Weapons, Revision and Conditioning (diary entry)

02.06.13

We began with a look at weapons and the whole issue of base principles. My ideal is to have as few principles as possible so that a student can easily utilize them in any situation. Unfortunately it isn’t always possible. Humans evolved to use external weapons. Once armed and with intent most humans become considerably more dangerous than when they had nothing in their very well adapted hands. Southeast Asian martial arts often begin with weapons and then complete their pattern by having their unarmed fighting closely resembling the same principles, but I am not always convinced this is the best solution either. Still, certain rudimentary rules remain in place when it comes to armed and unarmed fighting, such as distraction, preserving space and pre-empting.

Our weapon training started with unarmed defence against a blunt impact weapon. This consisted of intercepting the attacking hand. Let me emphasize that all students who train weapon defence with me begin with evasion and escape drills followed by incidental weapon and shield training. Only after this is down pat do we move onto the stage being covered today, which is dealing with an armed attacker whilst unarmed and with no immediate escape routes. This is the only time to engage.

We looked at the tactile parrying and gripping exercises covered during my last session with this particular client and applied them to weapon work. The same principle was then carried over onto weapon against weapon situations, after we revised the angles of attack. Moving into unarmed fight situations, we looked at a 45 degree clinching position, controlling the arm and head. This began as a high risk situation, where the locking off position of the clinch provided a target for strikes.  Then we scaled down the seriousness of the situation into a citizen’s arrest scenario. Here we looked at various simple locking positions and holds from standing.

After going through this we went through some revision.  This included the fence, transitional postures, striking, anti-grappling and combat grappling. The session was finished with a high intensity circuit:

1 minute slams with car tyre

10 seconds rapid hand strikes

1 minute snatch with car tyre

10 seconds kicking

1 minute full body defence with car tyre

10 seconds figure of eight with car tyre

1 minute full body attack

10 minutes deck squats with car tyre