Key-Locks & Ground Striking (diary entry)

11.10.2024 Hours four and five of my Submission Grappling/Ground-Fighting course for Zanshin Karate via my online service. Tonight we looked layering in strikes from scarf-hold. However, it also prompted a lot of tangents to lay the foundations for good striking. In order to land strikes, the person holding the pin needs to have good control over the defender. We began with following warm-up games:

1. Retain scarf-hold without hands versus escape without hands

2. Ditto but with defender's arms on head and attacker's objective is to remove said arms from head

This moved us onto key-locks (Americana and Kimura), which I taught from side-control. We used the following muscle memory excersises:

1. 10 x reps of hold

2. 10 x reps of hold with eyes closed

Followed by the following games:

1. Capture moving arm in hold

2. Capture the movie arm in hold with defender actively tucking the arm away

3. Capture moving arm in hold with defender permitted to move the rest of their body (bridge and snake)

4. Capture moving arm in hold with defender looking to escape

The above muscle memory and games were used on both key-locks. Next we moved onto using the Kimura-lock or (wrong-side Kimura-lock) to achieve the arm-bar. This can also be executed using a series of games breaking down each stage of the technique. So, you might have the defender fighting against the initial part of the hold only to move onto starting from the hold and the battle becomes focused on breaking the defender's grip. We combined all three of these holds into a series of counter-moves performed under pressure. The defender's goal was focused on escaping from a position where his arm was isolated. However, the attacker had a range of options from Americana to Kimura to arm-bar set-up via wrong-side Kimura to snake-choke or arm-triangle. All of this was then taken back to the scarf-hold. Finally, the strikes were introduced. We layered them onto the scarf-hold position with the attacker winning if he landed five uninterrupted controlled strikes to the head or achieved a submission position. https://clubbchimera.com/services/