Body Shot Bob and Weave (diary entry)

08.08.17   Tonight’s double lesson continued my client’s training in the peek-a-boo fighting style of western boxing for martial arts cross training. We spent more time going deeper into footwork, upper body movement and combining the two. This began with the use of agility markers as the lesson’s warm-up. As I have said umpteen numbers of times, coordination work is great early on in any technical training session. Training puts the body under stress, which reduces our cognitive function. As training progresses in a session it becomes harder to absorb information. This is why all training sessions should be tapered down in terms how much thought is going into each trained action. With your brain in its freshest state early on, it is time to test it in line with the body’s movement. That way you have a better chance of new or improved behaved being better retained. Coordination work not only helps develop better behaviour and movement patterns it gets the heart rate up too, ensuring you efficiently warm the entire body up whilst exercising.   The markers set up for good footwork. We looked at forwards, backwards and lateral movement. I then brought us onto angulation work again. Here I really emphasised a fluid movement to an offline position and then integrated into the rest of footwork. It is important to be able to angle off forwards and backwards, especially when an opponent is moving straight forwards or backwards.   Next I looked at the bobbing motion. It began with a simple explosive quarter-squat movement combined with a double switch stance. This exercise is great for developing fast leg muscle activation whilst training for dropping below the eye-line. As I explained in my client’s previous lesson, dropping out of an opponent’s eye-line is as much about attacking as it is defending. The fighter does not duck, bob and weave, and slip just to avoid an incoming punch. He can use these movements to launch a surprise attack. Dropping low in this particular instance is excellent for teaching the correct application of body-shots. Here the fighter learns to move his body as one unit. Next I incorporated the bobbing and weaving movement.   We then focused entirely upon body shot combinations. Bobbing and weaving allows for fast access to the body, attacking it immediately. This consisted of low versions of the classic punches plus liver and spleen punches. Then we incorporated body-shots into the DFLT process. This time we trained with longer, more technical rounds – 3 x 3 minute rounds of attack only, defence only and attack/defence together. This was followed by 2 x 3 minute rounds of body-shot only sparring.   We next incorporated head-shots, combining both ranges. This followed exactly the same DFLT process. I emphasised more striking off the same side when bobbing and weaving. In both sets of training there was a lengthy pause between the two sparring rounds to discuss strengths and weaknesses to be improved upon in the successive round. The sparring from the first DFLT set served as influenced for the first focus mitt session of the second DFLT set.