WAKF & Crossfit Blog

One way to get at the idea of timing in martial arts is to work simple patterns.  Have your partner take three steps and throw a jab at you.  Have them do it over and over until it is super easy for you to evade and throw a counter strike.  Do the same back to them.  Then pick something slightly more complex like a roundhouse kick and jab combination.  Engage in the same process – have them repeat the movement over and over until you figure out a counter to it.

While the process is very artificial, that’s okay.  It is a building block.  You’re working against a predictable pattern and finding the right timing for dealing with that pattern.  The good news is that many people actually are fairly predictable.  The bad news is that the really good fighters aren’t.

Tonight’s class was a complete heist of the black belt class I went to on Sunday.  So maybe it had something to do with this week’s theme but it certainly wasn’t deliberately focused around timing at all.  In fact, it was about using breath as a way of monitoring how much you are “in the game”.  If you’re breathing, you’re probably present.  If you’re holding you’re breath, you’re probably not so present.  Conclusion?  Breathe.

We started with some of the standard walking and breathing drills (inhale for four steps, exhale for four steps) but then we did a couple that I hadn’t done before Sunday’s class – inhale for 4, exhale for 1 and inhale for 1, exhale for 4.  Neat stuff.  It’s remarkably difficult to exhale all the air in your lungs in one count and likewise it’s a fair amount of work to fill your lungs in one count.

From the breathing drills, the students jumped into a standard bevy of drills: striking, striking each other, making contact one at a time, both making contact, blocking, grabbing, etc.  The focus throughout the class was: can you keep your breathing steady and fluid… which is really just another way of asking: can you stay present.

We’ll start timing tomorrow.

Here’s a video of the Kung Fu form “Lim Po”.  The name translates as continuous step.

What does this form have to do with grappling class?  Thematically, everything.  It’s meant to be performed smoothly, without pauses between moves.  Smoothness is a great thing to strive for in your sport grappling – and in all aspects of your martial arts.

Admittedly, though, on a practical level, the form has nothing to do with grappling class, other than the fact that I seem to have a hard time remembering to take pictures during class.