Evolutionary Self-Protection

A quiet week this week but a good session nonetheless! A warm welcome to our newest member who did exceptionally well with the hammer fist striking we worked on! Very natural movement and stable posture all round.

• Taking a simple exercise and making it horrible: shifting weight forwards, backwards or sideways to change the emphasis with our pushups, and holding exercises such as pushups and squats isometrically.
• Striking we looked at: palm strikes, hammer fists and turning elbow strikes. To recap:
  • Palm strikes are relatively low-risk strikes that are easy to employ. They can generate lots of power and hit lots of nerve endings all at once, so can be quite disorienting and shocking. You can also grab on straight away once you’ve hit. They’re quick too.
  • Hammer fists are powerful and also relatively quite low-risk to the striker.
  • Elbow strikes are devastating, quite easy to employ and are very useful when close up.
• Impact development: feeling the weight of your arm and relaxed striking movements.
• Dealing with impact and pushes: relaxed movement, joint mobility and footwork. Angles and directions.
• Working against armed assaults: a simple drill against a stick being swung at your head and a similar concept being applied against a very common knife attack situation: grabbing the shirt and stabbing towards the stomach with the rear hand.
  • Gaining control of the armed arm (haha) and testing how much control we have.
  • Finding opportunities to strike and get away.
  • Taking the stick and striking with it if we need to (see: Force Continuum).
• Breathwork drill for awareness of tension and relaxation.

All of this came together into a nice training session with a clear objective in mind when dealing with the attacks we looked at: to escape (safely). We had a new student this week who took on the concepts we explored quickly and easily with very nice, natural movement. Many thanks also to Chris for providing such exemplary (devastating) striking to discuss!

I hope you all have an awesome weekend and thanks for coming. See you next week!

Details of this class can be found here.

Josh