SA Training Day
April 2011
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Today proved to be yet another great day put on by the International Budo Federation, bringing all sorts of martial artists together again. Special thanks need to go to Kym who donated his time to putting on this great event. At the bargain price of $20, everyone got a chance to train with some top notch martial artists.
About 50 people turned up for the day and these were split between two groups. For me, the day started with Chris Gilles introducing us the harmonious and strength-less beauty of Hakkoryu JuJitsu. Chris gave a detailed background on the principles and ethos of Hakkoryu before we got to sample it's three core movements. We worked three different techniques, learning to off balance and submit our opponents with virtually no effort at all. At this time, Mick Murphy was also doing a session on Bo at the other end. The next segment was me on one end (and I was concentrating a little too much to be entirely sure who was teaching at the other end). I talked a little about Koryu Uchinadi before going into some basic tegumi flow drills. The idea of my session was too look at principles (either combative or learning strategy based) and encouraged people to find out how they could apply those principles in their own systems without compromising their "styles". Some of the combative principles included prioritizing imminent risk of weapons, getting to the outside, push/pull, find the safest place to position yourself, take their eyesight away, direct line, torquing, economy of movement, understanding and working outside of weapon ranges, going for mechanical weaknesses and so on. For the learning, the principles were about maximum efficiency through flow drills, promoting high repetitions as well as maximum realism through two person work and correct combative distance. The next session, I got to run another one and again, didn't really pay a whole lot of attention as to what was going on at the other end... It was interesting to see how much of this art looked just like some of the MMA and BJJ i'd seen in the past. We started off with an overhead throw that really caught peoples attention fast. This wasn't a new technique for me, but it was done in a different way, so I always find that sort of thing interesting. After that we learned various take downs and escapes from common holds. One thing I found particularly useful was from turtle, a way to defend rather effectively against someone getting the hooks and a choke in. We finished with a bit of a roll, escaping from a variation of side control. The last session for me was Kym's Ju Jitsu segment. We learned about 5 techniques for defending knives. I was please to see that Kym talked about controlling the retraction... something I look for in knife defences now, and something that is so often missed. We learned defences from various static and dynamic positions including principles of fast and efficient movement, small rotation, one-ness and so forth. After the training and a few formalities, the raffle was drawn for $500 voucher for tyres, courtesy of Khumo. Then, it was time for a soft drink, pizza and a mingle! Not bad value! It was great to see again some faces that I'd seen around the traps and also to see the number of open-minded martial artists in SA increasing. It was also great to meet some new people as well!! I thoroughly enjoyed the day and hope that everyone there got as much out of it as I did. Well done Kym! By Shawn Donaldson on the Ozbudo forum. |
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