02.07.12
Juniors
Whenever one teaches a method for cross-training for martial arts, the words Bruce Lee or Jeet Kune Do will inevitably crop up. Despite considering “Functional Jeet Kune Do” founder Mo Teague to be my coach, I have a very limited amount of experience actually training in Jeet Kune Do. I have attended seminars here and there; I own Lee’s posthumously published training notes and have an idea of the whole scene, but I would never consider myself to be a JKD practitioner. However, a recent seminar with the great combatives instructor, Hoch Hocheim inspired me to look at angles of attack with a knife. Mainly due to Jeet Kune Do Concepts founder and Bruce Lee approved instructor, Dan Innosanto’s influence Southeast Asian knife and stick fighting methods are a mainstay of contemporary JKD. I can see the appeal, but my concern has often been that the love of the art often muddies the purpose of the training.
My thorough bastardization of Hoch’s brilliantly simplistic methods helped me develop better “elasticity” in student defensive responses. I used three levels of attack – high, mid and low – and a set of curved (slashing) slashing attacks and a set of straight (stabbing attacks). The students first trained evasion tactics, generally based on instinctive and common sense responses. This also reminded me a lot of what Floyd Brown taught during his brief demonstration when we both took our KEWAP (Knife and Edged Weapon Awareness Programme) Senior Instructor qualifications. Following Hoch’s approach, we then introduced blocks and parries. We also looked at these on the ground, which highlighted the benefits of the various ground movement exercises we routinely train as part of our warm-up and warm-down. Finally all of this was applied to kickboxing. Of course, this weapon to unarmed teaching method is a distinctive trait of arts like kali, escrima and arnis, but for me it helped students to open their eyes to other possibilities. As I said earlier, the purpose of the knife training was purely to derive attributes. It freshened up the rather limited tactics we were using in our kickboxing/stand-up game.
The lesson finished with a few rounds of MMA sparring and then a warm-down.
Seniors
Our senior class overlapped our junior one with the warm-down. The two groups then split, with seniors moving into more cardiovascular based exercises and the juniors into post-workout stretching.
The senior class focused on grappling. We looked at some basic principles. This began with establishing and breaking grips. Again, much like the junior class, this was done in a very instinctive way. We warmed up with some grip-fighting. This followed by a game where both students tried to get the back position. Next we did some over-hook/under-hook pummelling to establish good mid-section control. This was then followed by a few exercises to establish getting the correct grip for an arm-drag, both from standing up and from the butterfly guard. We followed this with muscle memory exercises to drill taking the back position.
The class finished with some guard passing from butterfly guard followed by stretching.
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