Fighting Multiple Opponents – Some Training Components

As I have little expertise at fighting multiple opponents when devising training drills for fighting multiple attackers I draw from footage of real life situations. Akin to the Morris Method approach of  ‘watch the fight‘ this can provide some rich information.

In the last post I embedded the clip  of a victim surviving a multiple attacker situation. The clip from Turkey, looks like a road rage argument that escalates into violence. Three blokes attack one in the middle of a busy street and it’s all on cctv. To say that the bloke attacked does well is an understatement, and the clip provides an excellent example of some of the attributes required in a multiple attacker situation where there is plenty of space.

He is a continual flurry of movement, attack and defence. He moves and strikes while going back,  defends and strikes while cutting angles to fight his way out of trouble. He repeatedly knocks down his attackers even managing to knock one out cold! Admittedly, he was a better fighter than the opposition, but was nevertheless outnumbered. He successfully takes the skills he has, probably from boxing, and applies them to fighting multiple opponents. As a boxer he may never have trained specifically to fight multiple attackers but the movement, striking and defence skills he had accumulated were transferred to the street fight.

These skills, while not straightforward, can be covered in regular training and with a little imagination drills that tackle these issues can be expanded upon to become more appropriate to fighting multiple opponents. A number of further movement tactics can be adopted to use against multiple attackers.

Three of these I gleaned from an old internet article, the source of which I lost but have recovered at a different location. The Author, Darren Laur, grouped three tactics together and called them the “principle of S.C.A.R. (Screening, Cracking, And Re-directing)”.

• Screening – get a human shield! Position yourself so the attackers get in each others way, thereby being obstacles to others reaching you.
• Cracking – splitting the opponents. When possible move between the attackers, striking as you move. You can ‘bounce’ off them turning as you move into a better position.
• Redirecting – use the attackers momentum and direction against them by redirecting them into inanimate objects or other attackers

These in conjunction with two skills in addition to those from the clip but common in combat sports, namely clinching and feinting,  can be used within the context of the continual movement required for fighting multiple opponents.

• Clinching – not a boxing/mma clinch as such, rather using skills from clinch fighting to redirect or screen or set up a cracking movement
• Feinting – probably more like dropping a shoulder to feint in Association Football rather than feinting to throw a punch can be used to set up or in conjunction with the three tactics above

Clearly, these training components do NOT cover everything required to cover ALL multiple attacker possibilities. These are only useful where there is space to move, it does not cover the skills necessary to get back off the floor, for instance. But if successful continual movement could prevent the fight going to the floor, which is very dangerous when fighting multiple opponents.

BJ Penn belt taken, Mister Miyagi and Chopsticks

This post is NOT a Jackie Chan UFC crossover! I’ve missed a lot of UFC lately and and so have lost touch with whats being happening. Today I managed to catch some fights from UFC 112. BJ Penn lost his belt to Frankie Edgar and was taken down, for the first time in six years at lightweight! Amazing!

Penn v Sanchez

Watching the fight it became apparent that Penn was trying to counter strike Edgar, similar to the tactic employed, to great effect, against Sanchez. Trouble is that Edgar moves completely differently to Sanchez. Sanchez came in at Penn with a regular timing/beat and Penn was able to easily read this and pick him off at will.

Even before Penn cut Sanchez’s head in half, Sanchez’s face was swollen and beaten, while Penn was pretty much unmarked. Not so against Edgar, if anything Penn, certainly by the end, had more marks than Edgar. Furthermore, as mentioned, Edgar was able to take Penn down, not just once but twice!

The difference between the two fights was that Penn was unable to counter anything like as successfully as usual because Edgar was too awkward. Not only was he moving his head as well as his feet a lot, but his rhythm was not regular, he was moving with broken timing.

Edgar defeats Penn

Between round one and two Edgar’s corner told him to keep changing his head movement so that he didn’t just move forward and back but also laterally. From then on Penn was struggling to get Edgar. Sure he caught him occasionally but not often. Edgar moves well and is quick on his feet, really quick. He manages to throw shots from unusual angles because of his movement and because of his irregular timing it seems to be a bit like tracking a fly. Or trying to catch a fly with chopsticks!

