04.04.13
General Lesson
Today’s lesson centred upon the fundamental differences between self-defence and combat sport as well as the overlapping similarities.
Our general warm-up progressed into some fence behavioural exercises. Here students aim pre-emptive strikes to actual human targets each time their personal space is breached. This is a simple muscle memory exercise designed to promote a fast response when the interview stage of a conflict situation suddenly changes to a violent assault. We often drill the use of the fence in role-play scenarios to better acclimatize a student to the pressures brought on by aggressive or deceptive verbal tactics used by a potential attacker. However, the underlying importance in this situation is that a student has minimal delay when it comes to striking. There is no time to make a decision, once the barrier or fence is breached the student has to strike and continue to strike until he can escape.
We overlapped this exercise onto focus pad work. Here the student can hit the target with full force. I addressed issues related to how training behaviours are affected by the equipment being used. One of these behaviour include the manner a student strikes focus mitts, particularly when they use palms rather than gloved fists. Here students can start slapping the pad rather than training most efficient striking techniques. Shadow boxing is also a concern, with students often just throwing techniques without visualizing their targets. Here a good coach needs to make those who train with him mindful of what they are doing.
We then changed to the basic jab/cross combination, showing its relationship striking off the fence. This was then brought back to the fence to reinforce the basic principles of the striking structure.
Next we moved onto a switch exercise. We had two coaches on one student switching the dynamic from an exercise that taught a sportsperson how to handle the whole fighting area to a multiple attack scenario and back. The exercise encourages appropriate footwork and makes a student to acknowledge the difference in movement and tactics used in each situation.
The session was finished with a Sttategy One versus Strategy Two pressure test. One person wears a headguard and is only permitted to attack with grappling tactics. The other is instructed to create and maintain distance by using striking and anti-grappling tactice. Rather trying to recreate one of countless real-life scenarios, this simple test promotes the asymmetrical nature of an assault and to handle it in order to escape.
Private Lesson
We warmed up with some focus-mitt work. I focused on hand strikes. This began with boxing. Then we moved onto combat base, butterfly guard, snaking and closed guard. I noticed that butterfly guard needed some work, so we focused on this range.
Butterfly guard is a mid-guard used in submission grappling. It requires a lot of stabilizing strength from the core muscles (lumber and abdominal) and the hip flexors. We looked at how it can control a kneeling attacker’s base and then broke down a basic sweep. We then followed on from this technique to an arm-drag into taking the back mount and the rear naked choke.
This technique can also be performed using half-guard. Here it was emphasized how it important it was to get the underhook and to not allow the top fighter to flatten the half-guarder. We then looked at attacking the half-guard with the arm-triangle, knee-bar and ankle lock.
Next we went back to striking and covered kicking. Here I focused on getting the best torque when delivering a strong kick. Pivoting on the suppoertng foot also helps provide better penetration with the round kick. The session was finished with some freestyle work on the Thai pads.
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