Here’s another old video, this one from about ten years ago. I entered in this competition as a favor to a friend of mine. He’d just started organizing a yearly tournament so I wanted to support him. The rules don’t allow striking to the face but it is full contact.

That was the weirdest thing for me: it had been over 6 years since I had fought or even trained for that rule set. And once you’re used to punching people in the face, it’s VERY hard to hold back when they’re wide open, as I found out in this match. So I ended up kicking a lot and only punching a few times, when I was sure I wouldn’t default to boxing and earn myself a disqualification.

Looking at it now, I’m horrified by the sloppiness and numerous mistakes I make. If I’d have been my coach for that fight, it would have been back to basics in the next training session. I was never the best fighter out there, there were loads of guys better than me. But it’s weird being confronted with your younger self and shake you head because you know better now. :-) Regardless, I hope you enjoy the clip.

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Here’s another clip from one of my classes. Sometimes, when there aren’t many students, I let them do some free play and they can warm up however they like. If there’s an even number of them, they pair off and I go to the bag for my own warm up. This is one of those instances.

I always hated it when teachers would not explain why you have to do techniques a certain way. Or would leave you hanging with “We’ll get to that later.”  That’s why I gave some more information about what I was doing in this video.

Blatant commercial plug: I explain a lot of the “how” and “why” of training with the heavy bag in my book and DVDs. If you’d like to know how you can apply these concepts to your own training, click the picture below.

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Here’s a clip from a sparring session from my Sanda/Sanshou class. In the commentary, I’m giving some background as to the why and how of things. It’s nothing new or special, pretty much every coach does this with his students. It’s just my take on things.

The whole idea is for the students to practice something specific, in this case it’s staying at a certain distance. I’m playing the good sparring partner and let them do most of the work. I usually add another aspect to it, something specific for each individual student. That way, they train the concept we’re working on and I try to correct a specific error they’re doing.

Enjoy the clip.

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