Fighting through the Postures & Submission Clinic (diary entry)

10.05.12

Odd numbers inspired me to begin our training with two-on-one exercises. I feel that not only is this a great way to develop more self-defence orientated skills - such as fighting multiple attackers - but also develops what I call 360 degree coaching. This means that a students attack and defence coordination can be carefully monitored and they can experience the best type of physical feedback possible next to sparring.

We did this by placing one student between two others with focus mitts. The student strikes the focus mitts held by the coach in front whilst the other coach strikes from behind. The coach behind puts pressure on striking the back of the student's head, prompting the cover defence. The student responds to the striking coach by moving into him and strikign his focus mitts. We had the student move through standing, kneeling, sitting and lying posutres. This brought out the obvious problems brought on by ineffecient moving and stances in these ranges.

We brought evenything back to posture. This is another example of "quarrying", but perhaps an undirected variation. You set up an activity and draw certain things from it that you can develop. In this instance, I was just making use of the odd numbers. However, it immediately highlighted a fault. Quarrying typically highlights a strength - as in when you pressure test someone and find out what weapon or tactic they naturally and most effeceintly use. In this instance, a weakness observation was drawn from the activity.

We began postures with a natural standing position and began working strikes. Most martial arts teach a particular stance first and then teach the techniques. My argument - as backed up by the legendary doorman John "Awesome" Anderson - is that you need to be able to attack with force from every conceivable and practical position. So we began with a standard posture. Then we went into a sligthly staggered one, which lead into the more fight style positions of muay Thai, western boxing and so on. These stances are geared more for mobility. Just as targets dictate weapons, so circumstances dictate postures. As we moved into lower/deeper stances we looked at grappling and anti-grappling tactics. After shadow boxing through these standing postures, the students did a type of 30% sparring to test balance and reactions.

Next we moved to the kneeling posture, where we utilized the combat base stance found in submission grappling - working strikes and grappling. Then we went to the seated position and butterfly guard. Finally the back and we went to close and long range guard. All of these were sparred at 30% - 60% pressure (compliant to light sparring). The sesssion as finished with MMA sparring and a warmd-down.

After the lesson we had an hour's workshop on basic submissions. I taught the arm-bar/triangle choke/oma plata (shoulder lock) contingency set-up from the guard. Essentially this is based around setting someone up for an arm-bar. Depending on how the opponent responds you flow into either a triangle choke hold or the oma plata shoulder lock. We then looked at setting the Americana arm-lock up from the side control position.

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