Behind You…

Life would be a heck of a lot easier if the bad guys wore black hats and the good guys wore white hats.  In addition, if the bad guys could always announce when they were going to attack that would make things a bit rosier as well.  Finally, it would be dandy if they could stick to attacking us good guys from a place where we can easily see them… in front of us and about six feet away would be great.

Till then, we’ll have to contend with the fact that the bad guys often like to sneak up from behind folks, not announce their presence and in fact attack before you see them.  So we’ll have to deal with that contingency by first keeping our awareness up and second by drilling striking at someone surprising us from behind and seeing how quickly we can recover.

So today we started with doing some street stages but facing away from our partner, thus forcing the students to experiment with throwing strikes behind them.  Next, we moved to having our partner grab us from behind and the students threw a single strike.  From there we moved to grab and pull then on to grab, pull and strike.  The lesson was two fold.  One: don’t get attacked from behind, it stinks.  Two: if you do, counterstrike as you turn and find yourself a better position.

This class was pulled from Sifu Hosman’s teaching at camp and sprinkled lightly with some of my own ideas.