Westside Academy of Kung Fu Blog Posts

Ever been on the receiving end of a nice solid kick to the shin?  Stinks, doesn’t it?  Occasionally (often when the kicker has cleats on and you’ve forgotten your shin guards) it’s enough to send you down to the ground.  More often, it’s enough to make you hop around and howl for a bit.

Either result seems like a good win in a self defense situation.  Kick someone hard enough in the shin to knock them down or kick them hard enough in the shin to cause enough pain that they become distracted and leave you an opening to strike to the head or body.

Suppose the shin kick results in nothing at all.  You missed or you didn’t kick hard enough or the attacker is simply angry and/or drugged enough that they’re able to ignore it.  The good news is a kick that low doesn’t compromise your balance in the same way that a high kick (meaning anything groin or above) does.  Because the kick is so low, it’s easy to recover from.

Low risk with possible high returns… in short – more shin kicking.  (But what if the kick hurts them just enough to make them even angrier and more determined to beat you up?)

Check the whiteboard for the lesson plan and student feedback.

I heard a rumor that there might be an all system workout coming up soon that is about low kicks, so I thought we’d get a head start on things.  For tonight, that meant pulling the heavy bags down off the moorings and trying to kick the stuffing out of them.

It also meant dipping lightly into a simple Savate technique – a rear leg toe out kick to the shin.  Students were encouraged to ‘keep it simple’ and deliver the same strike over and over to the bag because if it works – keep using it.

Check the whiteboard for the lesson plan.

The guard position comes up pretty regularly in grappling.  As far as advantage goes, the top player has gravity while the bottom player has the power of their legs.  After all the pluses and minuses are added up, it’s kind of a wash – from the guard it could be anyone’s game.

With that “up in the air” idea in mind, today we went through two sequences.  One was for the player with the guard, the other for the player in the guard.  We drilled technique, offered resistance and tried to figure out how to make both pieces work.

After half an hour of drilling, we went to free grappling, starting from the guard.  Hopefully this came as no surprise to anyone – it was time to test out what we had just learned and see if we could fit it into the larger picture of grappling.

Check the whiteboard for the lesson plan and student feedback.

It’s always fun to take a technique from the adult class and see how much of it the kids can learn.  Today we tried doing “the uglies”.  The basic idea is that you’ve been knocked down to a squat position and someone (or someones) is throwing punches down at you – a very crummy position.

From that lousy place, you circle your frames (move you arms around your head like a monkey) to protect your head, move your feet so that you’re not a still target and stand up as quickly as possible.  The uglies got its name from being a bad position.  It’s not a place to hang out – unless you want to make it a drill, and then it becomes a place to hang out.  So we hung out at the bottom of our squat, moving our feet and circling our frames.  The kids, not surprisingly, did really well.  Judging from their movement patterns when the teachers started throwing padded strikes at them, not only did they do well but they understood that getting hit while you’re crouched down like that is no fun.

Check the whiteboard for the lesson plan and feedback from the adult class.

Rare is the martial artist who wants to be in a bad position in a fight.  More common is the martial artist who understands that training bad positions is a good idea to understand how to best avoid them and to understand how best to recover and get out of them.

So tonight we trained a nasty one: bent over at the waist with two training partners clubbing you in the back of the head.  I did mention it was a bad position, right?  From there, students had to hold (stay bent over) the position for five seconds, then get out.  They were allowed to move their feet and hands during those five seconds, but not stand.  At first, the escape involved standing up while delivering a rising elbow strike (to whatever target happened to offer itself).  Later, we added the punch (if you don’t think it works, ask me for a demo or ask anyone who got a good one in class tonight) to the side of the thigh.

Avoid bad positions?  Yes!  Avoid training bad positions?  Quite the opposite!  Know and embrace them so if worst comes to worst, you’ve already been there and know how to get out.

Check the whiteboard for the lesson plan.