Chaos! Trashing the Class in Telford (diary entry)
Image by shakirfm via Flickr
30.09.11: Today was the the penultimate lesson of my children's self-defence course for Telford. The focus of this session was to up the pressure and to see students responded to a less than ideal training environment. Usually for various reasons a training area is kept clear, clean and open. However, this is obviously not the case for a likely self-defence situation. One key thing students need to understand is that fights travel and they will very quickly find their body colliding, tripping over and falling into objects. One can see how this happens within the relatively uncluttered and sterile environment of sparring. I cannot recall a time when I have rolled with another grappler for a decent period of time before we are having to stop and re-set our selves away from a wall or pillar or back onto the mats. Is it any wonder that most MMA coaches dedicate regular sections of their lessons to fighting off the cage in the various positions. This is why a key area we flag up in Mo Teague's "Hard Target System" is awareness of hazards. CCTV footage of street fights and assaults shows that the vast majority of incidents, if they are not over in the first few seconds, end having some object involved.
So, with this mind we scatted the training area with bags and strike pads. You obviously have to make a compromise over safety. Everyone is now more aware that they could sprain something, but there were no hard objects amid the debris for health and safety reasons. The session consisted of going through various drills already covered in the previous sessions but now with the added hinderance of a cluttered landscape. Even the warm-up was affected with students scrambling from different positions - bear crawls, crab crawls, snaking and shadow boxing - whilst being told they couldn't touch the objects. It got them to think creatively and to adapt accordingly. Next we looked at a base CCMA exercise - Strategy One versus Strategy Two: Two groups had to face-off larger human predators who stalked them, engaged them and tried to hold onto them for three seconds. We reviewed the fence/pre-emptive striking and then other static striking drills from different postures. This was then changed to multiple aggressor pad-work on the move and again through different postures.
We then moved onto using incidental objects to your advantage. This came out in a straight forward self-defence scenario-based pressure-test. Individual students were approached by three attackers and had to respond accordingly to get past them and tag me in the safety zone. Their attackers were padded out to take strikes and the "victim" had the option to pick up and use any debris he/she could get their hands on.
The session finished with a re-cap on awareness and attitude, twin concepts at the heart of the personal security "soft skills" side of self-protection.
