Vagabond Warriors at The Martial Arts Show Part 2 (diary)

LONDON, ENGLAND - OCTOBER 27: WBA World Heavyweight Champion David Haye in action with the medicine ball during his Media Training Day at The Haymaker Boxing Gym on October 27, 2010 in London, England. Daivd Haye will fight Audley Harrison on November 13, 2010 at Manchester Evening News Arena. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Late in the day isn’t always the best of slots for free seminars, but nevertheless we still filled our second outing at the show as well as the first one. Attendees included some instructors and students who trained yesterday. I had my autograph signings earlier today, so was able to push the seminar more before hand.

We began with shadow boxing and visualization exercrcises for the warm-up. This was then followed by Stratagy One versus Strategy Two restriction pressure tests. S1 vs S2 addresses asymmetrical fighting – roughly striking/anti-grappling versus covering/grappling. The restrictive variation has the S2s beginning by holding the S1s in any chosen hold. The S1s then try to access their chosen strikes from these positions.

We then trained the chosen strikes against the focus mitts, first looking at instinctive combinations and flash-pad work. This trains the natural response state of the student and encourages the “think like a coach” mindset. We then addressed objectives. This comes under a practice I call The Switch. The Switch deals with training martial artists how to change from one objective to another. Objective defines training. In The Switch the student changes, without warning, from self-defence to sport and back again as he faces two coaches.

The session ended with some more medicine ball functional fitness. In this case, we combined sprawling with striking, interrupted by catching and throwing the medicine ball.

DON'T MISS: Vagabond Warriors FREE taster session on Thursday 17th May at 7pm at The Telford Martial Arts Centre

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