The Pivot: the door opens; the door closes

Last night’s boxing class (March 27) featured the use of the pivot. Unlike slips, ducks and rolls, which feel rather foreign to me, the pivot feels very natural. Since the pivot involves swinging the entire body, either forward or backward, I liken it to a door swinging on its hinges. And just like a door can open or close, the pivot can open up a new avenue of attack for you, or it can close off your opponent’s avenue of attack. It seems like a great way to flank your opponent when you’re attacking because you quickly take your attack from  their front to their side. When your opponent is executing a good attack and closing distance on you, the pivot can slam the door on their advance because you move from a position of defense when you’re in their line of attack, to a position of offense when you swing to their side.

1 more thing about shooting

After ICS training, the pistol feels like
an extension of my hand hardwired to my
own nervous system.

One more thing to say about the Israeli combat shooting (ICS) instruction I received from Mr. Stuart …. Despite owning handguns for a longtime and shooting them every few months, I never developed the relationship with the pistol that I now have after only a few hours of professional instruction. It’s hard to describe, but the pistol no longer seems like a piece of external equipment that I pick up and try to manipulate. The pistol now feels like an extension of my own body, as if it has been integrated into my own nervous system and does what I tell it to do, not like in the past when I would have to ask it and coax it to do what I wanted.

Fitness training as a full-time job

Sitting at my desk for eight hours a day makes me wish I could make physical training my full-time job. I don't want to become a trainer and train others, and I'm too old and lack the skill to become a professional, or amateur, athlete, I just want to get paid for my own training. Oh, and I want to have health coverage, too. 
It's not that crazy of an idea. When I used to workout in "normal" gyms with their rows of stationary bikes, treadmills and nautilus machines, I always looked at the wasted energy. What I mean is that there were a dozen people expending their caloric energy for their own health beneftit when at the same time  they could have been creating electricity. Creating electricity is a fairly simple process: according to Wikipedia,  "electricity is generated by the movement of a loop of wire, or disc of copper between the poles of a magnet."

Imagine this: we give up fossil fuels and rely on people power. Huge hangers filled with stationary bikes, treadmills and other types of equipment that could be used to create electricity  become the new power plants. In a heartbeat I would apply to become a energy producer. What a great job that would be. Ride a stationary bike for hours and read a book, listen to music, or watch TV and get a workout while I create clean engergy.

Essentially what I want is to kill two birds with one stone. There are days that I don't feel like going to the gym after a busy day of work. On those days I want my job to be my workout. This isn't hard to accomplish. There are plenty of jobs that provide incredible workouts. Several weekends during the year I'll do weekend work with friends who are landscapers, concrete masons and hardscapers. Those are jobs where you get paid and get fit at the same time. Run a jackhammer for two hours breaking up an old concrete sidewalk and then toss the broken pieces into a dumptruck. It willl crush you. Or, do the digging required for a dry-stack stone wall. That's a core workout from hell. Dig, dig, dig and fill up a wheelbarrow and then push the wheelbarrow thirty yards and dump it. Then move the stones for the wall. You could also work with a guy setting a brick patio. This will require an enormous amount of digging, pushing wheelbarrows filled with screenings and crushed stone and carrying 10 bricks at a time.

Maybe I'm on to something here. I'll bet there are fitness nuts out there looking for a way to change up their workout who would do some of these jobs for free. Their payment would come in the form of sweat, lactic acid and shredded muscles. If you want try some working class fitness, I can set you up with my buddy who pours concrete sidewalks. Come to think of it, I should I take a day off from working at the paper and go work with him. It only takes a day of hard labor to make me thankful that I can sit at a desk all day and get paid for it.

Home on the range with Israeli Combat Shooting

There was blood on the gun. It was my own blood. A circular patch on the second knuckle of my right  thumb was raw, worn by the deathgrip I had been clutching the pistol in for the better part of an hour. It was well over 100, the amount of times I had racked the Glock by that point, and now my skin and a smear of red were spread on the top of the grip of the gun. I put black tape over the raw patch on my thumb, just like I had done to my index finger on my left hand earlier, stood in ready position, loaded another magazine and waited for the command to fire.
I was having fun and I was learning, too. Even though I've owned handguns for more than 15 years, I never had any professional training on their proper usage. Now I was getting it. It all felt pretty natural and, like just about anything taught from the Israeli perspective, made tons of practical sense. While I've always been comfortable around guns, I feel even more so after the Israeli Combat Shooting (ICS) class. And after shooting without really using the gun's sights,  I don't think I'll ever waste the time to stand in front of a target and line up the sights. That seems almost silly now.

