The end of a good week on Friday culiminated with the adults classes in Basingstoke, practising ostensibly what are better known as Boxing, Muay Thai / kick boxing and Tai Chi drills for close in partner work. It might seem somewhat of a contradiction to include these four different martial arts styles in the same class, let alone for the same theme.
The jab, cross, hook and uppercut are staples of all Martial Arts including boxing and are contained in many of the traditional forms / patterns /kata practiced by the ‘traditional’ oriental styles such as Karate and Taekwondo. For some strange reason though many schools don’t practice them in a sparring environment. I did hear one Karate teacher say to a student who asked them why they weren’t practiced in sparring, come back with the following “Because the hook, cross and uppercut punches aren’t performed in a straight line, they don’t have the same level of power as a Karate punch.” I guess he’d never been hit with a good hook or cross or seen someone hit with one of these, I have and they are pretty effective. Look at a good full contact art and see how many bouts are won, using these very same techniques, the answer lots of them.
Where does the Muay Thai and Kickboxing come in. Well many people believe that kicks are only useful at long to medium range. Whilst I am not disputing their effectiveness at these ranges, they can also be applied to much shorter distances. We only worked on 4 kicks, front, round, side and back and their angle of delivery for maximum impact, so to speak. The front kick being used to either push the opponent back for a hand/arm strike or by changing the delivery angle to kick them to the floor. The round, back and side kick being used to good effect to attack the lower part of the body and legs to destroy the opponents body structure and balance. No need for any of the high kicking stuff here, just simple and effective kicking techniques, that when applied well are very painful.
Muay Thai is well known for its elbow strikes – these are of course included in many of the Karate systems, yet are under utilised due to being often thought of as too dangerous for those clubs that are very sports oriented. We spent some while work on the round elbow, upper elbow, dropping elbow and a diagonal variant of the round elbow. For the senior grades they also tried using some of the elbow techniques as part of a jumping move, to understand the difference in the dynamic. Also looking at the position of the attacking hand related to the elbow caused some interesting observations.
The time was finally reached, where we moved onto the Tai Chi part of the lesson. Nice relaxed and just doing the form right. Wrong, lots of pressure testing of ones partner. First up was pushing hands drills using the elbows to try and control your partner and evade their elbow techniques. Elbows are great to use, but you also need to be able to block them and then counter them. We then took the jab, cross, hook and uppercut punches and applied the same principles to these, to block and redirect the attack before countering ones opponent. This then moved into a free flow exchange, where either partner could apply the punches and the other person had to either block and counter, counter first before the punch landed or jam the attack. This was harder than it appeared and we spend so much time on this that, we were unable to look at using the kicks whilst doing the pushing hands, next time.
It was quite an ecletic evening of different styles, but it worked pretty well and proved that there are many ways to be able to defend oneself at close range.
