Theme of the Week: Armbars

It’s a short Kung Fu week because of Memorial day, adult testing and the kid’s tournament – we’ve got 3 training days instead of the usual 5.  So we’ll take that limited time and see if we can explore one particular idea a little bit – the arm bar.  The hope is to start getting students thinking of the arm bar not as one technique, but rather as an exploitation of the elbow joint from many possible angles and position.

One way of understanding the broad concept is deduction – look at individual instances to understand the general.  We started with this approach today, looking at a few different instances of the arm bar – from standing, from seated and from prone.  Then we went to some slow open ended drills and experimented with finding the arm bar against light resistance.

How many arm bars can you find in this picture?