I own a .40 Ruger and I welcomed the lower caliber and lower weight of Mr. Stuart's Glock 19, a 9mm, that I was using. This was only the second time I had fired a Glock and I couldn't seem to catch on to the trigger reset. This came into play when I had to fire three rounds in rapid succession. Here's how it worked. Two targets were set up, one on top of the other. The bottom target was the body, the top target was the head. On the command of fire, I had to assume the firing position, rack the pistol and fire two shots to the body and then one shot to the head. The two shots to the body should have almost been simultaneous with a slight pause between the second and third shot as I acquired the new target. Sometimes I was getting the two body shots off pretty fast, but several times I was too slow. This had to do with me not fully understanding the trigger reset on the Glock. I was letting my trigger finger move too far before squeezing off the second round.  I shouldn't have been letting the trigger come out as far as I was so I was losing valuable time measured in hundreds or thousandths of a second.

After ICS, I have more confidence with a pistol,  more skill with a pistol and had a boat load of fun  being trained. Considering how much I love being trained, I would make a great dog. Ruff, Ruff. More training, please.

Using deception to attack

We channeled the wisdom of military strategist Sun Tzu in last night's boxing class. Sun Tzu stresses the use of deception when attacking an enemy. If  the main target of your attack is the enemy's water supply, first attack his ammunition supply with a diversionary force. Once the enemy's forces are busy protecting the ammunition supply, then you attack the water supply. In boxing class we practiced jabs to the body. It's not a great punch, but it is a great diversion. Our main target was the head, so following Sun Tzu's advice we first attacked the body, drawing the enemy's attention low and then attacked the head with a straight right.

Born around 544 BC, the knowledge
found in Sun Tzu's "The Art of War"
is still used today by modern military powers.

I say the jab to the body isn't a great punch because it leaves you wide open for a counter. When throwing the jab to the body it's important to keep your chin tucked in and for the right hand to cover your face. Now, that said, the fact that jabbing to the body leaves you wide open for a counter is also one of its strengths. The counter is predictably going to be a straight right from your opponent, so by throwing the jab to the body your setting up your opponent for two things: your straight right to the head if they drop their guard to protect their body, or, if he counters with  a  right, you're countering his  right by using a shoulder roll and pivoting right which places you in a position where you've now outflanked your opponent and are facing the side of his body where you can deliver blows to his kidneys and head.

This idea of setting up your opponent for your future moves is like, as Mr. Stuart says, "playing chess." This is entering a realm of advanced strategy and it will take me a while before I can fully incorporate it. For the foreseeable future I'll be sticking to the game of checkers.

Need some aggro? Books and movies to quench your thirst

Allergies rendered me into a snot factory on Sunday and Monday and made it impossible for me to attend combat fitness and Haganah on March 19. So instead of working out, I watched “13 Assassins,” a movie loaned to me by a friend at the gym. It was a pretty cool Samurai flick with some good sword play and the always compelling code of the Samurai, or bushido. After watching Assassins only a day after the season finale of “The Walking Dead” that featured a hooded, sword-wielding stranger  decapitate a zombie, I have a strong urge to learn how to use a Samurai sword. But that urge will have to wait, first I’ll get proficient with just a knife, then I’ll  move onto bigger edged weapons. What doesn’t have to wait, though, is the watching or reading of fictional characters whoop ass with their fists and feet and all types of weaponry. If you have the urge to watch or read some good agro, here’s a short list of my favorites in no particular order:

Hannah - This movie came out in 2011 and features some awesome hand-to-hand combat between a teenage girl, her father, neo-nazis and covert government henchmen.

This is One-Eye from "Valhalla Rising." Think you could
beat a guy who is tied to a post? Think again.

Valhalla Rising – Weird. Violent. Beautiful. Meet One-eye, a slave used to fight other slaves in the Celtic Highlands way back in the day. Chained to a post and sometimes fighting two men at once, One-Eye comes up with creative ways to kill with rope and arrowhead.

Any of the Jason Bourne movies – Yeah, the storylines get a bit unbelievable, but the one-on-one fight scenes are still good.

