Clubb Chimera Martial Arts : CCMA

Juniors

After a brief warm-up the juniors engaged in a fun reaction game. Two teams faced off against each other and tried to avoid being hit by an inflatable swiss ball. The game got harder as the students changed from running to crawling and crab walking, all good skills for ground movement.

Hand Strikes

The focus of today’s lesson was developing hand striking. The students trained jabbing with circular footwork, blitzing with striding footwork and 45 degree offline striking.This was done static, on the move and as part of a timing drill. In the timing drill one student constantly used one of these three striking tactics whilst the other covered and timed their counter strike. I got this from the TVP boxing programme I practiced years ago.

Fighting someone on their strongest terms is not always the best strategy. Often zigging when another is zagging helps you gain the advantage. This came out in the specific timing training, particulary with the blitzing. When an attacker is blitzing they are fighting you head on. They already have the initiative; their plan is to run right over you. Therefore it is not often in your best interests to meet this head on, but to use circular or angled footwork to offset them and find the opening.

Computer Training

Today’s school subject was computer training. Unless we are discussing computers used in long distance warfare, such as pinpointing targets and guiding soldiers, there is no direct martial application. Certainly the computer skills your average school student will be learning won’t be directly applicable to martial arts. However, computers, the internet and their various applications are being used more and more to convey information on martial arts training.The science behind computer technology, of course, can be applied to martial arts knowledge.

Seniors

The seniors continued working on the cover, an area that I think is a key component in both self defence and MMA. I spent the whole lesson using a series of exercises designed to dissect the cover and make its application robust. Please see last week’s entry for details on the rules that apply to using the cover.  

The Fence-to-Cover Behaviour Drill.

To begin with we went back to self defence hard skills. The fence is the bridging tactic between soft and hard skills. It is used to negotiate a threat before it occurs. If physical force is deemed necessary the fence enables you to judge this and pre-empt your would-be attacker. The cover comes in if your pre-emptive strike hasn’t been 100 per cent effective. A drill I have developed in CCMA addresses the psychologically of delivering a pre-emptive strike and also the place for the cover. It begins with one student’s back against the wall, surrounded by other students wearing boxing gloves and full face head guards. They are just out of range to be a physical threat, but their presence is enough to heighten the one student’s senses to pending violence. Another student then steps in front of our one student with a focus mitt. He will prompt the pre-emptive strike by stepping into the one student’s fence. Once the fence is touched the one student will strike his target, the focus mitt and make his escape. However, once he makes his pre-emptive strike the other students will wade in. This prompts the cover and attack tactic used to make a safe escape.

At this stage I would like to point out that I have moved further and further away from the scenario-based training camp of thought. One cannot train and train regularly for every type of scenario. There are far too many variables even if we could set up every imaginable situation. It is far better to look at general behaviours and drill them. The fence-to-cover drill isn’t specifically to train someone to pre-emptively strike a would-be attacker and then defend agains the attacker’s mates. It is about getting used the adrenal build-up attached to the consequences of pre-emptively striking someone. The fight isn’t over until it is really over, so putting all your faith in a well aimed hard strike or strikes is taking a big gamble. So, in short, we train behaviour drills not scenario drills.

Next we continued the drill used last week, where one student starts striking and the other covers, closes and consolidates a position either through striking or clinching. This is a more specific and less demanding version of S1 versus S2 pressure tests. Due to odd numbers the students got the opportunity to train this both one-on-one and also against multiple strikers.

Grip Fighting: A Look at the Building Blocks of the Cover

Next we took this down a tone and looked at some basic structural points that make up the cover. The cover shares muay Thai and wrestling’s rounded shoulders, tucked chin, tight elbows (pulled in to protect the ribs) and general crouched position. I demonstrated this by having the students engage in some grip fighting, where they focused on defending their neck. This was then carried over into some MMA guard passing groundwork, where both the person using the guard and the one intending pass utilized the cover. Finally the session was completed with some two-on-one coaching, this time using the cover. One student stands in front with focus mitts, the one training stands in the middle and another behind him to help expose any flaws in his technique not spotted by the focus mitt coach. We did this with the cover and also made the drill a little more difficult. This time the focus mitt coach kept the student on one particular strike, but tested the integrity of the cover and his ability to adapt by suddenly changing the target for a kick or another type of hand strike.

Solo Training: Establishing Purpose

My discussion at the end was again on solo training. My concern is that getting people to train hard is one thing, but getting them to train intelligently is clearly another. The purpose of martial arts training is to improve your martial arts. Fitness, for example, is just a nice biproduct. Solo training is all too often just done to work up a sweat or to get a muscular pump. It should serve a far more specific and functional purpose. The tennis player is not satisfied with such things when he trains alone; he wants to have erased a fault in his gameplay or improved a trait. We should follow suit. Rather than trying to lose weight, gain strength, improve flexibility or lower our heartrate our priority should be on elminating specific bad habits and finding any others previously overlooked.