An Evolutionary Training Interlude (diary entry)

My client has experienced a minor back injury in his workplace. He has received treatment and is fit and able, but decided to take a break from the grappling course for this lesson. Instead we revised pre-emptive striking from his self-protection course and looked at how it related to certain aspects of cross training. I do use lesson plans and have a structured approach to my coaching to ensure a client achieves their requested objective. However, I have also favoured a lot of improvisational teaching and training methods. In fact, it was a very traditional martial arts teacher, Chris Rowen, who once said that he liked to “paint a lesson”. Today was an example of one of my evolutionary sessions. We began with the pre-emptive striking. Then we looked at restrictive training, fighting from the compromised position of being sat down. Here we first covered beginning in a restrictive position and transitioning to standing and then we isolated striking from sitting. Techniques covered included straight, hook and backhand strikes using palms, fists and elbows. Keeping the theme of fighting from a compromised situation, we looked at fighting around obstructions and clearing them. Clearing was covered first in a general self-defence sense. We focused on fighting around obstructions first within an in-fight situation. Many martial arts cover the fight stage in quite some depth, often specializing in a certain area, which has come to define their system, school or style. This is where I have found a lot of traditional or classical arts might get lost with the practical application. Long since their founders used this actions in live combat, many traditionalists or classicists, as pragmatic traditionalists are want to call them, become fixated on techniques that in reality are a few seconds of chaotic melee. This where arms clash and combatants struggle to gain an advantage, as the fight deteriorates into a scruffy grappling contest. This is sometimes referred to as trapping range, where limbs are parried, checked and pinned whilst the free hand and feet deliver strikes. Some martial arts begin exploring various joint locks or entries to throws. We were concerned with keeping it in real time and explored delivering looping strikes – overhands, uppercuts, forehands, backhands and hooks – as priority before conceding to trap. I coached this as a timing exercise, delivering constant jabs, then constant crosses and finally constant jab/crossing whilst the fighter timed throwing the looping shots from angles and at close range. We returned to self-defence and looked at clearing defences both standing and on the ground. This moved us onto the simple forehand and backhand angles of attack found in Southeast Asian martial arts, which was then briefly covered by the use of incidental weaponry. We finished with applications in grappling using neck-tie grips by the client on me. Hopefully my client will feel confident to return to our main stand-up grappling course next lesson, but I also hope this experience has provided him with more insights into martial arts cross-training methods and certain universal principles of combative effeciency.