Clinch and more speed (diary entry)

General Lesson

Today’s warm-up began with a student led series of functional fitness exercises, including some creative additions. I liked them a lot! Then I had everyone do some fast-twitch muccle fibre training; working step-ups on a bench with box jumps, side steps, side-to-side jumps and side plank waking. All exercises were intended to increase faster and more explosive mobility from different ranges.

We focused entirely on the clinch range in today’s lesson. This began with some grappling exercises where one student tries to wrestle a bad off another. We did this from a standin postion and in guard. one arm grapple coaching on the focus mitts. The coach holds a focus mitt and clinches the student using his free hand. This teaches the student to strike from clinch positions. We then took this to a more sparring-based situation. Students grappled each other at less than 50% resistance. First this was done with only hand strikes being permitted and then with knees and kicks. Finrally full clinch sparring was brought into play.

The class finished with improvised takedowns. One student stood in the centre of the class whilst other individual students attacked withn a grappling context. This was done at around 50%, the objective was for the student in the centre to be successfully takedown his attacker using an appropriate technique. This way of training techniques keeps matters moving rather just only setting people up in motionless positions.

Private Lesson

We began with some clinch warm-up exercises, including bulling, pummelling and various arm-drag drills, which took us onto butterfly guard. This served as a brief introduction to the butterfly guard. Here we touched upon a regular theme of late and the importance of core muscular control. The butterfly guard does not consist of someone hooking their feet into someone else’s kneeling legs and that someone lying on their back. Like all guards or fighting positions it requires the fighter to be engaged. You should really be sat up with the butterfly guard, which requires good core strength and control.

At the student’s request, we moved onto speed training. I had previously covered this as part of my virtual coaching. My speed training is roughly divided up into four areas: technique, muscular development, timing and reactions. We began with some sparring, keeping it to three one minute rounds to work intensity. However, sparring was to be very light in order to focus on reactions and timing. From there we did some agility exercises, using markers and some of the bench exercises used earlier in the general lesson. This was followed by some flash pad reaction work. The lesson finished with some sport specific kettlebell exercises.