A well deserved victory for Edgar and certainly not what I was expecting to see. I really like the counter attack style Penn uses, particularly when it comes off so well as it did against Sanchez.

Miyagi tries for the fly

Coupled with his movement Sanchez just couldn’t get a shot on target or get out of the way. But against Edgar it failed. Edgar was in constant motion and very difficult to counter on because his timing kept changing and he was able to hit as he was moving in/out and left/right.

Edgar’s broken rhythm, his quick feet, great head movement and ability to throw punches wherever he was meant that Penn ended up like Mr Myagi from the Karate Kid; tracking and trying to catch a fly with chopsticks!

Waiting for the bus; getting on

waiting for the bus

Using the feet properly, or at least getting to the stage I’m at has been a long and winding road. I’ve already described the amazing potential the feet have and how getting a feel for whats happening in the foot can assist in stablity, or being rooted/grounded. Obviously, the drawback of being too stable is a lack of mobility, a wall built with foundations is very stable but has minimal mobility, obviously fine for a wall except in extreme situations, earthquake/hurricane perhaps.

For humans wanting to be able to avoid incoming attacks stability has it’s role but good mobility is essential to avoid attacks and to set up your own. The answer is to be ‘on your toes’ rather than ‘on your heels’, the first supports movement while the second hampers movement. That’s not to say that you cannot move if you have your weight on your heels, of course you can, but it takes a preparatory movement to do so. I tell the kids in my class that its the difference between waiting for the bus and actually getting on the bus.

getting on the bus

It’s fine standing on your heels waiting for the bus but when you get on you need to move forward and your posture must support that movement. If you need to hurry to get on the bus, if it’s about to leave you really need to move from the front of your foot, i.e. be ‘on your toes’.

Nothing to spectacular in any of this but it’s amazing how many people in martial arts are rather flat-footed. It’s not universal, of course, but if you practice the hateful sanbon kumite and the like you’re training yourself to ‘move in stance’ and to not use your feet effectively. It’s like trying to move with an anchor pulling you back!

Elsewhere movement is optimised. At Primal, Steve Morris got us to repeat kick like they do in Muay Thai which trains the feet to move rapidly. The little ‘skip’ is key which serves to not only ‘charge’ the kick but also to adjust position in relation to the target. For me this had the wonderful spin-off of helping my foot movement in general, this became evident in the movement drills Morris introduced. These involved chasing each other around, meaning you have to move quickly to avoid the other bloke while staying close. It’s not a case of running away, rather adjusting position.

This training coupled with watching and getting an impression of Manny Pacquiao really helped me get to grips with moving my feet so they could make tiny adjustments for whatever reason, i.e. throwing kicks/punches, pushing off to move away. That is not all you can glean from watching such an excellent fighter as Pacquiao, it’s merely one aspect, albeit a vital one.

By concentrating training on optimising the potential of the feet anyone can learn to greatly improve their movement. But even you you become more ‘getting on the bus’ than ‘waiting for the bus’ you will notice an improvement.

Listening to the feet

In the last post I discussed the wide range of motion possible at the foot/ankle comlex of humans. This is derived from the mobility achieved from the 28 bones, comprising 25 joints, contained within this essential yet underused boday part.

That last asertion might sound a bit daft but it’s not made without foundation. Of course, we use our feet everyday, even the laziest of us has to walk about a bit, thereby rendering feet essential but are feet underused?

Maybe not underused in terms of getting about but definitely in terms of optimising the full potential of the foot/ankle structures. That IS confusing, I’ll elaborate.

After many years of karate training I underused my feet as the training tends to ignore the concept of ‘rooting’ in anything more than a perfunctuary manner. Not universally true but genarally so. By the time a karateka is curious about the softer side of things he/she can have some difficulty in learning to ’access’ their feet. Particularly if the curiosity leads to the interal arts the terminology can be confusing let alone the concept itself.

