Evolutionary Self-Protection

I had, as ever, an incredible time training with you all on Friday! Hope you’re all having an awesome weekend. Here’s this week’s notes on the training we did.

• Anything can become a training tool – even balloons! Training game 1 was team keepy-uppy with balloons. More and more of them! Every time one touches the ground, pushups for all!
  • (Any drill or training game can be intensified. Be creative!)
• The key with exercise and warmups is to ENJOY them – training game 2 was fencing with rubber sticks, while I annoyed everyone with various rules applied to the spar:
  • Left hand only,
  • You must use both hands (interesting to see how people interpret this),
  • You have to be sitting on the floor,
  • You have to keep at least half your stomach on the floor,
  • You have to lie on your back, etc
• Taking two ideas and merging them together works very well too, and isometric tension exercises work well with ground mobility. Thus, training game 3 was plank & roll leapfrog! Persons A and B perform a plank parallel to each other, and then on command person A rolls over person B (who is still planking) and assumes a plank where he ends up, again parallel. Then on the next command person B does the same, and we go up and down the hall like that! A great tension and relaxation drill.
• Biomechanics and footwork: getting our body weight into palm strikes and hook punches.
• Feeling for tension and relaxation in striking: elastic recoil.
• Relaxed movement: dealing with getting hit and getting out of the way in the first place.
  • On the attack: ‘swimming through’ the attacker.
• Targeting and position: striking straight, up and down to good targets.
• Knife on knife: an unlikely situation that you happen to have a knife when attacked with one, but a useful one to look at from time to time. Lots of useful concepts: disable the attacking limb, don’t go overboard if you don’t need to, maintaining contact, etc.
• Conditioning of the knuckles and wrist for striking: gorilla crawl (knuckle version) and progressive striking drills.
• Loosening off: a nice flow from sitting.

See you next week! All the details of this class are here.

-Josh