Vagabond Warriors in Denmark (diary entry)
- jamie03066
- Jun 15, 2015
- 3 min read
23.02.13
“Vagabond Warriors” Workshop
Vagabond Warriors is the proverbial jewel in the CCMA crown. This is what I love teaching more than anything else. It is not a style or system, but rather an approach to martial arts cross training enabling students and coaches to handle their education better. Vagabond Warriors introduces students to several different concepts I have included to better help them understand how to handle training in more than one martial arts system or better enhance their primary art or objective. These concepts include:
· C.S.I. – Clarification, Scepticism and Individuality; the three neglected or ignored areas of martial arts training
· The Hierarchy of Training – Specific Training, Attribute Training and Functional Fitness
· The Calypso Effect – Avoiding temptation and self-justification when you leave your main line of training and explore another system.
· The By-Product Myth - The myth that self-defence or sports skills can be acquired as a given when they are not the objective of your primary training.
· Martial Welding – Putting together martial arts styles or techniques in a patchwork that does not work as an overall whole.
We only had two hours, but I feel I got across the essence of my approach. That is more important to me than merely teaching some disparate drills. Many martial arts cross trainers “martial weld” by simply collecting drills and combinations. I want students/teachers who train with me to look at themselves as the centre of their training and to have methods to better improve their overall performance and the performance of their students.
We began with a functional fitness warm-up. Denmark’s temperatures were even lower than the UK’s, but I train a lot outside and didn’t see that as a disadvantage. Training needs to be mentally demanding and there is nothing better than to start with some discomfort. So everyone went outside into a playground and utilized what was around them. This included a series of boxes ringing an area that closely resembled a circus ring fence. I had everyone use them for balancing, box jumping, bear crawling and the stepping up with a knee strike. This latter exercise helps to work stabilizing muscle, due to the balance part, as well as overloading the technique and also helps the student to create the “gathering under” behaviour important in most upward striking. We also used several large mounds to practice various footwork and striking drills, which also worked better stabilization and overloaded certain movements. A giant chess board provided a good place to practice agility footwork. We also used the playground area to warm up with some clinch-work and, given that everyone was wrapped in thick clothing, even did some low intensity groundwork too. This last exercise helped to encourage students to adapt their ground game to an environment outside the matter gym. In this instance it was the hard and unforgiving tarmac. We also discussed the point of specific training and progressive sparring intensity.
Back in the gym and I made the layering progressive pad-work exercise my centre point for this session. We began with kickboxing-based sparring. After a round of this we went straight onto the focus mitts and broke down attack and defence. We began with flash-pad drills for the attack. We then moved onto defence only drills. Next we put the two together. Then everyone sparred again to see any marked improvements. Areas that needed addressing were then taken back into the drilling. We covered some mirror footwork and fed that into the pad-work. The pad-work progressed to include grappling and different postures and ranges. This was then fed back into the sparring.
The session was finished with some shadowboxing. Again, this is a sorely neglected area of training. Like pad-work, my objective with shadowboxing is to create an exercise that resembles sparring or fighting as much as possible. This is so that skills trained in this area are transferrable and relevant. Shadowboxing is improved by the student being given different types of opponent to imagine, so they can adjust their responses appropriately.
Recommended CCMA written work relating to this workshop:
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