Resistance is far from futile (diary entry)

General Lesson

We from last week’s clinch range tricks and traps. After a student-led warm-up, we engaged in some neck wrestling and then some pummelling. This moved us onto footwork and the v-step. This latter movement echoed the osato-gari principle last week, where the student moves his opponent one way to get the right amount of resistnace to end him in the opposite direction. We mixed in the knee strike from this position. From here I incorporated a rhythmic knee striking drill. We continued from here with a snatch-down wrist grab setting up for head-shot with the same hand. The student pulls opponent’s hand down with a single wrist control and neck-tie. The opponent responds by pulling his hand back. This motion sends the student’s gripping hand upwards as a punch.

Changing range we switched to the ground and scarf-hold. Here we looked at a series of attacks – elbow crush with the legs, hammer-fists to the face and reverse triangle choke – all setting up an elbow crush with the arms and shoulder. The lesson was finished with a couple of rounds of MMA sparring.

I was delighted to receive requests from students for next week’s class. This demonstrates an awareness of a need to improve. Breakfalls, sit-throughs and a revision over the elbow crush submission will join more work on bringing MMA back to the self-defence line on my “to do” list.

Private Lesson

We warmed up with exercises to encourage better movement from stand-up, clinch an ground ranges. This began with a competitive mirror footwork drill and then followed on with the “Crazy Baby” butterfly guard exercise. This latter range moved us onto drilling the butterfly guard. We looked at pulling and using leverage with the guard. Then we brought in the resistance band, in the form of a bicycle inner-tube, to train both the pulling and lifting actions. This was then confirmed in the performance of a sweep.

Keeping with the butterfly guard, we looked at using it to break an opponet’s balance by attacking the hip and knee-base. This was followed an execution of an oma plata or a Kimura lock.

We then moved back onto stand-up for right cross and round kick conditioning. Both were done by using the inner-tube. Resistance bands are one of the best pieces of sport specific training equipment. You can train most actions by applying them and they work the correct plane of motion. This means they work the correct muscle groups used in each technique and they work them in the right movement. Furthermore, they overload the technique and trick the brain into activating more muscle fibres. This makes the technique more powerful when the resistance is taken away.