short clip

one of my students felt lazy so he was asked to record--only rules are after
a hit, try and get away [no strikes allowed, which is frustrating but safer]
the attackers are allowed more liberties...muddy day brought many fine
rewards and high laundry bills to be sure [choking, i even got clapped on my
ear which i was nervous about since i just got over being deaf for 2 weeks]




he was taping forever, don't know what happened--this is all i found on the guys personal profile

oo0o0oooo0oo

just found this one too



the guy holding the pads in the first clip is my top guy...he's the one that seems to find
ways of getting hold of regular pressure [i have no illusions about this, probably a
real d*&k any where else but he has a home here ]

Love the clips, Russ! Your class look like a blast
There was deffo a Rugby/Am Football element to the chase down part.

OK Russ for some odd when I watched the clips I was reminded of a game we used to play when I was a kid. The game was called "Maul Ball" and we palyed it until I was in my late teens. The general idea was a bunch of my friends would get together in an open field, all of us would get into a circle and one would toss a ball (usually an American football) straight up, when the ball came down someone would catch it (after much shoving,shouldering, and tripping). The person who caught the ball would then run with the ball with the single goal of retaining possession for as long as possible while fending of all attempts to take it. All of the others would attempt to take the ball by almost any means possible short of actually punching/ kicking the head or groin. The most common method was tackling the carrier and striping the ball away.

After the ball was taken the holder would start the process all over again. All of this was conducted without any sort of helmut or padding. I haven't thought about this in years but it explains why kids in my era were pretty tough both mentally and physically.

Keep safe and train hard/smart, (the suddenly feeling old) Mark H

HAHAHA markh - I suspect many of those old fashioned games that came down to us, are training for battle on some level. We played British Bulldog ... something similar to the game you described. I remember it got banned from our school because someone broke their arm playing it .... Remember that game, Russ?

maija wrote:

HAHAHA markh - I suspect many of those old fashioned games that came down to us, are training for battle on some level. We played British Bulldog ... something similar to the game you described. I remember it got banned from our school because someone broke their arm playing it .... Remember that game, Russ?

ha ha ha ha ha...there's a blast from the past, i used to live for that game. and thanx for the responses Maija/Mark--would
have said so earlier but i just put the two crazy kids to sleep. that drill one of my students thought up. he wanted 'getaway'
pressure. he's the pad holder in the first clip. when i come up with a drill, it's usually more dire: small room, one exit, 3 or
4 folks descending...not always a happy ending

what i sort of like--wouldn't have done it otherwise, is that i found this drill reminds one to actually try and getaway. my room equivalent turns into alot of contact when running is just as good if not better. anyway, God knows how my clip up
loader decided on what to post. this a glimpse of the class. i'm glad i get to watch me getting away, i suppose there's that.
the other run, i was taken down like a beast by wild dogs, a serious choke which i gently bit out of three times before finally
packing it in . strikes would, of course, make the whole thing different for all but i'm careful not to wind folks up too too
much. several head slams later [last week] and i don't wish to lose the sort of fine line between macho laughter, and macho
chip on the shoulder.

maybe a clip will come up in the future for grappling, drive backs, padwork...who knows? new to me, never EVER film myself. perhaps the lens cracked after this shot

Good drills and fun all at the same time... sweeeet

looks like they are really taking it well too mate, not getting over excited or anything

nice and chaotic... ok, now upload the drills in the small room

good that you've got that student participation where they are coming up with elements of the drills too

MarkH and Maija - Ive theorised for a while that there is a huge gap between people who grew up playfighting/roughhousing and those who havent... dogs do it, monkeys do it, people who want to learn to fight need it in some format too

contact, contact, contact

Nice one Russ

Richard Grannon wrote:

looks like they are really taking it well too mate, not getting over excited or anything

nice and chaotic... ok, now upload the drills in the small room

good that you've got that student participation where they are coming up with elements of the drills too

MarkH and Maija - Ive theorised for a while that there is a huge gap between people who grew up playfighting/roughhousing and those who havent... dogs do it, monkeys do it, people who want to learn to fight need it in some format too

contact, contact, contact

Nice one Russ

cheers mate...when that young bloke holding the pads shows up--which is essentially
every time [he loves contact] i hold some drill or other. when he's not there, there's
almost no point. like some lion cub, if no-one's fighting he'll start choking people by
surprize...completely mental that one. a real blessing for the pace

otherwise i spend more time on the drive backs and pad work, then logistics of take
downs not really under pressure but just mild non-compliance.

working on the small room thing--less running and more scuff marks

Funny thing synchronicity, there I was thinking about the whole ..."And then GET AWAY" part of training, - and found this post of Chiron's from Jan 15:
Quote:" Obvious Epiphany

Another super-obvious training epiphany.

One of the key concepts in survival fighting is to always fight to the goal. You do not do the same things to escape that you do to neutralize a threat. You do not defend yourself the same way that you defend someone else. Sometimes drawing attention is a more achievable goal than prevailing in the moment… and other times you don’t want attention. Goals (and parameters) dictate strategy, which dictate tactics, which dictate technique.

So one of the basic training items is to change the goal. Groundfighting? Person A wins by submission, but person B wins if he gets to his feet. Fighting out of a corner can be practiced primarily to get skill at fighting in restricted space or the goal can be changed to get time and space to run.

The minor epiphany is that in self-defense training, the goal change only applies to one person. Noticed this the other day practicing response- bad guy (BG) attacks, good guy (GG) takes him out as normal. When GG was supposed to fight to the door, the student playing the BG subtly changed attacks to prevent escape.

