The Old One-Two Principle (diary entry)

The second of tonight’s private lessons was a technical session in stand-up fighting (Boxing/Kickboxing/Muay Thai) for two clients. We began with some line work, warming up by using the jab to pull the body forward. This was followed by jab/crossing forwards and backwards, and then dropping levels/switching stances. All of these exercises are great for encouraging more mobility – both travelling and on the spot. When you start looking at principles and tactics, as opposed to superficial techniques, the jab provides an insight into how attacks, defences and counter attacks are set up. This applies to every aspect of combat – sport, self-defence and hand-to-hand warfare. Writing under a pseudonym, the martial artist, journalist and martial arts historian, Robert Smith postulated that modern Western Boxing has its origins in German Fencing. However, it is easy to see that the basic framework of setting up the rear hand strike with a leading hand technique might be transferred to any sword and shield style of fighting. For that matter, I can see this asymmetrical form of armed combat with two weapons in Zulu Stick Fighting, Renaissance Fencing and other areas of medieval hand-to-hand combat. Anyway, the jab in its many forms is clearly a development of the tactic to use a weapon to fend off an opponent’s first blows in order to deliver the power strike from the rear hand. The fending off aspect evolved into referencing and controlling an opponent – as you often see in self-defence fighting – to gauging and creating distance. With this premise in mind, we started to bring in active leg techniques to work in coordination with the punches. This included shin-block/cross. I have never looked at the shin-block as an actual block in the negative sense of the word, but a strike against an incoming kick. Here the “block” serves in place of the jab. The whole one-two nature of this combination also provides us with a similar movement as that found in the Superman punch. This transferrable training method was covered in a previous diary entry. We then moved onto using the front kick (or teep in Muay Thai) as a jabbing push kick to unbalance an opponent for the rear leg low round kick. Again this followed the one-two premise, although its immediate equivalent with the hands would be jab/rear hand hook. We discussed how much the Thai low round kick changed the game for a lot of full contact fighters. It certainly upset the American/Japanese Kickboxing world. Here is an excellent video breakdown of an historical moment that drastically changed the way Kickboxers viewed Muay Thai and leg kicks in particular:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lpl_7w8-jTE

Next we looked at adding on round kicks to simple Boxing combinations. The function of these combinations was to encourage blending of kicks with punches. We went through four short combinations.