07.08.16 The fifth and sixth lessons of my client’s course on Personalised Martial Arts Cross Training focused on the cover. The cover is the general term I give for a concept of proactive recovery in combative situations that can be found through martial arts history. I write about it in some depth in my article, “Take Cover!” This was adapted for my book of collected writings, “Mordred’s Victory and Other Martial Mutterings”. We began with an overview of the rules, as I see them, for using a cover in a self-defence situation. I go by the principle that in a self-defence situation everything should be about getting on the front foot and taking control to reduce the risk to you. Self-defence hard skills should teach pre-emption, proactivity (forward pressure) and be pressure tested. The cover is not a pre-emptive counter-attack. If you are covering up then something has gone wrong, but not bad enough that you are completely out of the picture. The element of surprise is not yours. Everything you are doing now is about damage limitation and getting onto the front foot as efficiently as possible. The cover is not a block, although variations of it are occasionally represented as such in some Southeast Asian martial arts. The cover can become a type of guard in some combat sports (see the peek-a-boo guard), but not in this instance. The self-defence cover is used when the user is becoming overwhelmed by a volley of strikes. It is used to jam up the strikes, close the distance and then dropped in favour of returning fire. This is the way we trained it for standing facing and with my client’s back turned to the coach. It was trained using a code white test set-up. We initially worked through it using direct application, then we focus mitts for power and finally with head cage and boxing gloves for a degree of pressure. The concept was then taken to the ground and we looked at basic movement for asymmetrical ground fighting. This involved moving away from kicks to the head. In this instance the cover is only used to close the distance if there is no safe direction to turn away from the incoming kicks e.g. a multiple aggressor situation. Taking the concept back to a standing position, we looked at using the cover to trap and clinch. This progressed onto clearing obstacles or controlling limbs in order to access more efficient targets. We discussed the choice of targets, agreeing that the head area (including the neck) should be sought but anything that got in the way was also fair game. This brought us onto incidental and accidental targets.
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