You see things in training that profoundly affect real life.

BGs, in real life, are going to do what they are going to do. They have their own goals, strategies and tactics. The victim’s defensive strategies are both unknown and largely the BG doesn’t care. His tactics have been honed and he is used to the victim being too frozen to respond at all.

So it becomes an interplay of known and unknown strategies. That’s just a cool insight, another way to look at conflict.

For training, however, it becomes critical to ensure that the uke, the student playing the BG, is performing his role as a BG, with his agenda, as if completely unaware of what tori (GG) intends. That keeps some of the training artifacts from creeping in."

I remember having a discussion on The Dog brothers forum about how to make the players in the knife fights they host at their Gathering more realistic. In the fight both players are armed and the standard ending was that both 'died'.
Obviously this might not be unusual, but if the goal is to get away, how to add that focus of trying to survive TO get away ..?
I think one suggestion I came up with was to fight the opponent to get to an object, and try to get to the opposite side of the mat with it, without getting 'killed'. ..... Sounds a bit like Rugby doesn't it?!

maija wrote:

Funny thing synchronicity...

...one suggestion I came up with was to fight the opponent to get to an object, and try to get to the opposite side of the mat with it, without getting 'killed'. ..... Sounds a bit like Rugby doesn't it?!

ha ha...it does indeed, very cool entry mate.
timing came to my mind, as in--these fellas have enormous egos. after i showed them a comment from the famous and
[in a good way] notorious Richie, they became more stoked. the crafty fooka in me has blatently implied that there are
folks overseas wanting more of the tight quarters RBSD--with more hands on. i'm a bad man . but the way i look
at it, it's plus' all round for all our trainings

how do i live with myself, easy, it will up their game...today's training was just to die for in fact, the caucasian in
the clip was a fella with not much going on for ages. one of our infrequent thug types came back today to train--the one with the most potential but an annoying f&*k in that he never makes it to trainings. my wall flower hung him up to dry, it was
probably the biggest hit of the year. the prompt rematch had to be ended--pulled apart actually, because my [newly] once-
wall flower couldn't accept defeat anymore when he was losing ground on the rematch and had to be pulled off of a striking game that was quite spirited. my lil' boy's growing up

we had to discuss the idea of the tribe after, thanks to the dog brothers

synchronicity and timing then pleasant dreams--me

Chiron says

Quote :

Goals (and parameters) dictate strategy, which dictate tactics, which dictate technique.

so true. how many times do you see people going through drills roboticaly focussin on (mentally masturbating over) techniques... when the objectives, the goals of the drills ARENT EVEN GIVEN!!!

what are the goals? what are the parameters? everything else is secondary to that, to do it the other way around is cart before horse, but very, very common... I think it will be a VERY long time before that "techniques focussed" mental virus dies out.

Russ, let me know if I can help point them in the right direction. "Richie (with all the assumed authority that comes with knowing how to post youtube clips and make websites ) says you guys should do more of THIS"

Richard Grannon wrote:

Russ, let me know if I can help point them in the right direction. "Richie (with all the assumed authority that comes with knowing how to post youtube clips and make websites ) says you guys should do more of THIS"

oh you know i will mate, i'm not too proud


...and to the first point--goals, maybe it's because of the pressure they get, or whatever, but it seemed to come
naturally to them right from the get go. it's over the fence to safety or your fekked--etc.... we also have
a rule--if we can't make a technique work under duress, we're either practicing it until we can, making another
more user friendly version of it, or dropping it altogether [head controls comes to mind, where one tends to be
accessible to all at all out speed, another at half throttle, and the third at a stand still. in other words if i see
someone trying to glorify a technique that either doesn't pan out much or tends to take too much work when
kicking someone's feet out has worked better...

it always seemed better to teach stuff more to see what lends to their tastes. sort of, 'does that work for you?'
'great, then keep it.' the guy holding the pads, for instance, really is able to use this one head control because
he feels it, it somehow fits in to how he'd manhandle someone, not so for all the others. if that makes any sense.

...after looking at many entries--this one rings the truest for what i remember as 'British Bulldog'...probably
varies everywhere. i don't remember 100 kids--but maybe 30.

waddaya think Mark, is this like Maul Ball, or different. i remember pile ups and rough tackles...occasionally
with the inexperienced, getting about 20 yards more with stragglers hanging on some sod's shoulders and
waist...looking for all the world like one of those mother scorpians with all her young on her back

A brutal game played by British school kids. Usually played on a football pitch by anywhere between 10 and 100 players.

All but one of the players would start at one end of the pitch, the lone "bulldog" would stand in the middle of the pitch (the bulldog either volunteered because he was a nutter or was forced to do it by the rest of the players).

The people at the end of the pitch would then attempt to reach the other end of the pitch. The job of the bulldog was to take as many people down as possible. Unlike other violent games such as rugby there are no rules as to how you can take someone down, tripping people up and flying kicks are both perfectly acceptable.

Anyone the bulldog manages to take down are now bulldogs and stand in the middle for the next round. The game continues in the same fashion until some unfortunate mug is the only one standing at the end of the pitch and has to attempt to run past 100 kids who want to take him down by any means necessary.

The game ends when someone is seriously injured, a fight breaks out or the teachers come out and remind you that this game has been banned for a very long time

Russ,

Slightly different rules but same results...energy,pain,mayhem.......and fun.

Keep safe and train hard/smart, Mark H