Eastern Promises – Good flick about the Russian mob featuring Viggo Mortensen. The fight scene in the steam bath is great, and not because Viggo is naked. But the idea having to fight naked on a wet tile floor against two dudes with blades is absolutely horrifying.

Those are the only movies my brain can think of at 9 a.m., but here are a few books:

Anything written by Cormac McCarthy – This is the guy who wrote the apocalyptic tale of survival “The Road” and the narco-thriller “No Country for Old Men.” But these two books, which were made into movies, pale in comparison to his work “Blood Meridian.” If you like blood … lots of blood with top-notch writing, go get this book today. I shouldn’t even call it writing. This book is literature at its finest and yet it’s so chock full of scalpings, beheadings, shootings, neck breakings and skull crushinings, that you don’t go more than five pages without something horrific happening. This story is based upon factual events that transpired in the mid-1800s with a group of scalp hunters commissioned by the Mexican government to rid their land of Indians. Here’s a sample of the McCarthy’s writing from page 4 of “Blood Meridian”: “They fight with fists, with feet, with bottles or knives. All races, all breeds. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes. Men from lands so far and queer that standing over them where they lie bleeding in the mud he feels mankind itself vindicated.”

The Dune Series – The first six books of the Dune series will change your life. If you ever feel like you’re straying from the path of constant training and physical improvement, these books will set you straight. Taking place thousands of years in future, you meet Paul Atreides, heir to House Atreides. In this society full of double crosses, palace intrigue, espionage, traitors, poisons and assassins, danger lurks everywhere. The writer, Frank Herbert wrote the first book in 1965 and spares no details in the relentless physical conditioning and combat training that the main characters undergo to be able to face an attack at any moment. If you are a guy, you’re going to wish that you could be House Atreides swordmaster Duncan Idaho. If you’re a girl, you’re going to wish that you could join The Bene Gesserit and learn their finely tuned killing skills that are matched only by their cunning and physical beauty.

Shogun – this epic novel by James Clavelle takes place in feudal Japan during the heyday of the Samurai. This was a time when Japan was virtually closed off from the rest of the world and the only contact they had with Europeans came by way of Portuguese missionaries, until Blackthorne, an English captain of the sea becomes shipwrecked with his crew. This book is so detailed you’ll learn some Japanese and learn lots about the Samurai. It’s long, around 1,400 pages, and it is very slow in some spots, but if you can power through the lulls you’re rewarded with some sweet sword fights, ninjas, and even some good sex scenes. Seriously, if you like Samurai and their code of honor, this is a must read.
Fight – this book by Eugene Robinson is so well written it’s hard to believe that the writer is also a fighter who has been hit repeatedly on the head. The real title of this book is Fight: everything you ever wanted to know about kicking ass but were afraid to ask because you thought you would get your ass kicked. It is a non-fiction account of Robinson and how he got into fighting through underground boxing clubs, his band Oxbow and the early days of MMA. It also includes interviews with famous fighters, killers and jailhouse assassins. Did I mention that it’s incredibly well written?

Just relax. That guy's only trying to kick you in the head

There are a couple of things that seemed illogical to me when first learning to fight: you move toward your opponent's punches, not away from them; you punch with your feet and legs, not your hands; you have to stay relaxed in order to fight effectively. This last one has been the hardest for me to wrap my head around. Stay relaxed while fists and feet and knives are moving toward my face at great speed? Are you nutso?  I'm high strung. I'm a worrier. Relaxation at the best of times is a foreign concept to me, so the idea that I could stay relaxed when someone is trying to hurt me seems kind of silly. But, like many other seemingly illogical ideas surrounding fighting, I'm starting to see the light on this one, too.

The simplest reason for staying relaxed while fighting is that tension makes you slow and vulnerable. Example 1: When in your fighting stance, don't ball your hands into tight fists. This contraction of the muscles and the tension it creates slows down your punch. Only turn your hands into tight fists the moment before your hand hits the target. Example 2: This might only apply to me, but tension sort of gives me tunnel vision. If I'm tense or nervous I tend to become fixated on one particular threat. So I might only focus on my opponent's punch and not his kick, or I fixate on trying to hit him with a kick when he's really inviting me to hit him with a jab. Example 3: You can't be tense and also have fluid movement and if you don't have fluid movement you ain't dancing and if you ain't dancing you ain't fighting your opponent, you're fighting yourself.

