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My fourth Dan grading

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Massimo4thDanHaving started practicing kickboxing in 1981 I could say that my approach to grading has been quite relaxed. Last Thursday, 21st Feb 2013, I finally passed my fourth Dan grading, a rank that many people achieve in their late twenties or early thirties and within 15 or so years of experience in one martial art. To some extent I was never too rushed into the next rank: it surely is a good recognition of personal achievements but it doesn’t bring to the bearer any better martial skills. In my opinion a rank is just a title and a way of comparing your experience and achievements with others. At the beginning of my experience I initially managed to skip a couple of ranks and qualified 3 Kyu (3 ranks from first Dan) within two years but it was not until 6 years later when I got my black belt I 1989. In my experience of late while the first and second Dan grading are still very much based around one’s personal performance there is a substantial shift in expectations from the third Dan and above.

The examiner, represented by Neville Wray (pictured on the right) current vice president of Wako GB and one of the top ranked kickboxers in UK, wants to see you running a class, the quality of your teaching and consequently the quality of student’s style, knowledge of technique and individual preparation. To some extent it is quite natural to expect that a person ranked third rank or above would be running a club or at least a class so the quality of their technique, as well as their teaching abilities can be measured by how well their team performs. In my case I was very pleased of having a nice and varied class of 36 people ranging between beginners with just a few weeks experience all the way to 4 black belt and 5 instructors. I did run our usual warm up, then split the class in two groups; I run the advanced group while one of my instructors took care of the lowers grades and beginners. During the first 40 minutes of techniques we displayed some combinations that are typical of the CARISMA curriculum, like fast double kicks with one leg, various applications of the axe kick and various situations of attack and defence. I then switched group and demonstrated how I teach some of the most basic techniques and postures to beginners. The whole class behaved, very much like in most classes but with a bit of extra discipline, like a single organism with people pausing and listening when I was explaining new techniques and then immediately performing the various combinations on my command. Naville first congratulated with me privately mentioning how good the class he saw was. He then announced to the class the successful result pointing out the quality of teaching and techniques he saw, how well everybody behaved and the fact that on a scale of 1 to 10 he would rank the technical skills at 11 🙂

I am very pleased of having finally reached my fourth Dan; it was particularly interesting to see my pictures tagged on Facebook receiving many congratulation comments and a large number of Likes from friends located all over the world. I do not feel I am a much better martial artist then I was on Thurs morning… but it surely feels good 🙂 Now it’s time to start thinking fifth Dan.

Training kickboxing while maintaining low injury rate

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Image courtesy and copyright Duncan Grisby

Image courtesy and copyright Duncan Grisby

Martial arts are mostly designed and conceived as fighting systems. Fighting is about hurting other people so it is about delivering intense blows to another person; anybody training realistically risks hurting or getting hurt during sessions. Some styles like Judo were in fact conceived to reduce the risk of injuries by removing the most dangerous techniques from its ancestor: Ju Jitsu. Other styles limit the teaching and practicing of dangerous techniques to advanced students or simply avoid full contact training or sparring. Realistically speaking training with a certain level of contact and impact is necessary for anyone competing at full but also light contact level.

Training “full on” and maintaining a safe training environment creates a dilemma that troubles many martial arts clubs and some of them take one position in the spectrum of the impact vs. safety curve: some on the safe and sometimes unrealistic, particularly for those who want to use martial arts for self defence while others take it to an extreme and have a very high number of injuries some times serious ones. Kickboxing and many other styles that are practiced wearing pads offer the advantage of covering some of the “weapons” like fists and feet so that they ensure a safer training practice. In my experience of over 3 decades of training Kickboxing I definitely seen many incidents but, considering that we spend several hours per week kicking and punching each other, often at full power, the number of serious damages is negligible. In the over 13 years I have been running CARISMA, I can remember very few (3-4) broken noses, a few broken or cracked ribs (less then 10), a couple of swollen feet and very recently a broken foot. We obviously have the occasional, once per month or less, black eye and regular bruises, mostly on the arms when people receive attacks and block with their guard. All in all I am sure we are safer than most football or rugby club.

Some Kickboxing clubs spend most of their times hitting focusing mitts and Thai pads; that a great way of practicing power while minimising the risk of injuries. Personally I am a strong believer in one-2-one training combining attack and defence techniques and combinations that emulate the sparring environment. I find that pad work is mostly conditioning body and mind to simply face a passive opponent that invites you to hit a target. The pair training also helps improving defence reflexes together with blocking and parrying skills.

In my experience a proven formula to ensure a safe full contact training environment is to teach people to actively block the attacks they are subject to by using active blocks and parries rather than passively accepting blows on their guard. This last strategy is taught as the last resource that people should use when in extreme difficulty. When teaching blocks to beginners we always start from the technique with bare hands to show the exact mechanical movement involved and how to minimize the impact on one’s body while deflecting as much and possible the forces rather than absorbing them onto his/her own body. Then, when gloves are worn, they add extra safety to the whole situation and further minimise the risk of bruises and scratches. Many thousand repetitions later all movements become instinctive and automatic and they can work even at full speed and power. Sparring obviously increases the risk of incidents and injuries but, once more, if students have very clear ideas about precise blocking the whole process becomes as safe as it can be although never 100% incident free.

