Clubb Chimera Martial Arts : CCMA

Some sparring from a recent grading

Everything was geared back to working the CCMA basics – the quarrying of techniques, and instinctive and individualistic tactical selection. They warmed up with an activity shown at Mo Teague’s last Red Flag Day, the sprawl and catch game whereby a ball is rebounded off a wall and the selected student sprawls and then tries to catch the ball after the first bounce off the floor. It is a good reaction and skill training drill. I organized it so - as is often the CCMA way - the students took over the whole drill.

Then it was straight back onto the focus mitts for some proactive movement drills. Rather than spending ages making students conform to a certain stance and positioning, these drills bring out natural technique selection and a feel for making impact and moving in combat. We worked to advance this training so that the student being coached made instinctive responses through the different ranges/postures. At first I did it on voice commands – “Feet! Knees! Seated! Backs!” – but this could be so much better. It is still too passive and too reliant on verbal instruction. Responses need to be instinctive and drawn from obvious data rather than having to be told by one individual. I brought the whole around to a discussion and active demonstration on how we could improve this drill. The evolution process was fascinating.  

One student said, “The coaching student could give the commands”. That’s better; the coach is now taking full charge of his student as he has been with all the other movement training. However, it still relies on vocal commands. Another student took the ball: “How about signals?” Okay, now we have a paradigm shift from hearing to visual commands. It’s a definite improvement and more in line with several top coaches currently teaching on the scene. It is also like the flash pad concept – you see the target and hit it until it is covered.  However, it is still not in alignment with the rest of the coaching process and can get quite abstract. The goal, I explained to the gathered 6 to 12 year olds, was to make the whole process for both coach and student to be as close to what they were actually training for. It should closely resemble and improve sparring and combat.

Then another student spoke up. He was one of the lower grades. This is a common place where I look for innovation and honesty! I had seen him and his partner already ahead of the game with their training drilling. The coach led the way by going through the postures himself, making his student follow. This was well on the way! However, it is still open to progress and another student saw how it could be done. The coach can make more forceful, tactic related contact to encourage more realistic responses even to the extent that they follow through with takedowns and then continue the coaching on the knees, seated or from the backs. Of course, this can’t be too forceful otherwise you might as well dispense with the striking equipment altogether and go straight into a type of full resistance training such as sparring. Training continued from this point onwards with a renewed energy. By the next round the students who had been coached swapped roles and had a far more engaging system. 

Sparring followed on from here with each round building through the MMA ranges: boxing, kickboxing, kickboxing with clinching and takedowns, and full MMA sparring including groundwork. 

The physical side of things was finished with the class’s favourite activity: Strategy One versus Strategy Two. However, this time the children had adults to escape from! This type of pressure testing brings out the natural and often different tactics children use against adults in an escape situation. Running, agile footwork, voice (to call for assistance), biting the hands that grip them and stamping on feet tend to be the most productive methods for children to use against adults.  

Discussiion: Being alive! And I don’t necessarily mean Alive™. I mean be energized and in the moment as often as possible. This is what drove our work today. Enthusiasm is one of my traits and I take no shame in admitting this. The best teaching is done by those who have energy and can rouse enthusiasm in their students. This is part of all the tenets. Respect demands energetic enthusiasm because you really have to believe in yourself and sometimes others. Awareness brings it out in our living for the moment attitude. Courage needs passionate energy behind it in order to take the stand. Discipline is often the embodiment of tireless energy. Finally, the open mind is like a rapidly spreading energy that searches out new ideas and contingency plans.  

We discussed what it was like to have a “prickly personality”. A temperamental and easily antagonized individual is often described as being “prickly”. I like the idea of someone having a “crackly” personality. The Jeet Kune Do coach Paul Kelly once said that enthusiastic energy seemingly crackled off me. I liked the compliment. Now I like to associate with others who are similarly energized. These are the people who often get things done or lead the way with innovation. We need these people now more than ever in all that we do.

Seniors 

Grounding the seniors back to the essence of CCMA we went straight into some resistance based work and our core method – a Strategy One versus Strategy Two activity. This came in the form of a one-on-one sparring activity. By giving two people different objectives, sparring becomes a lot more intense and a lot more geared toward survival. The Strategy One learns essential self defence hard skills. He is restricted to making distance, anti-grappling methods and focuses on escape. He is prevented from trying to dominate a person whose main objective to get close and bring him down. Strategy Two is restricted to grappling only and understands more the mind of the predator and a useful bi-product is the pressure testing of how to restrain someone going at you full-on! Rounds are kept to a short period, one and a half minutes, giving little room for pacing and encouraging explosiveness, aggression and anaerobic conditioning.  