Movement is critical when fighting. I'll say it again, movement is critical when fighting. I'm just starting to grasp this concept but it's importance isn't lost on me. The first few weeks of doing the light sparring in boxing class was reminiscent of the way naval battles used to be fought when the ships would pull up broadside to one another and start firing thier cannon from a static position until one ship couldn't fire anymore. Incorporating movment into the fight eliminates this squared-off style and creates a style where you're keeping your opponent wondering, forcing him to move where you want him to move and as he tries to follow you, opportunities are created where you can strike.

I know that my footwork now is anything but graceful, no floating like a butterfly yet, because I've yet to learn how to properly relax and rid my body of tension. I know that I can amass all the skill in the world, but if I can't stay loose during a fight that skill won't do me any good. So this week I will keep one thougth in the forefront of my mind, I can see it there in blazing, neon orange letters: I will stay relaxed and loose and I will not remain static.

Corporeal dyslexia & thinking with my feet

Corporeal dyslexia. This is my own homemade term to describe my predicament of how I can perform a certain combative when the attacker is on my right side, but cannot perform it when the attacker is on my left side. Same attacker. Same attack. Different result, with that result being failure. I call it corporeal (body) dyslexia because I tend to reverse my movements when facing an attack from the side I’m not accustomed to. Here’s an example: last night we practiced avoiding the right-handed straight punch. To avoid it, we step to our left and punch to the body with our right hand. OK. All well and good doing that. I’ve been doing it right for three months. Then, we switched to avoiding a left-handed punch. We’re supposed to do the exact same thing, move to our left and punch to the body with our right, except that I couldn’t convince myself to keep stepping to my left. Over and over again I continued to step to my right and found myself in a no-man’s land where I was entirely out of position and had no clue as to what I should do from there. Had I done that in a real fight, I would have to call a mulligan and ask the guy to please try and hit me in the face with his left-handed punch one more time.

In this instance I have an idea why I was getting it wrong. Dodging the left-handed punch Haganah style conflicts with dodging a left-handed punch boxing style.  In boxing, avoiding that left hand would mean slipping to my right. I can understand why I’m getting backwards, I’m confusing the two fighting styles. But with the other moves I get backwards … that’s just me being confused.

One thing I’m not confused about anymore (OK, really only less confused about) is how to maintain proper form when punching rapidly. “Think with your feet.” This sage advice from Mr. Stuart has greatly simplified the process. Punches start in your feet, so let your feet guide you. Punches don’t start in your hands, so just keep the hands out of this.

Cleared to spar

I might come to regret it if I get my bell rung, but I've been given the green light to do full-on sparring and I'm pretty excited about that. It'll mean getting to the gym on a Friday or Sunday, typically my days off, and finding people around my same weight who also want to spar. The idea behind sparring is you want to go against people better than yourself. That shouldn't be difficult for me.

Last night's boxing class (March 13) was a good one. We spent more time on head movement and punching form. The most memorable thing from last night was the extended "rest" period we had. "Rest" tends to have a different meaning in boxing class than it does in the outside world. "Rest" during boxing class means that in between a round of throwing and blocking punches you get a break by assuming a squat position so your thighs are parrallel to the floor, back straight, butt out and arms extended straight out in front of your chest so they are also parallel to the floor. Then you hold it for a minute. It burns. It really, really burns.

Dialing up the speed keeps it real

Last night’s combat fitness (March 12) featured another round of code x. This is when our normal rest period between stations on the circuit gets eliminated and replaced with more exercise. Hooray for more exercise!

Haganah class focused on proper punching technique. I could practice this for 8 months and still not get it down completely. What I can do slow, I cannot do fast. I understand the mechanics of the jab and straight right, but when it comes time to start throwing them fast, my form deteriorates.

Staying with the same concept of being able to do things slow but not fast, I’m trying to make the Haganah drills more realistic by speeding them up. Last night we practiced avoiding a slashing attack from a knife. To avoid the attack you step to the side and seize the attacker’s knife arm. Practicing slow a few times is good, but to keep doing it slow doesn’t teach much. One of my biggest deficiencies is speed and speed and accuracy are certainly needed to seize an arm bearing a knife. My partner was up for it so we started slashing at each other in real time while not remaining static. We circled each other, threw some faints in and then slashed with speed.  It was realistic and way more fun than doing it slow.

