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Haha! Me or any submission grappler would be licking our lips at seeing lapels that big - aloha collar chokes!

Wouldn't work in the case of our school. No coloured gis until blue belt (BJJ) or black belt (shoot).

Typically, though, an MMA fighter is not going to train boxing specifically if he is already an MT fighter, and if he does, it will most likely be in an MMA context in which he will box in a fashion that suits MMA. He won't learn boxing the same way as if he's going through the ranks of (say) WBC contentders. Also, I would assume that "full-contact" in context means full-contact Karate aka American Kickboxing (long pants, foot pads, no kicks below the waist, no knees or elbows).

Maybe someone who crosstrains in Western boxing before their MT habits are set might develop bad habits in relation to stance and defending in ways that leave them vulnerable to MT techniques. However, I would think that if they were already skilled in MT and the Western boxing trainer understood their background and what they were trying to achieve then I can't see that Western boxing would hurt too much. Buakaw has been training in Western boxing for the last couple of years and his hands have gotten better. Also, the MT praying is called Ram Muay and the arm bands are called Pra Jiad (I think).

I have heard that most BJJ gyms are like this. Personally, I think this kind of relaxed setting would be a nice change. We address our instructors as "Sir/Ma'am" (I assume, the female instructor runs the kids' classes so I don't know for sure), but they will often let it slide, particularly for those close in rank to them.

You can get a surprisingly high return in terms of skill acquired from those sessions too. One night we had a Kempo black belt whose dojo hosts grappling seminars from our head instructor every few months come to training and he did pretty well. Obviously it's not the same as regular classes, but definitely worth it.

I think a high kick could work but it would be the sort of thing where you could take the opportunity if it was presented to you rather than looking for it all the time. Kicking a guy in the head when he's careful about his ranging and mistakenly steps into your kicking range is one thing, kicking a guy in the head who is charging at you throwing haymakers is another.

At our school we were lucky enough to have Rigan Machado run classes for a week. Unfortunately I missed the Monday classes due to a cold but Wednesday's were pretty cool. He showed us a few finer points of the cross-lapel choke which should come in handy. What I will never forget though is doing 720 grip exercises (clenching and unclenching fist) with arms extended in front of my body. You need a good grip for chokes I also took the beginners' class and we did loads and loads of armbars, from mount and guard. With Rigan, I certainly learned the value of paying full attention, as he doesn't repeat instructions much (unlike our regular instructors - not that i don't pay attention to them!). He's a great guy and a great instructor and hopefully he will be back. To top it all off he presented our Monday BJJ instructor with his black belt and he also presented a purple belt to one of our blues who had just won the Mundials.

The gogoplata is a choke in which the shin presses against the throat, usually from guard, here's a good demo: and one in no-gi competition it's not exactly a beginner's technique, nor one for those with as little flexibility as me.

Both are good, the BJJ more so for submissions and attack/defence from the bottom position, Judo more so for takedowns, because you'll practise them a lot more. BJJ has all the Judo takedowns, plus (depending on where you train) some from western wrestling styles, like the high single-leg, but we spend most of our time on the ground. Style-wise, I don't think you would really go wrong with either. I would take the BJJ, but of course, I'm biased I think really, the determining factors should be the quality of instruction, how good the advanced students are, the general atmosphere and culture, the cost, whether you can fit the training into your schedule, and the type of training (how much time sparring, how much time drilling, level of contact/intensity, etc). If both are good, then train both. I think you would find the styles are pretty complementary, just as long as you adjust to the minor rule differences.

I would prefer a situation where the kid attacked would have the right to punch the attacker after he initiated the fight, not have him wait to have the attacker punch him. Unfortunately that doesn't seem likely to be allowed, so I would go for grappling techniques in such a situation - which is more or less what you did. I would probably be careful of applying a submission technique because there's a lot of misinformation about chokes and the school administration could well accuse you of trying to kill the kid, and he's not going to know to tap to a joint lock. Then again, you might be able to hold an arm lock at a degree where it's painful but not going to break - up to you really. If there is a likelihood of a teacher coming quickly, I would just try to get a dominant and/or restraining position, eg: mount him, mount his back, get my hooks in and possibly S-grip or maybe a full nelson, or my personal favourite, the kneeride, because if you do it correctly, you can push all your weight through your knee into his diaphragm and have him struggle for breath, you're set up to armbar either arm if you wish, and you can easily jump up, or push the knee through and go to full mount, or go to side control. Using Columbine to justify a no self-defence policy seems very questionable to me. If you look at the common themes of the perpetrators of school shootings, the biggest ones are a feeling of alienation, of being oppressed, and being bullied. Punishing kids for fighting off bullies seems a great way to push a borderline kid over the edge.

