Teaching Consultation (diary entry)

08.05.2024 My client from Drum Martial Arts and Fitness continued his six-session teaching consultation. We discussed children's hard skills with an emphasis on 5-9 year-olds. Interestingly the early discussions revolved around a simple baton system being taught to law enforcement that my client studies. This brought us onto ideas regarding range and the "child's range". During the early days of Clubb Chimera Martial Arts we tested the best methods for our child students to use against a adult playing role of a predator. The range issue came up time and again, and it dawned on me that certain universal concepts needed adaptation. Head hunting became strike a target at your head height which then became strike whatever target comes into range. This latter point finds alignment with several Southeast Asian martial arts such as Silat or Eskrima. The WW2 marine and hand-to-hand combat teacher John Jasper "Jack" Styers Jnr. wrote a training manual in 1952 called "Cold Steel" that also emphasised this principle. The book is one of the rare self-defence works outside of Jean-Joseph Renaud's “La Défense dans la Rue” from 1912 before Geoff Thompson's "Three Second Fighter" and Peter Consterdine's "Streetwise", both in 1997, that teaches pre-emptive striking as a tactic. An interesting - and perhaps soldierly - aspect of Styers approach is that pre-emption is dealt with matter-of-factually. There is no fan fair, no discussion on the legalities of pre-emption or even why it is better than reaction. Styers simply states and teaches it as a logical conclusion. This is all stems from the book's primary focus on edged weapon fighting tactics. Although the topic wasn't touched upon in the lesson it is probably worth mentioning that weapon awareness and defence are introduced in the Rabbit level of the Animal Instincts Children's Self-Protection Programme. Children are aware of weapons from a relatively young age. Not only is it in their media it's in their genetic make-up. Humans rose to the top of the food chain in large part due to their abilities as tool-using animals. Combine that with their aggressive impulses and we have weapon use, as well as the birth of military martial arts. Other topics included:

• Ecological dynamics and the gamification of self-protection and martial arts. We talked about how I fell into this idea simply by understanding that I needed to run games in my lessons and melded that with my desire to keep training relevant. Important points my client recorded included using external objectives to define games, being constraints-led, the layering of said games and the important utilisation of feedback.

• Training versus performance: This was something of a tangent into functional training and the dangers of letting any exercise escape its parameters or disappear down an alley of its own making. Understanding the limitations of any exercise is paramount to getting good results.

• How light sparring and light pressure-testing allows for more growth.

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