Solo drills

This is continuing my musings about functional training. All I am reading now - and this is beyond blogs into academic text books - explains that there is strength training and there is skill training. You must use appropriate moves and approaches to gain strength but you must also develop skills. Practice your specific movements for your sport.

You will also know that I am interested in self defence via Krav Maga. For me that means simple easy moves that need to be drilled, hard wired in. The simpler the better so they survive stress.

So there is strength training....and I am coming more and more to commit to the approach of Doug McGuff....and then there is skill training - repeated practice to program in the skills and moves that you need to get as automatic reactions. Don't mix the two....

Get strong....but then develop your movement skills.

It is like the idea in Gladwell's Outliers:

A common theme that appears throughout Outliers is the "10,000-Hour Rule". Gladwell claims that greatness requires enormous time, using the source of The Beatles' musical talents and Gates' computer savvy as examples.[3] The Beatles performed live in Hamburg, Germany over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time, therefore meeting the 10,000-Hour Rule. Gladwell asserts that all of the time The Beatles spent performing shaped their talent, "so by the time they returned to England from Hamburg, Germany, 'they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.'"[3] Gates met the 10,000-Hour Rule when he gained access to a high school computer in 1968 at the age of 13, and spent 10,000 hours programming on it. In Outliers, Gladwell interviews Gates, who says that unique access to a computer at a time when they were not commonplace helped him succeed. Without that access, Gladwell states that Gates would still be "a highly intelligent, driven, charming person and a successful professional", but that he might not be worth US$50 billion.[3] Gladwell explains that reaching the 10,000-Hour Rule, which he considers the key to success in any field, is simply a matter of practicing a specific task that can be accomplished with 20 hours of work a week for 10 years. He also notes that he himself took exactly 10 years to meet the 10,000-Hour Rule, during his brief tenure at The American Spectator and his more recent job at The Washington Post.[2]

You have to put the hours in. Practice and practice.


Here is where the video comes in. I have bought this DVD and it is pretty good at stressing a very simple straight forward approach, a game plan for every fight. Simple pre-emptive stuff. bang bang bang. Yes there is more to it but if all else fails hit hard and run away. Simple drills to practice over and over.

I do a single one hour Krav Maga class a week....which is not enough to develop the skills, to embed them thoroughly....so I need to practice out of the class.


Apologies for the poor quality, but you will get the idea.





This is how Ritchie describes the clip:

The notion of a "Street Kata" would at first sound ridiculous but at the end of the day we need a way of training alone and sportive shadow boxing is not the right way to go about it.
You need to train in intense bursts of explosive violent energy with a degree of emotional intent that adhere to the restraints of combative ergonomics.

Posh way of saying you should train how you want to react. Efficiently, Aggressively and with maximum effect.

The term "creating structure for spontaneity" I stole from Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink"- he nicked the term I think from Military Tacticians.

More than ever when you are training alone the temptation to get greedy with potential threats is very strong.

The way to overcome that is to create a rigid structure to work within.
Of course we dont need to adhere to that structure, but you can only create interesting digressions from a path when you have a path to move away from.

Enjoy the clip.