Wim Demeere's Blog

Martial Arts, Self Defense and a Whole Lot More.

From the Octagon to the Street

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This is an article I wrote for Black Belt Magazine  and it got published in the January 2009 issue. I edited it a bit to make it more blog-friendly and cut it down in size. As always, feel free to leave your thoughts in the  comments section.

“From mixed martial arts to the street: Practical grappling skills for real-life self defense”

by

Wim Demeere

The first Ultimate Fighting Championship in 1993 started a revolution in martial arts competitions: Very few techniques were prohibited:

  • Vicious elbows to the face.
  • Joint locks carried out to the fullest.
  • Strikes to the back of the head
  • Even kicking a downed opponent.

But the biggest upset was the fact that having a ground game and solid grappling skills proved an absolute necessity to leave the Octagon a winner. The Gracie family proved the effectiveness of its ju-jitsu ground techniques by placing one of their lightest fighters (Royce Gracie weighed a whopping 175 lbs.) against primarily heavyweight opponents. More often than not he managed to submit or choke out his opponents with an almost disheartening ease.

Nowadays, MMA competitors no longer fear the ground and are well-rounded professional athletes. They are masters of full-power striking techniques, grappling, groundwork, and most of all, they flow effortlessly from the one to the other when the situation demands it. This makes them formidable opponents and places MMA as one of the most well-rounded combat arts in the world.

The sport itself also changed; it turned into a multi-million dollar industry, eclipsing boxing and other martial arts in popularity. With the increased public awareness came a rise in misconceptions about not only the sport but martial arts and violence in general. The cage is viewed by many practitioners as the ultimate proving grounds for martial art styles. They argue that if exponents of any given system cannot beat an opponent in the cage or Octagon, then that system is worthless. They reason that MMAs have proven they can take down anyone fighting solely with traditional martial arts and then beat or submit them with ground fighting. The seemingly obvious conclusion is that the Mixed Martial Artist is the ultimate fighter in both the cage and the street. But is this statement true?

To a certain extent, it most certainly is: [Read more…]

Martial arts basics, Part 2

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In the first part of Martial arts basics, I talked a bit about how I like to teach my students the importance of basic techniques by making them do loads of repetitions. The key is, once they have a good enough grasp of the techniques, making those reps challenging and fun by adding slight variations and tweaks.  In this video, I’ll show you how I personally like to train and what my students have to do too.

A couple of things:

  • I’m not focusing on speed or power. Those two aren’t my goal at all. My focus is on working those basics and feeling the differences between each variation.
  • I picked the four basic punches because that’s what we were working on in class. It could have been other techniques, so don’t get hung up on that part.
  • The bag was hanging a bit too low and as a result, moved around too much. Instead of stopping it with a technique (which requires a different type of timing from what I was working on), you’ll see me slow down or even grab the bag. Which is something I don’t often do. Usually, I time a technique to to stop it in it’s tracks. Ideally, you have a partner holding the bag for you.
  • Obviously, you need to do the same drill with a partner for the best results.
  • This is by no means the only, or even the best, way to train your basics. I’m only showing a possible example of how you can go about it so it’s fun as well as productive. I could have done it in a hundred different ways than this or chosen tons of other variations.
  • The main thing isn’t how I do the techniques of what particular sequence of variations I chose. It’s the fact that there is such a progression instead of just hitting the bag with whatever you can think off. There’s a place for free style heavy bag training but also for more structured training like in this clip.

Next time I’ take my camera to class, I’ll see if I can show some more partner work instead of always beating up the heavy bag. :-)

For more info on making these kind of progressions:

Hard-core heavy bag training
Learn all about progressions in my book

Martial arts basics

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Neil got the ball rolling and asked me to join in. I gave it some thought and here’s my take on it.

His premise was that people often neglect the basics of their art because they either don’t understand the importance or think they’ve already done enough of them. Odds are these two reasons form the bulk of what causes the problem. On the other hand, I think that to a certain degree the main fault is always with the teacher. If his students don’t have good basics, he’s the one who failed to teach them. Though there are exceptions to this.