Training when injured

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Alex training with a broken footThere is quite common saying, in traditional martial arts schools, when you hurt one of your hands or feet: “you have another hand and two feet, you can still fight!”

In today’s world of health & safety regulations and “better safe than sorry” attitude many people in position of responsibility, like doctors, instructors, teachers or lawyers tend to default toward a safe behaviour when unsure: stop training and rest until healed.

If I followed this rule I would have probably trained about a third of the total time I actually did.  When training martial arts (but also other contact sports) injuries do happen, however careful and safe you play.  Injuries sometimes occur even during simple drills or exercises, not necessarily during the toughest part of training such as sparring.

Pain exists to remind us that what we are doing is not right for our body and we should really listen to our body; training while ignoring pain could be dangerous and deteriorate the injured part with the risk of causing permanent damages.  At the same time there are safe ways of training when injured by using the body parts that don’t hurt so that you keep training them and avoid contact with the injured part.

An extreme case of this behaviour is Alex who recently broke a bone in hit foot by slipping while sparring; although with the foot in a hard cast he kept attending our classes doing stretching, press ups and abdominal exercises so to keep up with fitness and flexibility.  At some point as you can see in this video below he was even punching the bag while seated.

In over 30 years of training I was lucky enough to avoid any seriously broken bones (apart from a little toe a couple of years ago) but every time I bruised, mildly dislocated joints or strained muscles on one side of my body I kept training with the other side improving the total symmetry of my techniques.

The importance of proper alignment in front stance

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I will define proper alignment, for the purpose of this post, as the correct alignment of limbs and other body parts so that all vectors of the forces involved in a particular movement or techniques are correctly aligned in order to produce the best performance. For simplicity we can call internal alignment the alignment of your own body and external alignmentwhen we refer to the alignment of your body compared to the position of your opponent. Bruce Lee used for the same purpose the definition of winner’s position in his “Tao of June Kune Do”. I will explain in this post the importance of proper internal and external alignment for maximum results, applied to the front stance.

 

For the majority of people training martial arts it should be pretty obvious the correct internal alignment when preparing for or performing a technique. When training traditional martial arts like Karate, Judo or Aikido a lot of emphasis is paid to the external alignment as well as the internal one. Wing Chun has even a form based on the wooden dummy where proper alignment of techniques can be trained and improved by the continuous feed back that the dummy actually offers.

 

When training contact sports like kickboxing or boxing the application of proper internal alignment offers a good and stable position that is optimum for attacking and defending. The effectiveness of external alignment is easily measurable when testing the actual power that can be exercised onto a target. I prepared some simple pictures below that explain my thinking from a front stance that applies to boxing, kickboxing and many other fighting styles. In all of the pictures the shapes of the feet show the correct angle to be standing (with small personalised variations) and the cross indicates where the centre of gravity should be falling, aligned to the central line of the person.

 

Correct alignment

When two opponents are aligned as in this picture all punches will work correctly as well as all kicks with the rear leg (right, in this case). In this case the one person’s right foot is in line with the other person’s left foot and their central lines are in front of each other. We should remember that all straight strikes (jab, cross, front kick, side kick) should be aimed at the central line of the opponent (with small variations) while the round kick will go across in a circular motion that naturally tend to align the right foot to the line of the left on while hitting the opponent in the process.

Misaligned on the left

This is when the right feet of both opponents are nearly or completely aligned. When misaligned on the left you might have the illusion that straight strikes such as front and side kicks with the rear leg come easier but, in reality, your all structure is weaker and most punches will not work properly. The round kick with rear leg will have to travel a shorter distance to hit the target but it will end up weaker than when properly aligned.

Misaligned on the right

I find this to be the most common form of misalignment, particularly among beginners. Some people instead of trying mirroring the opponent’s position tend to align their left shoulders when facing an opponent. In this case the left feet of both opponents are nearly or completely aligned. All techniques coming from the rear part of the body will be very weak because they will never reach the optimum alignment of the body they have been designed for. Techniques with the front hand will also be weaker than when correctly aligned.

Misaligned at an angle

When one of the opponents stands at a funny angle the whole concept of alignment will cease to work and most techniques will simply have to be performed accepting reduced performance or by trying to realign with proper foot work.

 

All examples seen above could be obviously mirrored when people are standing with the right foot in front.

Conclusion

These examples of alignment and misalignments should be considered individually, taking into account the dynamic aspect of a fighting sport or a martial art. Positions of two opponents could be changing several times within a few seconds and it might be difficult to seize the right instant when everything is next to perfect. In my experience the most essential thing is to train the positions and the alignment statically as part of individual techniques or combinations and then check them during sparring to ensure that they work as expected.