Clubb Chimera Martial Arts : CCMA

Juniors

The junior class began with a series of training specific routines, as is the norm with CCMA. Good time management dictates that all exercises should resemble the activities mainly trained. I won’t go into my usual rant about martial arts classes spending too much time messing around with abstract warm-ups! Our exercises included various movement drills, Mo Teague’s ball ‘n sprawl reaction training and were finished with an anaerobic entry drill. This drill creates the right sort of physical pressure felt both in self defence and competition as well as helps build neurological pathways aiding muscle memory for good form.

Freestyle pad-work was an interesting assessment of different levels of coaching. Couples who actively engaged whilst coaching spotted errors in their partners far faster than those who were more laid back. I also found it interesting that the more laid back students were also those more likely to use voice correction when they did eventually spot flaws in their partner’s work. The freestyle pad rounds came to a conclusion with two fast-paced drills. The first one was rapid striking and the second an Iain Abernethy inspired competitive build-up drill using sprawls and hand striking.

The class finished with some MMA sparring, where those who coached best unsurprisingly did better.

Discussion: The old adage what you put in you get out. If you train at sloppy technique all the time that’s what you end up with when the pressure is on.

Seniors

We began with the standard warm-up:  Fence to straight striking and hooked striking transitional and referencing drills, the cover drills, chokes and transitional kicking. This was done at a fast rate. No pacing allowed!

Two seniors engage in stand-up sparring

The emphasis tonight was to develop drills that better suited the rest of the training. As previously mentioned, this is good time management. So we dumped the focus mitts in favour of the sparring kit. The gloves became targets. If you have read previous entries you will know that this is something I have been wanted to incorporate for a while now. Rounds were done with both coach and student wearing full sparring gear and also, for the benefit of a wider range of skills, with the student going at it barehanded. These rounds then led into sparring to see if these training methods had had any sort of immediate effect. The result was very encouraging. Students are now far more confident and focused. The same process was also repeated with groundwork, training from the knees, backside and back.

Now it was time to take matters back to the self defence line. This stuff is great for in-fight attribute training, but the emphasis is not right. So we did the intensive S1 versus S2 drills. The objective changes everything!

Discussion: Comfort zones. I thank the great self defence pioneer, Geoff Thompson, for first articulating the idea of leaving comfort zones to me. As Geoff says, “There is no growth in comfort. The gold is in the discomfort”. I took this ball and ran with it in as many different directions as possible. I particularly do it with my thinking. Scepticism, the method of critical thinking, is forces you to be honest and never to be complacent. In tonight’s example we sought to improve upon our already engaging and proactive focus mitt drills. Despite seeing the improvements in our MMA training we weren’t satisfied that it had necessarily improved our conditioning for self defence. This was why we got into the S1 versus S2 training, which interestingly enough brought us almost full circle to the drills at the beginning.