Grappling & Anti Grappling Continues at Kingham Hill School (diary entry)

27.11.19   Wednesday’s lunchtime lesson continued my self-protection course at Kingham Hill School. Today we continued our work on combat grappling and anti-grappling. This included working from the clinch and the ground. We warmed up with various clinching drills taught in the previous lesson. This included neckties, under-hooking and wrist-grips. Then I had one student resist whilst the other tried to pull them off balance with a grip. This was an exercise to get the foundations right when being grappled. Next we trained the hunting drill on the focus mitts to reinforce the importance of striking whilst being gripped. This was then combined with the gripping exercise. Next we moved onto sprawling in response to having either legs gripped or an attempted tackle. This is an excellent technique from wrestling that builds on dropping weight and maintaining balance from the previous exercises. We then took the grappling scenario to the wall at very close range. Here eye gouges, head-butts and elbow strikes were used in order for the defender to access striking range and escape. The lesson finished with defending off the back and using the hip escape from guard to get to a standing position.