Clubb Chimera Martial Arts : CCMA

Juniors

We had an overall review of training methods today, beginning with self defence hard skills and then merging into mixed martial arts, continuing some of the clinch/stand-up grappling training.

After some escape drills and one new exercise game suggested by a student, we moved onto the standard hand-strike transitional drills. The students worked straight and hooked strikes from the fence, their knees, seated position and the guard (on their backs). Then they moved onto the proactive pad drills for two minute rounds working all ranges. A competitive element to encourage better coaching awareness was introduced: the person holding the pads tried to tally up as many times as possible he caught out his partner and when the roles were reversed the new pad holder tried to beat the score.

Stand-up grappling focused more on unbalancing and standing sweeping techniques. Rather than drill techniques that teach these principles I thought it would be better and more in line with our method of teaching to use games that promote investigation. This began with a game taken from Judo whereby both students try to step on each other feet without getting their own touched. To emphasis the stand-up grappling they had to do this from neutral grappling positions: wrist control, plumb and collar and elbow tie-up. These positions were called out randomly throughout the two minute rounds. The next stage was to do isolated takedown sparring, focusing on sweeps or tripping each other up. After a couple of rounds of this they progressed to full stand-up grappling sparring, which is very similar to freestyle wrestling.

Next the class went to the ground to drill some arm-bars from the guard in a fluid motion. Then the lesson was finished with some MMA sparring with a fast turnaround of partners.

Discussion: Revision of the tenets – Respect, Awareness, Courage, Discipline and Open Mind.

Seniors

Today’s lesson was a mixture of mixed martial arts athleticism and counter methods from last week’s techniques. We began with a fairly energetic warm-up of specific exercises. Included were solo and partner versions of double leg takedowns and cover work, both which counteract some of the stuff we did last week. There was also some brief revision of our previous work and more suggestions for further training both with and without training partners.

The class then went almost straight into MMA sparring. It is the custom of most martial arts clubs to reserve activities like free sparring to the end of a class. I guess this comes from the way most sports training sessions go: warm-up, work on some technical stuff and then try it out in the game. It’s not a bad procedure and we followed this procedure last week. However, I don’t see a set in stone reason for following this routine slavishly. At CCMA we aim to delve into chaos in order to learn from the fight. This is what I call “quarrying” is an analogy for drawing out raw material from pressure tests. The idea is that you are, to paraphrase the great martial artist, Steve Morris, “learning from the fight”. This can also come from within the sporting environment of MMA, muay Thai, wrestling or whatever. Mo Teague might refer to it as reverse engineering. You start with the actual activity and then you either cultivate your strengths – this is exactly what we do with self-defence hard skills – or work on areas you feel need serious attention.

I say we almost went straight into free sparring because we worked on our proactive target/movement training first. This consisted of one round a piece coaching techniques with boxing gloves and one round a piece with the person being coached going at it barehanded. This was then followed immediately by frees sparring. The reason for this was to see how well the proactive coaching dovetailed into the sparring.

After a few partner changes we looked at two cover drills. We focused on the high line striking attack and the low line grappling attack i.e. double leg takedown. The high line drill consists of the coach wearing a head guard and boxing gloves and the student is either barehanded or wears MMA gloves. At increasing levels of intensity the coach feeds the student a volley of shots. The student covers, moves in and attacks the head. The head guard is removed for the low line drill and it is up to the coach to make sure the student cannot access his high line. The student is encouraged to attack what is available and to check with his cover for shots coming under his cover i.e. knee strikes.

As a warm down exercise we did a couple of rounds of continuous transitioning from pins and then a couple of rounds of continuous defence from under the pins, often regaining the guard position.