An example

In my Sanshou class, there is a specific progression when a new student starts:

  1. Fighting stance
  2. Basic footwork: forward, back, left, right.
  3. Straight punches: jab and cross.
  4. Straight knees: left and right.
  5. Hook punches: left and right.
  6. Push kick: back leg and step up with front leg.
  7. Round kick: back leg and step up with front leg.
  8. One basic throw and takedown.

The student starts by working in front of a mirror, doing ten reps before switching to another technique. As he won’t know many techniques in his first couple classes, he’ll do hundreds of straight punches before he even gets to the infamous round kick. Which is the whole point; I want to drill the basic techniques in first.

Back in the “good” old days, we’d do hundreds of reps of the same technique, non-stop. That’s just the way it was. In Asia, this still seems to be the way it is done in many styles. In and of itself, that’s not a bad thing, on the contrary. I’m a firm believer in doing your reps and the quality of movement in a traditionally trained martial artist is often light years beyond what modern practitioners can show. So this method does work.

The other side of the coin is that in Asia, people seem to accept the fact that you have to train the same thing over and over. And those who don’t aren’t allowed to protest and have to do it anyway. In the West, we want to know why you do things a certain way and want to have our say in the matter. Try the Asian way over here and you usually end up with very, very few students.

Some people say you should never adapt your teachings to your audience in the name of tradition. I think that’s bullshit. I strongly believe you get better results by a combination of ingraining basics with reps but also by adding slight variations as soon as a student performs them well enough.

Back to the example.

It takes about three months before a new student in my sanshou class is ready to join the group. However, that doesn’t mean they can only practice the seven points I listed before. As soon as they have a basic mastery of those, they also practice: [Read more…]

Guest post: “Be open to Learning” by Loren W. Christensen

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Loren just sent me this, after reading my post on Unusual places to train and teach. An empty Saigon street during the Vietnam war certainly qualifies as “unusual”! Enjoy this guest blog post.

I was a brown belt when I went to Vietnam in 1969 as a Military Policeman. Many Vietnamese soldiers as well as Korean soldiers wore small, black squares above their green fatigue shirt pockets denoting how many black belts they had earned. Those with two rows had earned belts in two fighting arts.

Some of the ROK (Republic of Korea) Marines had three rows of black squares, anywhere from three to five squares in each row. Often, the more black squares a soldier had, the more chiseled his features and the harder his physique.

On one occasion, early into my tour, I was assigned to guard a building on an empty Saigon street at 2a.m. (curfew was at 1a.m.) with a rather dignified South Vietnamese military policeman who had two rows, three black squares in each, over his fatigue shirt pocket. To break the ice, I indicated that I had also trained in the martial arts, at which his face brightened and he pointed to the squares on his shirt. For the next several hours, my new friend and I swapped techniques, mostly by pantomime, and with what little English he knew and what Vietnamese I had learned.

Loren and me, a couple years ago.

At one point, he stepped over to a traffic sign that was attached to a tree about a foot above my six-foot-high head. He looked at it for a moment, then spun like a top, his kicking leg shooting out before it hooked back to slam that sign with the heel of what had been his rear foot, a foot wearing a heavy combat boot. I remember jumping back, probably with my mouth hanging open, going, “What was that?”

Although at that time I had been training in the martial arts for four years, I had never been taught the spinning hook kick. I had learned the spinning straight back kick, but not the spinning hook. I didn’t even know it existed at that time until I saw my Vietnamese soldier friend nearly rip that high sign from the tree.

So for the next couple of hours he taught me the kick. We leaned our M-16s against the tree, stripped off our flak vests, pistol belts and shirts, and commenced to train. He was most patient with me as I stumbled about, but by the end of our session, I have to say that I could do a pretty good spinning hook. Of course kicking as high as that sign was a ways in the future, but that night I could hit the trunk like a bandit.