I would agree that seeking to go to your back to pull guard is a bad idea, but probably the least-worst option if you end up on your back. What else would you do? Going for takedowns doesn't seem like such a bad idea provided you end up top. What's wrong with takedowns?

Is it true that the forehead cuts, bleeds and bruises really easily? The reason I ask is that we use a few defensive structures in shootfighting that come from Rodney King's Crazy Monkey style where your hands/gloves are placed on your head and you move your hand back towards the back of your head as you absorb a punch aimed at your head. Anyway, the reason I ask is that sometimes I don't do it quite right and the heel of my palm hits my forehead as I take a punch. I get a slight jolt but nothing like really being hit properly. I end up with bruises, and they don't even hurt to rub on, it's just the discolouration, and, I assume, bleeding underneath. My Dad sees those, and of course, worries about brain damage. This seems unlikely to me, so, is it true that you can get forehead or facial bruising or bleeding with hardly any impact at all?

Going to the ground willingly against multiple opponents usually isn't a great idea. If you can position yourself so that you take one guy down and the others are behind him, you could get to kneeride on him, allowing you to stand up fairly easily if need be, drop shots on the guy you're on, and deliver some kind of verbal threat/warning to the others if you think they're not fully committed to the fight and might withdraw after seeing what you did to their friend. If you unwillingly go to the ground and it's a fairly chaotic situation you might be able to tie up one guy's limbs from the guard, maybe choke him out, then use him as a kind of shield, but even then I would think that's something more suited to a situation where you ended up on the ground against your will. To be honest there's not really anything that works that well against multiple opponents and any ground fighting techniques you use, as with standup, would need to be very quick manuvers that don't leave you vulnerable for too long.

The infamous eye gouging incident was, I believe Gerard Gordeau gouging Yukio Nakai in umm..Vale Tudo Japan? Big Jon Hess used an eye rake in UFC 5 I think, but that wasn't really what won it for him. But yeah, I agree, if you have the sort of control where you could attack a small joint, you may as well go for a bigger one.

Ottman, I think you're right to reserve some skepticism for the value of lineage, but the way I see it, it's a sort of fraud detector. Because I can see my instructor's lineage, if I am concerned with the authenticity of his claimed rank and expertise, I can, if I want, call up Rigan Machado (or one of his people) and ask. If I am concerned with Rigan's authenticity, I could go up the tree to Carlos Gracie Jr, etc etc. Most good instructors don't just appear out of nowhere. Of course, some do, and it would be wrong to say "no lineage == he sucks". But if the guy was claiming a specific rank, like a BJJ black belt, I would want to know where he got it and who from.

Small joint manipulations were actually legal in early UFCs, but nobody seemed to use them, and I'm sure many of them knew how.

if you look at the army combatives manual from as far back as WWII, the curriculum was judo based - grappling. How old is your instructor? I've edited that out, as it is an unfounded assumption based on articles I read rather than any actual knowledge of the US army combatives system.

The philosophy, I think, based on how I learned, is that you start from possibly the worst h2h situation imaginable - you're mounted - and learn how to escape. Also, there's the idea that most people can throw some sort of punch intuitively, whereas grappling, to start with, is highly unintuitive. [edited to remove unfounded assumption]

I hope you'll excuse the slight thread derailment, but speaking of promotions, my shootfighting instructor was awarded his black belt in BJJ last week. He is the third (I think?) BJJ black belt we have now. The fuss made over it I think helps highlight just how huge an effort it is to reach that rank. There was no formal grading exam, he was just considered to be ready. http://www.bjj.com.au/profile_bill_gray.htm

I've been on a bit of a video buying spree myself lately, got Saulo Ribeiro's 6 DVD set on BJJ (Jiu-Jitsu Revolution), Duke Roufus' 4 DVD Muay Thai set, Masters of Grappling 1 (feat. Frank Shamrock, John Will and Rigan Machado) and a 3 DVD set of Muay Thai fights. Tell us all about the Krabi Krabong book when you've had a look, it sounds an interesting style.

I heard you can get killed fighting in that Kumite

Real or otherwise, they'd make a great distraction to set up your big first shot

How about... Muay Escrima-Jitsu You could use the stickfighting techniques from Escrima, the kicks, knees and elbows from Muay Thai (and punches from MT if you lost the stick or didn't have one for some reason), then the takedowns and ground grappling of BJJ. You could even use your Escrima stick to trap limbs or use it in chokes.