Kingham Hill Ground Defence Continues (diary entry)

20.03.19   My Kingham Hill class revised all the self-defence work we have covered in previous lessons – beginning with the fence, moving onto incidental combinations, transitioning through strikes and postures, the cover (regaining the initiative), anti-grappling and combat grappling before we continued last week’s work on defending from the ground.   The warm-up consisted of the usual tactical escape movements, covering, moving towards genuine exits, footwork, sprawling, punching and knee strikes. This was then followed by a series of ground movement exercises, including various crawls for fighting from a top ground position to snaking/shrimping from an underneath position. We then moved onto the focus mitts and went through the aforesaid revision, looking to correct any basic mistakes.   During the new material we specifically looked at fighting from under the mounted position (aka the schoolyard pin). Here we worked a lot on bridging and snaking underneath. The first escape involved turning the attacker on top and quickly moving to standing position. The second escape involved moving to a half-guard or guard position in order to follow the same turn and stand disengagement process. We also looked at how to cover from attacks coming down and also how to wrap an attacker’s supporting arm.