We then moved onto an old “favourite”, the infamous scramble drill. This type of drill really brings out all the dirty add-ons because you go into desperation mode as you try to make it to a certain point with the rest of the class doing their best to restrain you. I put head guards on those doing the restraining to further encourage head-butting, gouging and other “banned” tactics. Multiple attackers further changes the dynamic, as it is virtually impossible to dominate so many people when your objective is to escape and you begin on your hands and knees.

Another instinctive CCMA drill brings us back to pre-emption. The pre-emptive strike test involves two people facing each other with head guards on. Two other students act as coaches to control the action. Distance is held at just inside conversational range – striking range! One of the controlling students gives a physical prompt with a gentle tap on the shoulder to one of the striking students who will then strike the student facing him; the other student tries to defend. The other controlling student makes sure the distance is kept, as usually after being hit a few times at least one of the students will naturally try to make space. The space he desires the usual striking sparring space will see in most martial arts classes. This is not space we have in a normal pre-emptive assault situation. Both students usually start with hands by their sides, although fences can also be used. It is a great way to pressure test the concept of pre-emption. I see it as my tribute to those who told us that “block and counter” was not a reliable method and promoted proactive defence. The test confirms for the individual whether or not pre-emption works.

All these activities draw hard physical data for the student. They quarry their techniques from the experience of being put under pressures that mimic within reason examples of violence. Obviously we need to look for the flaw in the drills to understand what is built in that reduces the possibility of someone getting seriously injured, but in general a lot this stuff brings you close to at least the feelings of being involved an assault situation. From these experiences – through learning from the fight – you discover what will work best for you personally. The next stage is to cultivate these skills.

This was done through some progressive focus mitt drills. The students learnt how to generate more force and then drilled it through restrictive ranges. This helps develop transitioning too and really helps everyone appreciate the dimensions of a high percentage technique. We then did some work with the resistance bands, understanding that the force of resistance supplied by the band must be the “power-line”. This is crucial for proper development. We must understand what muscle groups are working best in order to better develop our strike and make sure that our resistance works to improve them in the action.

This brought us to the end of the lesson, but the next phase for this would be to look into functional fitness to further work the muscle groups better to improve the technique and also to integrate the techniques back into pressure testing to see whether you have made any marked improvement.

Personal thought: Training equipment. We really haven’t come on in leaps and bounds in the way we manufacture and utilize our training equipment. In the junior class I became increasingly aware how correct positions can prompt great instinctive responses in even the most untrained student – hold a focus mitt head on and they will natural strike in a straight line, change the target surface inwards and it changes into a hooking strike, hold the target towards the ceiling and the strike becomes a downward hammer fist and so on.

There have been many circular gimmicky products put out on the market, but as good intentioned as many of them are – they provide better angles that the usual flat surfaced targets – they have their own abstraction. Even recently I played around with ways to create this sort of stuff, but taking my cue from the untrained I realize that we need smaller targets that resemble the actual striking areas better. The focus mitt still holds true all these years on and, as you recall in a previous diary entry there are ways to get best out of them. http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=51601296919&h=WtlMH&u=3Xkkg However, they are still limited in many ways and this harks back to their origin. Focus mitts were created to train gloved western boxers. I have yet to find much information on their origin, but they were perhaps evolved from the baseball catching mitt. There are a huge variety of these mitts on the market from curved to flat designs with different degrees of padding and of different sizes, each with a convincing argument for their usage – and that’s not including Thai pads. Personally I think small sturdy focus mitts are the best in order to improve accuracy and to promote variety of ranges and positions. The humble kick shield has had its day unfortunately. They haven’t seen much improvement since the days when Bruce Lee was experimenting with American football tackle pads, which is what the kick shield evolved from, and I don’t feel promote realistic form. The target does not even remotely resemble any of the real target areas. Watch an untrained person kick one of these things from a round (roundhouse or turning) kick position. They invariable kick it with inside of their foot and leg, like a type of wrong outside to inside crescent kick. This is totally different from when anyone tries to kick (as opposed to pass) a round object like a football. All targets you will kick will have a rounded surface unlike the kick shield.

We need targets that a coach can hold that help promote the type of surface the student will be striking in real life. My thinking is moving closer and closer toward target boxing gloves, also known as coaching gloves. Savate drills make extensive use of these gloves and were even doing it long before the target glove was developed. The target glove is compact, has a more rounded surface (plus you have the option of using the more rounded back of the glove) and obviously you can use it very realistically to feed your student. I am also thinking towards using parts of the “Red Man” suit to create more proactive target areas. As always there is a lot of room for investigation and improvement. I hope, if anything, these diary entries help shift the emphasis further towards better teaching methods in martial arts/self defence that will include experimentation and innovation.