the priority tactics and they focus on their effectiveness. If data through personal pressure-testing produces a general consensus on this I am willing to change my stance on their position, but so far these “dirty moves” tend to work most effectively as “buffers” or leverage and often don’t work great against superior positioning or striking. Nevertheless, knowledge of them of them is essential for self-protection and I intend to leave the door open for their inclusion as we do more progressive pressure-testing.

We began with a straight forward pressure test on two illegal moves, as advised by Mo Teague and taught both at the recent Red Flag Day and to the Special Ops guys on a recent course. Full contact kicks to the groin and spear hand strikes to the throat against full contact boxing. These short explosive bouts were strictly optional only and held outside the matted area. The sheer intent behind this type of training really gets the adrenaline up and makes matters less sparring orientated and more geared for reality. The groin shot is an area of much debate. Some do not see its relevance at all whereas others see it as the holy grail of self-defence techniques. The same goes for throat attacks. I accept no absolutes in training and still fall somewhere in the middle. When the targets are accessed with a lot of force they can cause devastating results and out of all “dirty moves” are, to some degree, “man-stoppers”, but they are not always easy to reach at the “in-fight” stage and they don’t always drop a person. At present I would consider them secondary stoppers. They rarely knock out or knock down a person, which are my main areas of focus, but they can certainly debilitate an enemy.

eye gouging at grappling range

We moved onto more anti-grappling tactics, taught within the grappling range of course. Finger and thumb locks seemed like the logical place to start. Mo had taught some great simplistic finger locks that reminded me of my old traditional ju jutsu days. I also added in the thumb stripping I used to use a lot when I trained in Geoff Thompson’s private group. Small joint manipulation is another technique barred from mainstream grappling and mixed martial arts competitions because of the amount of damage that can be inflicted by relatively little pressure. Small joint locks appear to be great for setting up other techniques and also fall into the “accidental and incidental” area of training. Next up we looked at the face shredding attacks Mo taught, which included take-downs by applying pressure under the nose and attacks around the face using the bony parts of the wrist. We grappled these under pressure in conjunction with our normal stand-up and groundwork and also incorporated the biting and skin grabbing from the previous lesson.

Finally we covered eye gouges. This was done from specific positioning whereby you are pinned with someone putting their whole bodyweight against you. We used head guard because I was more interested in the mechanical application of this tactic rather than the pain compliance. If you can get pain compliance that’s great, but considering different pain thresholds in others I would rather have a robust mechanical reason for using a tactic.

Discussion: How to debate and rationally look at martial arts techniques and tactics. Critical thinking should be a healthy and positive method for testing and confirming information. We must not criticise for the sake of criticising. Equally we must avoid confirmation bias. We promote an open mind as our final tenet, which means reasoned openness to new and old ideas, and a willingness to fairly test these ideas.

I would like to highly recommend to both CCMA’s students any other martial artists or fitness enthusiasts reading this to attend Mo Teague’s Red Flag Days held in Telford every three months. It’s a fantastic opportunity to really push yourself physically, training functionally for martial arts/self defence and train with inspirational people. There is a lot of discussion in the self defence world on who is presenting and teaching the cutting or bleeding edge methods. I try to make sure CCMA is representative of this. Mo Teague is one of our most profound inspirations for this approach: http://www.worldcombatarts.co.uk/Site/Red_Flag_Day.html