Back in the swing of things

After missing almost all of my classes last week due to computer training at work that kept me in the office late, I made it to Saturday morning combat fitness and Haganah.

Combat fitness deviated from our normal circuit. Instead of doing 30 seconds at each station and going around the circuit twice, we didn’t work on the clock and went with reps instead. We were told to pick 8, 10 or 12 reps and this number is what we had to perform at each station and we would do each station three times. I wasn’t feeling very ambitious so I went with 8 reps. Some of the younger guys went with 12 and they’re bad asses for it.

This type of circuit doesn’t sound that bad at first, but when one of the stations is burpees into an upright kettle bell row, it kinda gets hard fast. This is how we do it: Stand next to a kettle bell so it’s on your right side (we were using a 35 pounder). Do a burpee and as you rise up grab the kettle bell and transition into an upright row. Bend down, set the kettle bell on the ground and transition into the burpee. Repeat 8 times for each side.

If you’re unfamiliar with the burpee, think back to your days in elementary school gym class and remember the squat thrust. Start from a standing position, quickly drop into a push-up and spring back to a standing position. You can greatly increase the difficulty of the burpee by doing a complete push-up before springing back to your feet and as you spring back to your feet add a vertical jump.

Along with mountain climbers and planks, the burpee is a deceptively simple exercise that will quickly kick you butt.

Prepare yourself for a very, very loud noise

In a post the other week I touched on the idea of the psychological training that happens in tandem with the physical training. In that post, I was saying how I needed to raise my level of aggression during sparring and to achieve that I have to assume a different mindset. Another aspect of psychological training is conditioning yourself for the things you know are going to happen. Besides recognizing that in a real situation your heart will be beating out of your chest and fear is going to want to paralyze you, there are the things like loud noises and hard surfaces you have to think about.

The Haganah instructors are always driving home the real-life scenarios of what we’re practicing on the mat. It’s going to be dark, you’re going to be scared, you will be caught off guard, you might be fighting in a confined space (between parked cars), you will most likely be fighting on concrete … the list goes on. So when the instructors see you perform a take down and your knee lands on the mat and not on your attacker’s chest, they will remind you that there will not be a soft mat for your knee to land on in a real situation. Your attacker’s chest is the soft surface to cushion your knee.

In my limited training, it’s the gun disarm that represents the clearest example of being prepared for the real-life scenario. Why the gun disarm? Because guns go BANG! And the closer you are to the gun, the louder the bang. During the gun disarm it is highly likely that your attacker will squeeze off a round while the gun is only a foot or two from your head. This is OK, because by the time he squeezes the trigger you will have already removed yourself from the line of fire. But if you’re not prepared for the blast of noise, heat, light and debris, and fall to the ground in fear, then all of your training will have been for naught.

So now when I practice the gun disarm, at the moment I remove myself from the line of fire I imagine the attacker pulling the trigger and I try to hear the blast and feel the heat and the shockwave of force that will follow.