Just how doing the drills in real time helps develop speed, the accuracy of punches does the same thing. When we’re practicing avoiding the straight punch, it doesn’t teach us much if our partner isn’t punching fast and directly at our faces. Yeah, you might get punched in the face if you’re not fast enough, but it is a fight class. If you’re taking a cooking class you can expect to cut yourself while chopping onions and burn yourself on the stove. If you’re taking a fighting class you can expect to get hit in the face. Partner preservation is always a top priority, but that doesn’t mean we need to sacrifice reality. You’re doing your partner a disservice if you’re throwing fast and accurate.

P.S.: Based upon the reactions of my friends in the gym, shaving my beard was a bad decision. I pretty much realized it was a bad decision as soon as I did it.  Fear not, the beard will return!

Medicine ball babies & softly spoken attack commands

During Saturday's knife fighting class we tried to stab babies ... sort of. Ok, there were no babies in the gym and no babies were stabbed in the making of Saturday's knife class. Allow me to explain. During some of our sparring sessions one person had to hold a medicine ball and shield it from their opponent as if it were their own child they were trying to protect from a knife-wielding maniac. Believe it or not, I performed better while I was holding my baby. I guess it had to do with staying on the defensive and only countering when my opponent committed himself to an attack. When my opponent held the baby, he tore me up, filleted me. It was like I became so intent on trying to stab his medicince ball baby that I forgot all about defense. I think the medicine ball baby demonstrates two things: one, when we have  a little bit of motivation, even made up motivation of protecting a medicine ball, we perform better, sort of like the momma grizzly coming out in us; two,  having a more defensive-minded approach to the fight makes you more cautious, less willing to attack, but ready to exploit your opponent's mistakes.

This was my bouncing baby boy during
knife sparring. We had to cradle  the
medicine ball as if it were our own child
while fending off an attack.

Knife class also featured the use of voice commands and conditioning. This is how it worked: We had color-coded commands. Yellow meant do nothing. Red meant slash the hand and stab. Green meant push and slash. When the instructor said a color, we had to perform the appropriate action. Sounds easy, right? It is pretty easy when you pay attention and the volume of the commands stays consistent, but just when you become accustomed to the commands being yelled, the commands would be given at conversation volume and then at an even lower volume. The idea here is to be prepared to fight even if your sensory input does register threat. Your opponent probably won't announce his attack with a war cry and his attack may even come during a seemingly benign interaction when there is no yelling. For example, a guy might stop you on a street and ask if you have a light for cigarette. He's not yelling, the tone of his voice is neutral and the volume is low and then he's coming at you. So the varied volume of the instructor's voice commands forced us to ignore yelling or softly-spoken commands and focuse on what the color meant we should do. Just because there's lots of noise in a certain situation doesn't mean you lash out with an attack, and just because there's no noise it doesn't mean that all is ok.

Combat Fitness
There's code blue - 15 seconds rest during each station on the circuit. There's code red -  no rest between stations on the circuit. Now there's code x - exercise between stations on the circuit. Saturday's combat fitness (March 10) class debuted code x and it injected the circuit with a heavier work load. So instead of having rest or no rest between stations, we did mountain climbers, jumping jacks and a bunch of other exercises for 30 seconds between each station. It sucked while it lasted, but it made finishing the circuit all the more gratifying.

Size don't matter

Last night’s kickboxing class was a good one. I finished it feeling better than when I started it, mentally and physically. My knees have been hurting me lately, but somehow kickboxing made them feel better. This is surprising considering the one warm-up exercise that involves my partner trapping my kick and holding my extended leg against his ribcage with one arm while I hop on one leg and throw punches. And the whole time I’m hopping, he’s pulling me and making me move in circles. Go figure. I felt better mentally after class because I was finally able to start incorporating some proper movement into my sparring. Things just clicked.

I got to spar with five people and each one was a different size and one was even left handed. It never ceases to amaze me as to who is good at sparring. Keep in mind that I’m not that great at it, but sparring always proves that size can be insignificant. A guy who stands over 6 foot and looks like he could crush coconuts between his bicep and forearm will simply cover up and go on the defensive the whole time,  but a teenage girl weighing in at 110 pounds will engage with a flurry of punches and kicks to my head. 