The point of this story is to recognize that you can learn from anyone, anywhere. Over the years, I’ve learned from white belts, from things non-martial artists have asked me, from the school of hard knocks on the street, and once, many years ago, from a Vietnamese soldier on a sticky-hot, Saigon night, as artillery rumbled in the distance and shook the windows of nearby buildings.

You learn something every day if you pay attention. ~Ray LeBlond

Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere. ~Chinese Proverb

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The martial arts student who makes you proud

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Kris’s latest blog post got me thinking about the many students I’ve had over the years.You get all kinds of people coming to class and it’s your job as a teacher to give it your all so they learn as much as possible. Which isn’t always easy. Top of my head, this is what I remember of 20 years of teaching martial arts:

  • Some were good athletes, others were not physically gifted at all. Most people seem to fall in between. I’ve also been fortunate to have had natural athletes join my class. Those are always a lot of fun to work with because they have energy to spare.
  • Most students picked things up OK though a couple had absolutely no co-ordination to speak off. They literally weren’t at home in their body, moving as if it was alien to them or belonged to somebody else. Very few of those lasted long because no matter what I tried, they always struggled to learn movements everybody else seemed to pick up easily.
  • I had one, just one, super-gifted student. She was a young woman who studied classical piano and was interested in tai chi chuan. When I showed her the first movement of the form, she repeated it perfectly. Then I showed the second and the same thing happened. And so on. It was impressive to see a student just flat out carbon-copy my movements. Unfortunately, she didn’t continue because she was afraid of injuring her hands with the self defense techniques and sink her musical career. She could have been amazing though.
  • Most students were good people but every now and then there was an asshole who wanted to hurt the others. He’d use the sparring sessions to beat up his classmates. When this happened I  put a stop to it but every now and then I had to “teach a lesson”.  Never enjoyed that but sometimes it was necessary.
  • The funniest student was a guy who called me up to ask about my classes. During that conversation, he told me three times that he was the European MMA cage fighting champ. I congratulated him every time. He also explained his TKD (?) teacher was afraid to spar him now… Oh-kaaaaaay… Anyway, he showed up for my Sanshou class: early thirties, skinny but with a potbelly, balding but with the remaining hair in plucks and a look in his eyes that says he’s not all there. We start the warm-up and he’s huffing and puffing after 5 min. As soon as we start practicing techniques, it shows he can’t lift his leg above waist level and has terrible technique. Maybe he won the EU video game cage fighting competition or something? Sure wasn’t a fighter. He (barely) makes it until the end and then pays for ten classes. That was the last time I ever saw him. Weird as he was, it sure was nice of him to sponsor the school like that… :-)

Video game champion?
  • The student I’m most proud of wasn’t a particularly gifted one. Not good or bad, just average. He did well enough in class, except when we sparred. Then he’d get an insane adrenal dump and go nuts:
    • He’d tense up and cross his forearms instead of staying in the on guard position. (Never understood why he did that.)
    • He’d start to breathe hard through his nose, at the edge of hyper-ventilating.
    • His eyes went wide and he lost almost all his technical skills and flailed all over the place.
  • It didn’t matter how low or high the intensity of the sparring was, he just defaulted to that setting every single time. I tried dozens of things to help him but nothing ever got rid of this problem completely. It ever so slowly got better and in the end, he only lost it when he got tagged hard.
  • He stayed with me for six or seven years and that’s what made me most proud to have him as a student. Because in all those years, he came to class twice a week, knowing full well he was going to be freaked out and scared out of his mind when we sparred. And he showed up anyway. It takes a special kind of courage and determination to do that.

There are other examples of students like him but I never had anyone who had to conquer his own fears as much. The fact that he did so for all that time is impressive and it saddened me when he eventually quit.

Just reminiscing a bit after Kris’s post triggered some memories. Speaking of him, he has a wicked cool new video coming out. Here’s a preview:

I’ll review it when my copy arrives. Stay tuned.

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