Sticks to Teach Unarmed Attacks

[joesteph]

There's already a "Knife Position" topic and thread, and postings by JohnC and Tallgeese made reference to replacing the moves of the knife with the hand for unarmed training purposes.

Today, I had a very good class in self-defense jujitsu, from punch and kick combos to joint locks and takedowns. Towards the end of class, Sensei produced foam sticks, and we practiced five strikes against air: collar bone, other collar bone, lower ribs, other side lower ribs, then a poke to the solar plexus. I thought of the stick as a police baton, and he is a police officer. Then we dropped the sticks and made hammerfists, striking at exactly the same points with the "new" weapon, except for the solar plexus, which was a punch.

We ran out of time to use other than the right arm, but when I came home, I took a short stick, tapped BOB as we had been training, dropped the stick in favor of hammerfists and punch, and included the left arm. Being a rightie, it took some doing to get the left to capture the rhythm the right had, but it worked.

The edit was that I'd accidentally typed "palmheels" originally, instead of hammerfists as we were taught in class.

Edited February 3, 2009 by joesteph

[bushido_man96]

You could even try this on BOB using the forearms as striking tools; they are very good tools for this, too.

[JohnC]

I'd caution however that the appropriate / best targets change sans the weapon. For example, you probably can more easily reach / effectively strike the collar bone with a stick in the fight, why would you want to with a hammerfist (as there probably would be a lot more effective techniques / targets available)? This is a fundamental problem of using the one size fits all approach -- it simplifies overall training but leads to sub-optimal solutions as, in reality, arms are not spears and hands are not swords.

[tallgeese]

What's more important to training across various weapons in unarmed combat is similar principles, not similar weapons. An overall approach to the goals of fighting that is unified will serve you better than trying to unifiy the movements of the tools you're using.

Still, it's not a bad teaching tool to get people used to training in an unfamiliar weapon to give them a similar pattern with something that they are more familiar with (ie, unarmed).

As to what bushido man said, working BOB over with weapons is useful just like beating on him unarmed would be.