Wim Demeere's Blog

Martial Arts, Self Defense and a Whole Lot More.

Pad Man work with the focus mitts

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Here’s a clip I recently made during my Sanshou class. I’m the pad man and am using the focus mitts to drill in some basics with some of my students.

Some more info on why I’m doing the specific work with each student:

Simon:

  • Simon’s still in his early development as a fighter and has a couple of technical issues he needs to work on (releasing the hips and rear shoulder for one) but that wasn’t my focus in this round.
  • The goal was footwork: I wanted him to feel the contrast between stepping in and out with a punch, stationary striking and moving forward continuously. These are three very different things.
  • This forces him to become more fluid in his stance and footwork, which is the most important issue he needs to work on right now.

Kevin:

  • Kevin has a tendency to “launch” his techniques instead of driving them from his feet through his body, to the arms or legs. As a result, he often has a hard time controlling them. This in turn leaves him vulnerable to counters every time he has to put extra effort in staying in balance before retracting a technique. Power is great but it’s nothing without control.
  • That’s why I made him do knees and middle kicks on the focus mitts, right after he does the punch. This forces him to stay in balance during the punches or he won’t be able to perform the kick or knee strike.
  • I have to correct him a few times on his loss of balance (hanging in the right cross, switching feet during the cross) because otherwise the whole goal  of this round is out the window.
  • As a pad man, the way you correct somebody is just as important as the fact that you’re doing it. You see me quickly demonstrating both the mistake and the correction, along with verbal cues to be as clear as possible. This is the approach that works best with Kevin right now. As he progresses, he’ll learn to take corrections with just a few words from me or a quick demo of the mistake alone.

Yannick:

  • Yannick has fast footwork and moves well enough so I didn’t have to focus on those issues with him. His biggest issue right now is a tendency to retreat as he defends against a punch or kick. That’s not necessarily bad but it does make it more difficult for him to counter-attack.
  • I had to cut half the footage with him because we went out of the camera frame for a long time. But you still catch it in the end: I tell him to stay put and then immediately advance with the punch.
  • This forces him to do something he isn’t comfortable with right now and gives him the confidence to slowly implement it into his game.

The whole purpose of being a pad man is not just holding the focus mitts in the air and let your partner or student hit them. On the contrary, you have to think about it and have specific goals in mind when you work with somebody. These goals and the methods you use to achieve them are always tailored to the individual in front of you. That takes some effort on the part of the pad man but it’s a crucial issue. Otherwise you’re just going through the motions or you make him train something that’s not a priority for him at that time.

For lots more information on how to hold the focus mitts and other equipment, check out my Pad Man instructional video.

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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…]

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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Confidence

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One of my newer students asked me a question after class, something along the lines of:

You can pretty much handle anybody in the street, right?

I replied with “Not only no, but hell no!” and seemed to get a confused look at first. I then explained that in the street, things are pretty different than in class and there are no guarantees. None at all.

Anybody can be taken out at any time. It doesn’t matter how good you are, you’re not invincible. You can always have an off day and not see it coming. Or sometimes, you just mess up. It happens.

On the other hand, it’s easy to look good in class. I mean, I’m the one showing everything, explaining how it’s supposed to be done and by default I’m the benchmark for my students. I’m supposed to be able to pull it off against them. If I can’t hack it against them, then I don’t really have much business teaching.  So I do understand why he would think I’d take on a horde of ninjas in a dark alley with one arm tied behind my back.

We talked some more and he explained how the training has made him feel more confident, more secure than if he had to throw a punch, the other guy would at least feel it. Which sparked another round of long explanations on my part (my older students groan when they see me get ready for another Castro-length speech…) covering things like adrenal stress, the difference between sports fighting and actual combat, running instead of fighting, and so on.

As I drove home that night, I thought about it some more. It’s been a long time since I started training but I remember the feeling you get when things start to come together for the first time: [Read more…]

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