So I spent these past two weeks hanging out with a friend who’s done Chinese martial arts for about the last ten years, and now I feel like making notes on what I learned. My friend has training in Wing Chun and Tai Chi push hands with some other styles thrown in along the way. Now he does something that looks completely different from standard wing chun. You can find his blog here: http://humanityproxy.wordpress.com/
My other training partners in this time included a guy with limited Choy Li Fut training (from here on called “Sasquatch” because we only had one day of serious training with him during the past two weeks and he’s an elusive guy when trying to get a hold of him around Christmas) and a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (grappling) exponent.
Background:
Training started off with light sparring to figure out our strengths and natural movement. I naturally moved forward very well and threw a lot of damaging shots, HumanityProxy was a lot more elusive and hard to land good hits on. So on the second day we had Sasquatch over for practice. We were paired off to work on upper body evasion, kick defense and basic offense. The first few days after were focused on isolating aspects of the fight to drill proper evasion into me.
Notes:
-When I’d fight in place or slip back out of any attack I’d generally get bulldozed. Sparring and evasion drills are essential. I learned to tuck my chin into my shoulder like a boxer and move inside the radius of an attack, how to slip and step to the sides and move my body from whatever position I find myself in to minimize damage to myself.
-HP would demonstrate looseness by pointing up at a security cam video of us both when we walked into a store. If I was tense, I’d have worse body language vs him, as he’s very loose and floppy 24/7. Likewise , if he were to throw a punch or kick and you strike his attacking limb, the limb would be so loose that his body won’t turn when the punching hand is struck off to the side.
-HP seems to have gained a lot of his evasion skills from backyard boxing and Tai Chi push hands.
-His upper body strikes are mostly whipped with a lot of power but he focuses too much on generating from the spine instead of pumping from the legs too. I demonstrated to him that whippy strikes combined with leg pumping and dropping energy penetrate a lot harder even if you don’t harden up on impact. My secret? Picking my feet up slightly from a normal stance and dropping slightly closer to the ground, over and over; doing exercises patterned after ape movements, over and over.
-Counters to kicks:
Striking down on the leg, especially from knee up.
Kicking the kick, especially with crescent motions from the side.
Moving the target (leg, body, head) out of the way, using shuffles and switching stances to avoid low kicks from range.
Moving in on the kick and smothering it with striking and locks.
Close in: hip bump into groin and perform a throw.
-Counters to holds and attacks from behind:
-Like strikes, chokes and locks seem to get you when you stop moving. I usually escaped attempts to choke me by twisting out of them.
-Do push hands to better avoid being put in holds.
-Lessons from BJJ guy:
-I always knew the types of bear hug counters taught to women are weak (stomp foot, headbutt backward, etc) and found I could escape easier by going limp until I drop close to the ground. Limpness slacks up the hold and makes other moves possible. The BJJ guy prescribed a four inch body drop into a wide stance and bringing the hands upward in a strong position, then moving for any move possible from there.
-BJJ and Tai Chi push hands seem to work on similar principles and carry over to each other. Our grappler friend picked up a Tai Chi push hands drill in a matter of seconds.
-Wrestling vs “WWII combatives”:
A lot of guys who watched a few Carl Cestari videos (and then appointed themselves as experts and gurus) will go around saying they have a superior fighting system that was tested in WWII, ramble about martial arts sucking, bash grappling even though their WWII combatives heroes all did centuries of Judo, etc. I got a few chances to pressure test their moves against my sparring partners.
-Against a “Dracula guard” (resembles a horizontal elbow strike, crashes, strikes with the elbow and edge of hand): Go low and to the outside of the raised arm, get in close to the body. (HP and the wrestler both use elbow-traps too)
-There are ways to mitigate the counters to a Drac guard through practice, but a vertical-forearm elbow spear seems more useful against a grappler as it’s harder to get around and can crash both high and low attacks.
-Against a mount position on the ground: If your enemy straddles on top of you, he can pin an upper arm under the knee or the foot. If he uses the foot, it’s easy to roll him off.
-As far as “Combatives” as a style and not a catchall term, we coined a phrase for it: “Idiot wreckers”.
Idiot wreckers are moves that catch you unaware in a vulnerable position and do a lot of damage. A chin jab is an idiot wrecker because the victim has to open up his body’s center line. A lot of locks and throws are also idiot wreckers along with outrageous moves that catch you when you’re on guard but get motor-set to focus narrowly and do the same thing over and over.
-Kickboxing stand off situations and a lot of “efficient” moves can be broken by using dramatic “surprise” moves that the opponent hasn’t seen before. Reaction speed is slowed down against anything that doesn’t look like an imagined attack, or which comes from an unexpected range and angle.
-Forms and drills that lack “aliveness” are still useful for ingraining an underused movement pattern into the brain, no matter what anyone says.
-Physical training and conditioning:
Contrary to common internet knowledge, exercises that focus on specific muscles are the way to go for developing strength. I coached HP to do sternum chin ups (try to touch lower chest to bar, arch back) and his back muscles were fried by just a few reps. The upper back muscular supports punching and protects vital organs from damage, so the value in this bodybuilding type of exercise should be obvious.
More to follow when HumanityProxy does his own writeup on our findings. Until then, I recommend everybody check out Rick Hernandez’ “Predator and Prey” series on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRV6aOODy4_ImO8njdN_22PHaFiLagXAK
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