Westside Academy of Kung Fu Blog Posts

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.

Many of us have the habit of dropping our favored striking hand a little bit in order to gear up for a more powerful punch.  The trouble with this pattern is that it provides an opening for an aware partner.

The solution: feedback.  Not too much, not too little – just enough to let us know that dropping our hands is usually a poor choice.  To establish the correct level of feedback, today the students put on the boxing gloves and… asked.  They asked by hitting one another, starting lightly and raising up the contact level until the person being struck said “okay, that’s enough that I don’t like it but not so much that it’s gonna cause damage.”

Once that contact level was established, the students gathered some data.  I saw everyone’s cover improve, thanks to a proper level of feedback.

One armed drills are often fairly dry – that is to say, there’s no scenario behind them.  The directions are simply to put one hand behind your back or to let one arm hang limp or to grab your pant leg with one arm or something along those lines.  But a fun one is to have the students “hold a baby”, or rather hold a focus pad in one arm and pretend it’s a baby.

Very few students throw or drop the “baby”.  Very few use the “baby” as a weapon.  Most will guard the baby with one arm and fight with the other.  It’s a great drill to get students to use only one arm without having them constantly thinking “man this drill is hard I wish I could just use my other arm” but instead having them thinking more along the lines of “man I’ve got to keep this baby away from my partner so I should really use my free arm as best as I can.”

Fun stuff.

Cheap digital cameras and phones are a wonderful thing for martial artists.  It means you can take a video of yourself training and get some awesome feedback.  I recently took a video of myself working on the heavy bag and noticed a couple of things.

First I noticed that my right hand does some pretty neat stuff – hooks, uppercuts, backfists, straights, head shots, body shots… a good variety.  Then I noticed that my left was quite boring – consisting almost entirely of straight shots to the head.

Thus the theme of the week was born: off hand.  What does it mean?  It means giving your non dominant side a little bit of extra attention.  Can you add some variety?  Can you make it more active?  Can you make it a legitimate threat during sparring?

For the final day of our week of working on covers, I told the kids to keep their hands up, filmed them doing some harmony sparring and then showed them the video.  My hope was that between the message of me saying “keep your hands up” and the video feedback, that there would be some notable improvement.

Did it work?  Watch the video and then come watch the tournament on Saturday.