I first came across this side of things on a small sanchin session with Mike Clarke in Southampton. One thing he demonstrated then taught us was how to  drop our weight using the structure of sanchin stance. This leaves you very solid in your stance. Involving what I call ‘fat, flat feet’ this sinking of the wieght increases the surface area of the foot in contat with the ground and so improves stability.

Trouble is solidity without mobility is errr, limited! It was a long time before I was able to manage both. The process of managing both invovles ‘listening’ as the Chinese arts call it, or, and a little more up my street, becoming tuned to the kinaesthetics of the foot. This means you need to become consciusly aware of whats happening in the foot as you move. Not consciously interferring with whats going on, but just observing.

I used to travel to courses in Kent which covered this sort of thing. On the way back I’d need to go through London and the Tube was a good place to ‘listen’. Bounding up steps to ground level or riding out the bumps between stations was great practice.

Steve Morris mentions walking as a great way to get a grip on the kinaesthetics of the feet, and other joints for that matter. It’s a very useful method for discovering various movements possible at the foot and ankle and how these effect the efficiency of walking. How changing foot position alters how you push off from the floor and at what angle. How you use the foot to stop or adjust to avoid an unseen obstacle. All this and more helps you to be aware of  and then attempt to optimise whats happening. It’s a very useful process.

human gait cycle

Quite recently, Steve Morris showed us the importance of the roll across the joints at the ball of the foot and the importance of that in normal gait. It was striking that none of us were using this natural part of the gait cycle to its optimum. This will be elaborated on in the next post……

On your marks 3

A comment on the last post, made by John of Massachusetts, indicated that the clip of the elite level Shotokan fighters did show fast Shotokan techniques delivered from traditional stances, that’s the gist anyway. I chose the clip precisely because of the high standard of the fighters. While these fighters are able to deliver fast punches and kicks, the stance they adopt, fudo dachi I think,  fails to support fast positional movement. In order to successfully make ground quickly they need to adjust the starting position before they move.  If you observe the video carefully you will notice this adjustment.

This adjustment, particularly from the bounce, rapidly shifts the fighter through the equivalent of the get set and go phases of the sprint start. Bouncing up and down in the starting posture does not provide the correct lower leg angle to propel the fighter forward with plyometric action at the ankle curtailed.Does that make sense?

If we return to the sprint start analogy, the get set phase positions the sprinter to explode out of the blocks, the bouncing stance does not position the karateka to explode, an adjustment is required. The sanbon kumite of the original grisly clip provides even less opportunity for explosive movement as the plyometric action is completely absent. To illustrate what I mean follow this link to an article analyzing the blocks start of Usain Bolt, notice how the angle at the ankle of the right foot changes as he begins the movement, it goes back before moving forward. This is the plyometric action or the stretch shortening cycle, which greatly increases power. The starting position in the blocks completely supports this; forward posture and lower leg angle.

The Karate fighters in the clip tend to move from a position that is not set up to support explosive movement, of course the blocks position is impossible to attain but nevertheless the fighting stances they adopt have limited forward posture and usually have a less than ideal lower leg angle. This results in them having to make an adjustment before they can explode out of the blocks, as it were. It’s the equivalent of not being in the blocks properly when the gun goes.

Despite this drawback the bouncing is clearly more dynamic than the stiff movement of sanbon kumite although the starting stance is not too different to that used in sanbon. Note the centralised weight, supporting stability rather than mobility.

To achieve the equivalent of the starting blocks position the fighting posture needs to support rapid positional movement, with the weight forward and a lower leg angle supportive of a plyometric action similar to that in the Usain Bolt link. Clearly, that would be better than adopting a posture that requires a big adjustment before rapid movement can be achieved.

While the fighters in the clip above start in a sub-optimal position they still move quickly, this is achieved through a lot of feinting and minute positional adjustment to draw the opponent into making a half movement against which they can time their strike. While the rules of the tournament are far removed from street fighting there is still plenty of skill on show. The timing and distancing is very good and this is what Machida has successfully taken to MMA, but thats another post.

