03.06.13
General Lesson – Mixed Martial Arts (Stand-up and Ground)
Today’s training consisted of going through the four basic kickboxing combinations called in random order. It is a good concentration exercise and once everyone was comfortable with the sequences I made sure the pad holders kept things moving.
We then did a couple of ground fighting games – Crazy Baby and Touch the Head. The first works the butterfly guard and promote good movement for the top and bottom game. The second is a long range guard game and promotes fast passing and defence. The class finished with a few rounds of MMA sparring.
Private Lesson 1 – Mixed Martial Arts (Range Conditioning)
We didn’t cover any specific techniques this week. Last lesson had a hard focus on prediction under pressure, so we eased off this area and just looked at working attributes through conditioning exercises. Given the uneven number of this private group, I used the opportunity to work certain drills. A coach or student should never feel handicapped or delayed by the class number or circumstances of his training. This really is a case of solution equals opportunity.
A group of three provided me with an opportunity to have one student attack and defend from two different angles whilst moving through ranges. This is typically a self-defence exercise whereby the person in the middle is taught to attack and respond whilst under attack from multiple aggressors. However, it also serves to develop conditioning of the cover. The cover position is a useful tool in mixed martial arts, providing an effective proactive defence. The sudden and regular changing of ranges is also important; as the fighter needs to be able to fight from whatever position he ends up in and learns how to transition quickly through them. Transitioning is a very important aspect in MMA and often neglected. The fighter with a weak transition leaves himself vulnerable to all manner of attacks.
This type of exercise has to be introduced using verbal commands, but students holding the focus mitts should be encouraged to think like coaches so they do not need to be told when to change a range and they should be able to initiate the changes through movement alone. It is far more effective to have a student trained using visual stimuli rather than auditory.
We then moved onto a takedown entry shuttle drill. This involved a student resisting an arm-drag, so that the other student went into a double leg down. This was followed by a triangle choke exercise. The student in the middle triangle choked the other two students and moved his hips from one to the other, promoting explosive attacks from the guard position. This led me onto go through some finer points of setting up the triangle.
The lesson finished with a few rounds of ground grappling or rolling, and then we looked at warming down through shadow boxing. We tend to mould ourselves to fit the equipment we use and this can be a counter-productive problem. The fighter who does not overlap his bag training with other aspects of fighting ends up developing a bag-based form. Likewise shadow boxing just becomes a series of techniques being thrown without functional purpose if visualization is not used. The fighter needs to imagine the type of opponent he is facing and to work through it as it were real sparring. A good way to handle this is to have the coach provide a story – end of the fight and you are behind on points, up the intensity – and to give characters - wild swinging opponent, grappler, striker, long range fighter, short range fighter and so on.
Private Lesson 2 – Self Defence (Increasing Pressure)
We revised all aspects of self-defence taught up to this point and looked towards refining them. The pre-emptive response was good as was the fence, but power still remains the problem. Both students can generate force, but it is when they do that is the problem. The first strike must be hard. It is important that a student is trained to keep striking until his enemy is no longer an immediate threat, but the first strike should not be light. John “Awesome” Anderson made this point to me very clearly during our training session years ago. A half-hearted or dubious initial strike can provide the enemy with an opportunity to strike back harder.
We covered the fence and had an outside confirmation on some anti-grappling techniques. In short, one of the students got the chance to try a finger-lock on her mum. Symmetrical ground fighting proved the area most needing of work. It is hard, especially if there is a distinctive size difference between fighters, to fight from underneath a pin. Biting, pinching and other pain compliant anti-grappling methods can be helpful, but leverage is the bedrock of good ground defence.
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