All Day Taster Sessions at Woodlands 2012 (diary entry)

02.02.2012

Woodlands School and Sports Academy invited me back to teach five sessions to their pupils. This was intended to promote my weekly classes at Eastern Green School. Students were aged 11-13 and were, on the whole, pretty enthusiastic and well behaved. It helps to have a teacher read the riot act out at the beginning and then to go in with vigour. Each session differed slightly, but these were key points I made:

• The session would focus mainly on MMA, but we would cover a little bit of self-defence at the end with a pressure test. My weekly lessons generally focus on MMA for conditioning and attribute training with monthly workshops and seminars dealing with self-protection.

• The best way to receive information is to do so with a blank slate. Comparing, mixing and experimenting can be done afterwards once the information is absorbed. In this day and age, it is likely that at least a few students will have been exposed to other martial arts, and the is an understandable urge for them is resort back to this training to impress their peers or me. I cited the example of the world class martial arts coach, Rick Young, who charges £100 an hour for a private lesson. People travel from all over the world to attend these sessions and to absorb the huge amount of knowledge and experience he has acquired. However, all-too-often students waste around half an hour of this session telling Rick about what they can do and have done.

• When it comes to self-protection only idiots engage in real fights through choice. If you want to fight, join a combat sport and do it in the ring, the cage or on the mats. Good self-defence hard skills are last resort tactics used to preserve your personal safety or the safety of those you wish to protect. I cited the example of world champion boxer, Ricky Hatten who gave up his valuable watch to a knife-wielding mugger without hesitation. It’s never worth it!

Training consisted of shadow boxing, grappling games, basic Thai boxing combinations on the focus mitts, some groundwork, takedown drills and takedown defences. The pressure test was a multiple attack strategy one versus strategy two exercise, which was largely enjoyed.