On your marks 2

In the last post I likened the three phases of the sprint race start to the initiation of movement or attack in martial arts. I proposed that the ‘get set’ position was the better of the three, with the ‘on your marks’ phase being unprepared and the ‘GO!’ phase being over committed. Put simply it’s better to be ready to move than not but not at the expense of over committing.

The grisly old clip in that post provided an example of the ‘on your marks’ phase in action. The stiff, robotic, linear movements in this clip are practised in a lot of ‘traditional’ martial arts but  is a very crude example. The Karateka are ‘stuck’ in a long stance and can barely move as a result, the weight is centralised with the legs so wide that ‘stance’, as in a way of standing, is indeed an appropriate word.

Often in karate people are told that movement comes from the hara/tanden or the centre. Pure nonsense of course, ask any child how they move and penny to a pound they’ll say with their legs or feet. The trouble is, when starting from a position that does not support free movement a preparatory movement is required, which could come from the core. Of course the core plays an essential part in the process of movement, linking the top and bottoms sections of the body.

Clearly, if you adopt a fighting posture analogous to the ‘get set’ position, i.e. ready to go, you have an advantage over someone in a posture synonymous to the ‘on your marks’ phase, i.e. requiring a preparatory  movement before you can move. Put simply, if you start from a position which allows you to move you have an advantage over an opponent who isn’t ready to move, that’s obvious.

Of course the old clip is karate at its most crude, here’s a more dynamic clip of two karate men training in a ‘traditional’ format, ippon kumite (one step sparring) and so starting from an ‘on your marks’ start.

The video shows the attacker and defender switching roles scrolling through a number of pre-arranged attacks. They start and finish in a long stance that fails to facilitate movement, clearly a huge flaw in the drill which leads to some rather peculiar adaptions to the standard model in the old clip. The bloke on the left has a tendency to ‘flail’ with his back leg when retreating in an attempt to move quickly, while both ‘bounce’.

Despite showing far better movement than in the old clip, including lateral retreats, the whole premise is to block and counter. This manifests in the competition version of karate, thus…..

These are elite level karate athletes, moving much better than the blokes in the old clip, freed from the restraints of formal training but still not as well as they might. Starting from a position that is sub-optimal for movement, synonymous to ‘on your marks’ position rather than ‘get set’ the movement options are limited. The rules of the competition don’t help and other factors contribute to creating a fighting environment that does not support free movement; if something goes wrong they cannot get out of the way again. For example, once they commit to a movement, if it doesn’t work they get hit, via block and counter even. If they feint a movement and the opponent reads it they are in trouble because they return, or are in the process of returning, to the starting position. The whole moving in stance premise is flawed, with the stance being a huge part of the problem.

As these fighters adopt similar movement strategies they start on an even playing field. If a fighters were to adopt a ‘get set’ posture that fighter would be set for movement and would have an advantage over the others, but the years of training sub-optimal movements make this radical adjustment unlikely.

Movement Skills

On the Karate Underground forum, and elsewhere I expect, one of the recurring discussions concerns the respective value of kihon (basics), kata and bunkai (forms and applications) and kumite (fighting/sparring). It seems to me that the main source of controversy centres on the difference in the basic techniques and stances and how these are applied in kumite. Usually, they look completely different, in points sparring competitions (kumite) the robotic basic movements (kihon) are lost as these cumbersome movements are too slow and awkward to enable point scoring.

The merits or otherwise of kihon training practices such as three/five sparring and the like have been debated ad nauseum on forums and are not the point of this post. Rather I will discuss the kind of thing we do at our club to encourage movement skills which are likely to be useful in sparring or fighting. I decided against 3 step and san dan gi (a similar Goju practice) after observing a kids class at a friends dojo. I noticed the contrast between the natural flowing actions of the kids before class and the awkward stiff movements during kihon practise. It occurred to me how daft it was to alter the natural free movement style to an inferior version. This is a complaint Steve Morris levels at karate and other systems, watching the kids at this particular class really brought this message home and I decided on the spot that my kids and adults classes, for that matter, would avoid this sort of training.

