The Oldest Trick in the Book (diary entry)

18.06.12

Positioning, movement and timing have all been themes of recent lessons. Putting it to the vote, the group agreed timing needed more attention than everything else. It was a wise choice; positioning and movement should follow timing. Timing is the essence of the fight; it can decide everything. The same could be said about tenacity, but the latter easier to train. Timing requires mental alertness and diligence. You don’t get better at timing by sweating. You get better at timing by learning how to anticipate and set-up your opponent or enemy.

We began with the jab drill. This exercise, which we covered last week, teaches students to look for the jabbing motion and respond by avoiding it and countering. It encourages what, in boxing, is known as slipping. We then moved onto feigning. Knowing how to “dummy” a move is a crucial part of in-fight psychology. However, this is also an area that is very specific to your chosen objective. You can only feign based on the context of your fight. For example, there is little point feigning a move taught to kickboxers to someone in a real fight.  Feigning in self-defence usually runs along verbal and behavioural manipulation i.e. “What time is it?” being uttered immediately before you hit someone.

We used the jab feign first. Feigning here is designed to prompt your opponent to defend high. You then respond with a low round kick. This was then followed with a series of kick feigns. We feigned a kick to the leading leg, prompting a shin block, exposing the opponent’s rear leg to attack. We then looked at dummying low to hit high – once memorably referenced in “Ultimate Fighter” by a fighter who used this to successfully score a knockout as “The Oldest Trick in the Book”. Other variations included dummying low, striking to the mid-section and dummying one side to switch-kick to the other.

Looking at the biomechanics of all of these motions and even going back to the jab/low kick you will find their success is mainly based on an explosive hip action. It is vital for our functional fitness to reflect this and develop the fast twitch muscles located in the hip flexors and supporting muscle groups. Between these various combinations the class did a series of exercises designed to get a fast a hip motion. We looked at developing explosiveness in the hip flexors, the obliques, calves, hamstrings and quadraceps.

Taking the concept to the ground we looked at feinging from the guard and the Kimura sweep in particular. This technique involves one person sitting up from the guard and twisting to attack his opponent's arm. The actual Kimura is a medial hold made famous by Masahiko Kimura who famously used it to defeat co-Brazilian/Gracie jiu jitsu founder, Helio Gracie. The motion used from the guard is also a basic sweep. Here we introduced a feign. The opponnent sits up in your guard. You sit up to attack the arm, the opponent pulls back. You move back and then attack again.

The class finished with some MMA sparring.

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