Kimura, Proactive Pad-Work & Escaping Head-Locks (diary entry)

14.10.13

General Lesson

We continued our work on the use of the Kimura or keylock in MMA and submission fighting. The lesson began with a warm-up to help create muscle memory for the application of the lock. This is a popular move in both sports and has a rich variety of applications. We narrowed these down today down to its use from closed guard. Here we covered the submission and the sweep and the reasons for applying either. We then did some specific guard-passing sparring beginning with the wrist held prior to attacking with the lock. Then the session was finished MMA sparring and static stretching.

Private Lesson 1

We began with a prelude to what we will be covering in the workshop this Saturday. We focused on proactive pad-work. This process is usually broken up into freestyle flash pad drills, defence-only pad-work and then combining them before doing some mirror footwork, adding in transitioning through postures and then feeding it all into MMA sparring. The loop is then immediately followed back onto an improved proactive pad-work exercise. We began the drill at its most developed. Here the coach is padded out and uses boxing gloves as targets. The student punches, kicks, slips, rolls, blocks and is fed freestyle combinations from various different ranges.

We then looked at the jab and the cross in isolation using the 360 degree coaching approach. Here a student uses a single punch to a focus mitt held by one coach. Both coaches monitor defence as the strikes are executed.

At the clients’ request, we then covered kicking technique. First, we covered clinching after having a kick caught. We also covered intercepting a low round kick with a low front “teep” kick and I introduced some basic feigning strategies using kicks.

Private Lesson 2

We began with some quick-fire rounds on basic self-defence striking. These drills were designed to speed coordination and responses, using the appropriate tools. We focused on speed over power in this instance. We then looked at combat grappling focusing on releases from side head-locks (aka chanceries) and counter attacks. The session was finished with some revision on kickboxing combinations.

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