Three phases of conflict & MMA (diary entry)

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Despite the interruption of the Bank Holidays, I was happy to see that most students had been practicing and we were able to go back through everything fairly easily.

The session began with a discussion on attitude and psychology, and how it counts at the pre, in and post stages of a fight. We discussed the differences between sport and self protection, and how these stages applied to both. In sport, pre-fight deals with the right physical preparation and adopting the winner attitude. In self protection, pre-fight is social, tactical and self-awareness as well as adopting the survivor attitude. Both deal with understanding the physiological effects on the body when stress hits you. In sport, in-fight is the strategy, tactics and techniques applied to dominate and win a competition. In self defence, the in-fight is the physical responses used to subdue, restrain or neutralize a violent threat. Post-fight in sport relates to de-briefing the match, looking at successes and failures in your own game and working to improve them. Immediatley after the fight it is about sensible mental and physical recuperation. Post-fight in self protection is concerned with maintaining awareness, administering first aid, if required, and reporting the incident to the relevant authorities. It also concerns dealing with psychological impact of the episode.

We developed our warm-up along the lines of correct mental attitude. I regularly come back to a theme of walking students up and down a hall, looking at the way they naturally carry themselves and improving it with set objectives – “You are about to get into a fight”. Then we change to the in-fight stage and adopt appropriate shadow boxing postures. We changed from moving on the feet to moving from combat base to moving from butterfly guard and then to moving from a snaking position.

We then revised all stand-up combination work on the focus mitts. This was followed by neck wrestling and pummelling to work clinch positioning and then drilled the arm-drag/counter exercise. Moving to pins we covered the transitional pins. Today’s tech. nique was the arm-bar from guard. The session finished with some MMA sparring.

DON’T MISS: “Return of the Vagabond Warriors” cross training workshop on Saturday May 28th. Book your tickets now!

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