Stick Boxing (diary entry)

Headgear and boxing gloves are mandatory in Olympic boxing and amateur boxing. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At my client’s request we looked at a mixture of weapons work and western boxing. Using the CCMA approach, I made sure both the stick-work and the boxing served as attributes for each other. We began with the double rattan sticks, attacking high and low. First this was done as a stick on stick drill and we added on footwork. However, in the interests of target familiarization I donned head-guard and boxing glove for my client to strike at more beneficial targets. We looked at several variations working cross-parries attacking inside and outside the target area. This branched into unarmed self-defence possibilities bringing in combat grappling as well as hand and knee strikes.

We then moved onto boxing, catching, parrying and slipping the jab. This was then followed by the overhand right and brought us back onto the familiar theme of getting good angles on an opponent. Then we moved onto body-shots only light boxing sparring, where the point regarding good positioning and attacking from angles became more evident. We followed the sparring with some specific exercises encouraging my client to step off the direct line and attack from angles. This brought us on footwork and agility/obstacle drills.

Feeding back this information into a live situation, we sparring some more. This time I allowed head shots and other weaknesses were exposed. These were then isolated on the focus mitts, looking at my client’s body movement and strengthening his defence. The CCMA approach pushes the importance of learning form the fight. The typical way to train is to go through technical work and then to finish with sparring, but I feel that in order to get the maximum learning experience from live training is to be able to isolate and develop exercises inspired by the shortcomings in a fighter that sparring exposes.

The session was finished with a series of speed exercises. We began with combination work. Then some fast flash pad drills. This increased to areaction exercise. We ended this section with some high intensity interval punching drills.