Progressing Looping Exercises (diary entry)

24.10.13

General Lesson

We looked deeper into the progressive looping exercises. I am still struggling to find a title for this somewhat unique mixture of methods that I use for these exercises that enjoy a feedback loop between sparring, footwork drills and pad-work.  Using hand strikes as our theme, we isolated attack and defence, integrated them, and then used examples to promote better upper-body movement as well as working them from grappling positions.

We began with a fence self-defence exercise as a means to look at minimizing delay in counter-offensive responses. Pre-emption strikes need to be triggered at the right time from both a tactical and legal point of view. There is a degree of timing involved and using the fence as an action trigger allows you to eliminate the decision part of the O.O.D.A. loop. Taking this onto some more generic flash pad work the fighter was trained to hit the target when it appeared and continue until it was shielded. We then isolated defence, which brought out the importance of learning more upper body movement as well as cutting down the space of the attacker. Finally they were combined into the proactive focus mitt drill.

We then trained slipping and rolling punches to focus on the upper body movement. Next we pitted strikers against grapplers for a few rounds of asymmetrical sparring to help develop better angling, which came out of the previous section. The lesson concluded with some MMA sparring then some muscle activation exercises for the children to take back and train over the half-term break and finally a warm-down of static stretches.

Private Lesson

As with the general lesson, I decided to look more at better development of upper body movement. We covered slipping and rolling punches, and then using punches to set-up kicks. We trained both opposite side and same side punch/kick combinations. This moved onto setting up double-leg takedowns. We concentrated on driving the knee through and trained a much lower style entry, common in BJJ, but less so in MMA. The takedown is typically taught using a motion that clears the opponent’s leg out of the way and the attacker ends up in side control. MMA often adopts a type of spearing takedown akin to what is found in American football, where the attacker generally ends up in the defender’s guard. Because of the striking involved in MMA being an opponent’s guard is less of a concern than it would be in a submission-only based bout. We then trained attack and defence from a guard up against the cage with the attacker standing.  

At my client’s request had a look at the finer points of some basic submissions. This began with the Americana from side control. Here we looked at establishing the side control and placing the weight to upper end of the opponent’s body. Then we looked at isolating the arm and keeping it as far away from the body as possible. We then covered arm-bar from guard. I always found this to be the most problematic of the three basic submissions from guard that use the legs. Students often make the mistake of not engaging their hips enough.

Please see below a brief video looking at common errors when executing the arm-bar from guard: