JKD Vlog 6 - Wrestling?
September means it’s starting to get dark already by the time I leave for class. It also means, unfortunately, that I’m back to work. But JKD classes aren’t slowing down.
Class on September 5th was pretty interesting and completely unlike anything that we’d done before. It was kind of focused on wrestling style stuff. We started with a sort of sweep or trip. A takedown I guess. It reminded me a lot of the double leg takedown you see in MMA but instead of grabbing both legs and using the shoulder to push your opponent down we were just grabbing the front leg. The other hand pushed on sort of the waist or hip while the first hand picked up the grabbed leg and pushed some. After some practice we did it as a drill with a couple of punches first to keep the opponent from noticing the attack on the leg.
From there we went into a takedown (I don’t know what else to call these honestly) that was completely foreign to me. I’ve never seen anything like it that I could compare it to. It started with both arms around the opponents neck, a la a muay thai clinch. But from there you pulled the other person down. I’m…honestly not sure how. I just couldn’t seem to get my partner down without also going all the way down myself, which was…definitely not right.
The final one we did was a sweep. We started inside, close to our partners, sort of grappling, then we had to hook one arm around their neck, and sweep the opposite leg. This wasn’t too different from tang soo do sweeps, just with the hand on the neck instead of the shoulder. But I’m bad at sweeps so again, I couldn’t do it.
I don’t know what it about sweeps and throws that I just can’t pick up. We did them sometimes in tang soo do and I was never good at them and now that I’m doing them again in JKD (and frequently in wing chun) I’m remembering how bad I’ve always been at them. To be completely honest I’m not entirely sure what I need to do to improve them. They just don’t click for some reason.
Class on September 12th was much more to my liking. The first thing we worked on was a counter punch for a jab or cross. It was pretty simple, just slipping the punch to the outside and attacking low. I thought it built really well on the jab, dodge, jab combo that we had worked on a couple of weeks earlier. It could fit right into that combo while making it a little shorter and more direct. We also worked that slip and counter punch into a longer combo, with the person who slipped the initial attack following up with some hook punches that the initial attacker needed to defend against. These are my favorite types of combos because they incorporate both offense and defense. Often one person is just attacking and their partner needs to practice something in response to that attack. But having the initial defender go on the attack and the initial attacker defend makes the drill much more dynamic in my opinion.
From there we moved into kick defenses with attacks. We were blocking an initial roundhouse kick with either a leg check or our arms and then following up with a combo. Most of them we did were punches, like check, cross, hook, cross, but we did do some with kicks, like check, jab, cross, leg kick. I liked this drill a lot because I find that a lot people, especially new students, have trouble mixing their offense and defense. They either only defend and never attack, which means their opponent just gets to attack indefinitely, or they try to attack without any thought to defense and just walk into punches. Honestly I have struggle with this sometimes and I’m certainly not new. Hopefully the practice will bleed into sparring.
Afterwards we did some sparring which let us try to internalize some of the drills that we had done in class. Personally I was trying to focus on working on the new stuff and not fall back on my old habits. I’m trying to get better at some of the stuff I struggle with and doing things I’m comfortable with won’t get me there. Lately I’ve been focusing on head movement when we spar but in this class I spent more time working these combos. Although one of them still did involve some head movement.
While I’m not thrilled to be back to work I’m glad that classes are still going strong. I just hope I’m able to juggle work and class though. I’m less thrilled that I’m still so completely unable to do throws and sweeps though.
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