Average class

Hi Nick,

What type of structure and content do you have in your regular class with guys that are turning up week in week out.

As in what type of warm up, technique being taught, drills, cool down.

How do you work on awareness with students.



Alan

Alan,

It varies a lot mate..even though we have a small core of techniques I like to mix up the way we train it.

A typical warm up consists of some light cardio to begin with to get the blood flowing. I'm not a big fan of charging straight into training without warming up as some do. They say that you don't get to warm up in the street which is true, but, they forget in the street you get a huge adrenal dump which makes up for a lot.

Once the cardio is done i.e. starjumps, running on the spot, we loosen the joints from top to bottom or bottom up and then usually do a drill whereby we grab one another and push and pull each other around. Not only does this help you understand body mechanics and balance points but it serves to stretch and work out all the incidental small muscle groups, ligaments and tendons etc which standardized exercises sometimes miss.

We finish the last portion with some explosive calisthenics such as clap pushups, bastids, and so on. I'm a big believer in plyometric exercises at this point to develop explosiveness in muscle groups.

All this takes approximately 10-14 minutes which is, according to a book I use by a New Zealand Sports Medicine guy in the time necessary to warm the body up.

What happens next depends on what I'm covering. Sometimes I'll split the class up so beginners can focus on their requirements and guys who've been there longer can focus on their stuff. Other times I'll keep the whole class as one group and work on something.

I can't really be more specific than that because of the variety of stuff but a rough guideline I use is one very hard class followed by two easier (relative term ) ones. That method served me well during the military as well. If every class is hard you don't give the body a chance to heal, if every class is easy, you don't test your limits so we mix it up thus.

If I'm doing something technical involved I'll do that in a class before any hard physical stuff so people are fresh and can pick up the maximum information. Other times if it's just going to be a simple class on sparring or basic strikes we'll go all out and beast them.

That's about it. Classes go for an hour to an hour and a half and the average person can get through all the material in about ten months. That's slightly longer than they gave us in the military but the mission perameters we have in civvie street are more complex than the military. In the latter it's what to do if you're primary weapon has malfunctioned in close quarter combat and is designed to get you another primary weapon ASAP. In civvie street we have far more legal restrictions so have to have a slightly bigger playbook to draw from.

Last important difference between the military guys and the civvies is that in the military they're already in shape and they're aggressive and they're motivated. In civvie street they may be overweight, they may lack aggression, and combat experience etc so they have to brought along a little bit slower.

Hope that helps

Nick

Sorry,

Just realized I missed the bit on awareness. A lot of times an explanation of the color codes (grace of Jeff Cooper) and what they mean is my starting point.

Then I'll point out concrete things to start doing like sitting in public where your back isn't to the door/crowd etc, keeping the wheels of the car in front of you in traffic visible over the bonnet, locking your doors, wearing seat belts and so on. The hope here is that once they are "aware" of those behaviours they'll adopt them in their everyday life.

In gun classes I've told everyone to attempt to snatch each other's weapons at any time during the class...that keeps you on your toes with regards to people getting in close to you and maintaining awareness of where your weapon is.

When I go to seminars I'll designate 3 or 4 guys in the crowd and arm them with training blades (nobody else knows this is going on) and give them a number each. At various times during the day I'll scream out their number and their goal is to stab as many people around them as possible. First go round they get loads of people...by the end of the day hardly anyone.

Games like this really help. Almost every body guard course I've ever been on uses the same sort of tool to teach their guys. On the way to lunch and/or the range people designated as bad guys will attempt attacks on the person designated as client which starts to teach you to be on your toes all the time.

Kathy Long and I had dinner once in CA and she told me about her black belt test which included an attack from three black belts at the club anytime during the seventy two hours after the formal part of the test. She didn't know where or when it was coming from but, if they were able to get her, she'd have failed (They attacked her coming home at 2am BTW and she beat them and passed).

Finally, I don't use them in FIST but kata training is brilliant for awareness training. When they're done right, katas are supposed to be done in unison. I.e. we all start, move and finish at exactly the same time. Dancers have an easy time of these because their moves coincide with the music they're playing. We don't play music so I have to use peripheral vision to pick up movement of class mates beside me, my ears to pick up foot work, breathing and the rustle of clothing etc behind me and so on.

Nick

Nick, the designated badguy idea is very good, I'm going to bring that to our training.
Lots of other good stuff as well. Thanks.

Cheers Nick,

That's good stuff.

Do you find in a class of an hour/hour and half you get time to cover all the material you have planned, sometime I am surprised at how often I have to go back over things and just dont get enough time.


Alan

Helllllll no....I always run out of time. The first seminar I ever taught here we started Friday night from 1800 -2200. Went all day Saturday with only one hour for lunch and then most of Sunday.

I found out after that one it's a better learning process to break it in to hour long blocks with 5 min breaks in between otherwise everyone suffers from information overload.

whenever I see the mcdojos doing an hour of calisthenics and 20 minutes of techniques I always suspect it's because the instructor just doesn't have much knowledge/info to impart.

Nick

Hi Nick

When I run my classes I always try to get a realitvly hard warm up in for the fitness side. Usualy there are a fair amount of running about, press ups and sit ups involved and what ever leg exercises I fancy then move onto more combat orientated drills (such as grappling or boxing drills that get you sweaty)

I do this because none of the people I train are fit, IMO me included.

How knackered would say you should be after a warm up? I like everyone to be fairly sweaty and out of breath then move onto some more relaxed stuff

AXE
Jagunco

It depends...some classes I'll absolutely beast the guys...because to push and find your limits is good and a valid part of training. There will be fights when all you want to do is quit, and having experienced that feeling in class, and having pushed beyond it, will help in the real world.

In other classes we warm up enough only so we don't strain anything when working out...that balance is back to the 1 hard, 2 less hard that I mentioned.

There's a lot of ways to mix it up as well. You can do a killer warm up at the start, or at the end. You can also do a set of exercises then a drill/technique then exercises, then drill/technique and so on for the entire class.

I don't like to spend too much time on getting fit though. I firmly believe that is down to the person to do in their own time...I try to keep in mind they're coming to me to learn how to survive a fight and not drop weight or get in shape. It should only be a by-product of fight training, not the goal.

Nick