Don't let warm days thwart exercise

These first hints of spring with sunshine and warm temperatures make it a challenge to get to the gym. When I’m exposed to bright sun and temperatures in the mid-60s I’m drawn to my barbeque like a magnet. And when I’m drawn to my barbeque I develop an insatiable thirst for alcoholic beverages. Stay strong, man! This urge to wuss out and skip class will pass once nice days become common again, but right now the first thing I want to do when I get home from work is crack a Victory lager and sit outside. OK. Enough of that.
My knees feel better after taking off Tuesday night’s boxing class. But it seems like my body must always hurt somewhere, like pain will never truly go away, it will just migrate to another location. Today it’s my right quadricep. I took many, many knees to it last night during FIGHT class, each one seeming to land on the same spot and each one seeming sharper than the last.

Combat fitness class on March 7 started with a twist. We did a Crazy 8 warm up of jumping jacks, jump squats, burpees, pushups, modified V sits, toe-touch crunchers, jack-knives and up-downs. That certainly gets the blood flowing. I have a love-hate relationship with Crazy 8s. Love ‘em because they really push me to the limit and force me to cross thresholds into new endurance and muscle building territory. Hate ‘em because 90 percent of the class views them as a race. Sure, speed counts. You can’t be lackadaisical about it, but I think lots of people are sacrificing form for speed to the point where what they are doing isn’t remotely close to what they should be doing. Jump squats require you to actually jump. That means your feet leave the ground and your hands go over your head. Pushups are done by lowering your chest to where it almost touches the ground and then pushing yourself up to where your arms are almost straight. I’m done complaining.

Tonight is kickboxing class. No matter how nice it is outside when I get home at 5 I will not crack open a beer. No matter how nice it is outside when I get home at 5 I will not crack open a beer. No matter how nice it is outside when I get home at 5 I will not crack open a beer. No matter how nice it is outside when I get home at 5 I will not crack open a beer. No matter how nice it is outside when I get home at 5 I will not crack open a beer. No matter how nice it is outside when I get home at 5 I will not crack open a beer.

I have to keep that thought in my head all day. On a side note, Men’s Fitness has a fairly interesting article about DNA and exercise.

The trench is here to stay

I’m not sure if Mr. Stuart meant the current trench will stay, or if a new one will be built and remain permanently in the facility, but either way he said we’ll have a full-time trench. That’s pretty cool.

In last night’s class (March 5) we got to play in the trench again and reviewed the straight punch defense, just one of the defensive trench moves we learned during the seminar. I like the trench more and more and I think if I had to get into a fight today I would want it to be in a confined space. There are a couple of reasons for this: The trench narrows down the potential attacks you’ll face because the space eliminates lots of punches, kicks and elbows. It simplifies the encounter and your response to the attack. The trench requires a heightened degree of violence and ferocity and not so much technical and fine motor skills. Where boxing requires a great degree of accuracy and maneuvering, trench fighting is about making your opponent eat the wall. Fighting in the trench also reinforces one of the main points of Haganah, and that’s always move forward. Mr. Stuart says it over and over again, “When someone comes at you, the worst thing you can do is nothing. The second worst thing you can do is move backwards.” The trench boils this point down to its essence. There's no place to run and the only way to end the engagement is to incapacitate your attacker and move past him.

As much as I enjoyed the trench fighting seminar, it did tax my body a bit more than I'm accustomed to. It was held on Sunday which is usually a recovery day with no physical activity. It took me a while to warm up for last night's combat fitness class. Once I got going I was fine, but at first I felt like a rusty old engine. My knees have taken a beating and I'm seeing some swelling in the left one. It's 9:23 a.m. on Tuesday and right now I'm thinking of skipping tonight's boxing class. I consider this a tactical cop-out to give myself some time to elevate and ice. I would be seriously pissed if I injured myself and ended up missing weeks of training. Decision made, tonight I ice and elevate, but just to stay sharp, I'll watch a DVD on combat wrestling.  

Walls aren’t just for hanging pictures, they’re for smashing heads

It was quite the Haganah weekend. I had the usual classes on Saturday (combat fitness, Haganah, and knife fighting), but Sunday was a 5-hour Haganah seminar specializing in trench fighting. Don’t think of muddy fighting positions protected with barbed wire, instead, think of hand-to-hand combat taking place in a phone booth.

