SW Portland Martial Arts teaches Mo Duk Pai (a style that emphasizes ethics, practicality and teaching) and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (a grappling and throwing art).
CrossFit Hillsdale teaches functional fitness with an emphasis on gradual progress and real world results.
Our mission is to provide students with quality instruction, love of learning, and open appreciation for all movement arts.
If your partner is moving too much and making you dizzy, maybe it is time to kick them in the leg to slow them down a bit.
Today in the 7pm class we drilled leg kicks. Then, when we sparred during the 8pm class, we added leg kicks as a valid target. What better way to practice your timing (at kicking someone in the leg) than to play against an actively resisting opponent? None.
Grab a partner you trust and kick each other in the legs!
Kevin and I both have a fail in the above video where we catch at the bottom with lousy back structure. Put another way, we’re trying to squat with a rounded back. As you can see, it doesn’t work.
The annoying thing is that it can work. At lighter weights, you can get away with a curved back in your front squat. Despite that irritating fact, you should NOT catch lig cleans wo a bent back because then you’ll develop that habit and when you go heavy it will appear despite your best efforts.
Don’t round your back… you’ll lose all your friends… and probably more important, you’ll lose your barbell.
When you’re outnumbered, mobility trumps stability. Actually, that’s not entirely true but most of the time, if you are facing more than one opponent, it seems wiser to keep moving and try to position yourself in such a way so that you are fighting only one person at a time rather than standing still and getting hit by all the people coming after you.
Many martial artists will argue that training to fight multiple opponents is a fool’s errand – that no amount of training will help. I disagree. I think if you are a great striker and you move well, you could handle two or maybe even three unskilled opponents. I’m not saying you’ve got great odds. But I think it is possible. Awful in the extreme but possible.
Even if fighting multiple opponents is an untenable goal, the footwork required to drill against multiple partners transfers beautifully against sparring a single opponent.
Coach Geoff leads the Wednesday night beginner classes. His favorite thing about coaching is helping students progress through the many skills that a competent CrossFitter must possess.
To this end, he has mountains of patience, myriads of metaphors, a kettlebell and a paintbrush.
In the video above, Dan is working on angling when he strikes. I am working on staying on the balls of my feet. I think the net result for both of us is more active footwork and avoiding that most awful of behaviors – standing still while someone tries to hit you.
If one month of working on footwork and strikes can improve our sparring, maybe we’ll extend the focus another month!
6309 SW Capitol Highway, Portland OR, 97239
503 432 7450