Besides, it’s painfully boring, and kids especially get lost to it. So for my classes we do no ‘moving basics’ as such. I adopt and adapt some of the Morris principles and practices from Primal and use these to get kids, and adults moving properly. That’s the goal, free movement with the weight forward which enables striking. One of these drills involves keeping on the cusp of the striking distance with your partner as he/she moves around, the idea is to maintain the distance while ‘following the leader’. Often people are rather flat-footed during this drill and fail to keep their weight forward on the front of the foot. This means changes in tempo and feints etc are difficult to achieve.

One way I get round this is to ‘play’ pretend basketball. I watched the movement skills of basketball players and liked what I saw, so I thought it would be a way to get people used to moving their feet effectively. Often people look at me like I’m insane when I say we’re going to play basketball with imaginary balls and hoops, but once we get it going people can get into it. Oddly, I often end up with three or more basketballs, perfectly under my control, no matter what tricks I’m performing with the imaginary balls. And despite my many simultaneous tricks, no-one is able to take them off me, that’s the advantage of being in charge

It’s a bit silly but is useful to get the flatfooted moving more appropriately. Then we might get them to chase the pads around or something. Later comes the bashing game, this is good fun; the kids love it, although some find it quite scary. One thing’s for sure it gets the feet moving. There are at least two bashers, its better if there are three or four, and one bashee. Bashers hit the bashee with focus mitts, thai pads and kicksheilds etc., while the bashee avoids, dodges, lines up and splits the bashers. I encourage the bashee to face the bashers as much as possible. There’s a minute on the clock for the bashee to survive. It’s an excellent way for kids, and adults, to become familiar with moving effectively and is a great introduction to multiples. The most I have tried it with is 5:1, it was chaos, absolute, total chaos, but they all survived, enjoyed it and I’m sure are better prepared for the chaos of a fight than if we’d stuck to 3 step sparring. While the kids in my classes have no idea what a jodan age uke response to a jodan oi suki attack is, they know how to cope with a 5:1 attack, well at least they have a half decent idea. Furthermore, they are learning to move in a way that allows them to move and hit while improving fitness and having fun. Great stuff!

Kids and Karate

There’s a lot of stuff out there concerning kids and Martial Arts training. I’ve only recently started teaching my kids class, but I’m enjoying it more and more with time.

When I started I wanted to make sure that I didn’t teach them bad movement skills. Often with karate training people end up moving like robots, this is through overuse of three-step sparring and the like. The difference in movement efficiency when kids do that sort of training compared to when they run around freely in play is marked and frankly scary.

Why on earth would a teacher/coach/sensei want to replace movement efficiency with a vastly inferior model? I can see no reason. Please,  feel free to let me know via comment if anyone can.

One of my first aims was to shape inherent efficient movement skills into something martial. We ‘play’ Zombies and the ‘bashing game’. These are adaptions of adult drills that get the kids moving around one or more opponents. In simple terms they run around avoiding other kids. I give them tips and they improve. They love the drills, there’s some competition and a lot of fitness work. It’s a winner.

Another aim was to use similar ‘play’ methods to teach striking skills. I get them to throw a ball against the wall and then adapt the throwing technique into the striking technique. This is a method Steve Morris uses, and it is very effective. I also use it with adults, always with great success.

These kids can hit hard, no question about it. Oddly enough they enjoy this too, especially when I let them hit me! I always have them hitting pads and bags straight away, it can take a while for them to get used to the contact but they get there.

One outcome of this playful learning is that the lessons are noisy and a little anarchic. No straight lines, lots of belts falling off and then discarded, running around. That’s not to say that discipline goes out of the window, misbehaviour and silliness gets a visit to star jump corner (burpees with a star shaped jump). Increasing numbers of forfeit star jumps are then ‘awarded’.

The photo taken after yesterdays class with three young achievers illustrates the lack of emphasis on a tidy gi……..

young achievers