The trench fighting seminar brought former Israeli special forces commando and founder of the Haganah fighting system Mike Lee Kanarek to the West Chester FIGHT Center. The day was spent learning how to fight in confined spaces against opponents attacking with handguns, knives, fists, knees and feet. While the trench fighting skills imparted by Sir (that’s how we refer to Mr. Kanarek) are taken directly from the Israeli army’s experience of fighting in the confined urban environment of Lebanon, they easily apply to civilians and situations that any of us could find ourselves in. You might have to fight in a narrow alley, between rows of parked cars or the hallways of your own home.

The idea of fighting in a confined space seemed horrifying at first. A lot of what you know about conventional fighting becomes unusable: there’s very little room to punch, there’s no room to employ boxing skills like footwork and head movement, even throwing elbows becomes difficult. But what Sir points out right from the get-go is that the two walls on either side of you that seem to limit your movement so much, are really your allies. So if you have to go toe-to-toe with someone in a narrow hallway, don’t think of it as one on one, think of it as three on one because you’re going to use the walls to your advantage. How do you use walls to your advantage? Mainly by smashing your opponent’s hands, knees and head into them.

There was a “trench” constructed in the gym. It was made out of plywood and two-by-fours and was padded inside, but due to the fact that there were around 50 students in the seminar, we spent most of the time practicing along the walls of the gym which were not padded. Since the walls weren’t padded, partner preservation was a top priority, especially when it came to slamming their head, which is how almost every scenario ended. The only disappointing aspect of the seminar was that I, and most of the students there, only got to go through the actual trench once. All 50 or so students had to line up, some holding dummy guns, and wait their turn to enter. For a moment it struck me as some bizzare, painful amusement ride we were all waiting to take our turn on.

At the end of the day I was tired and my right hand was sore from repeated wall slammings, but I felt good about what I learned and now I'm fairly optimistic about fighting in confined spaces and using walls to my advantage.  I know for sure I will never look at walls  merely as things to hang pictures on.

Sparring: from fear to frustration to yearning

Last night’s kickboxing class featured some light sparring. We call it no contact, meaning you’re not supposed to punch to the face since we’re not wearing headgear, however, you can punch to the face if your opponent is covered up and able to block. My first sparring partner seemed to disregard that rule and tagged me a few times when I dropped my guard. They weren’t hard punches and he said sorry, but then added “I couldn’t resist,” which I take to mean he knew what he was doing and did it on purpose. That guy is way better at sparring than I am so it’ll take me several months until I can accidentally punch him in the face. I can try and be mad at him for not following the rules of no punches to the face, but the truth is that I’m mad at myself for allowing him to punch me in the face in the first place.
Sparring, at first, was frightening. Now that I’ve been taking boxing and kickboxing for two months, sparring has become fun. I should add that it has also become frustrating. When I first started sparring I had no idea what I was doing and I was afraid to get hit and I would freeze up when the punches and kicks came my way. Now I know just enough to be dangerous to myself: I’m willing to go on the offensive to apply the skills we’ve learned. With the type of sparring we’re doing now, I don’t really see the point in holding back, staying on the defensive and waiting for my opponent to make a mistake and then attack. We’re only sparring for 30 seconds at a time and then switching to another partner.  So last night I started going on the offensive, leading with kicks and trying to follow up with punches. But what mainly happened is that I would lead with a kick, close the distance and then get punched by my opponent.

The sparring doesn’t end when class is over, I’ll lay in bed going over each of my encounters trying to catalog what I did right, what I did wrong, wondering why I dropped my guard and got punched in the face, wondering why I didn’t trap the guy’s kick when he threw an obvious roundhouse … This is where the frustration comes in. I know what I should be doing but I’m not doing it and as I drift off to sleep I know that the only way to rectify my mistakes is to do more sparring. More sparring. More sparring. More sparring.

I am not a big guy. I’m of incredibly average size. I stand 5’ 9” and weigh 166 pounds and this makes me one of the smallest guys in the class. When sparring, I usually have to go against guys who are taller and heavier than me. Sometimes I have to go against guys who are way, way taller and heavier than I am. Since we’re only doing no contact, the size difference doesn’t matter that much. If we were throwing for real, then it would matter. It can be intimidating to square off with a dude who is 5 inches taller and at least 40 pounds heavier, but if he doesn’t know how to fight, his size advantage doesn’t matter. However, problems arise when my opponent towers over me and also knows what he’s doing. But those situations offer the best opportunity to learn. You can only get better by sparring people better than yourself. And if they happen to be bigger and better, well that’s just twice the learning.