Me Pretending I can Strike

[TheMightyMcClaw]

Some of us at the UM BJJ club who have striking backgrounds have decided to start doing MMA/Striking/Jits With Hits on Friday nights. Furthermore, I got a digital video camera for Christmas, and am going to try and keep some records of my training.
I pretty much only do grappling training nowadays (Ann Arbor has a terrible lack of good martial arts clubs, especially for striking), but I did karate (Shotokan, not the cool kind) for a couple years in high school. I've technically been part of two MMA clubs, but they were both the kind of "show up and spar however you want to, maybe someone will give you some pointers" rather than professional gyms. I've had approximately two muay thai lessons.
Anyway, here's the first batch from last Friday:

Me versus Brendan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[yt]xRlDnIC-RFU
For the record, Brendan outways me by about 25 pounds and is part of the UM boxing club. He also did MMA, somewhere, I think. This demonstrates pretty well the point I was making in the bagwork thread, which is that I have attrocious spinning back kicks.

Me Versus Jimmy - Part One
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[yt]i30htauOy60
The camera got traded off in the middle of this one, so it's in two parts. Jimmy did Wing Chun about four years prior to this match. I goof off a lot in this fight, culminating with me trying to throw an axe kick and falling on my butt.

Me Versus Jimmy - Part Two
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[yt]s7H_joLkxw0
I rattle him with a head kick. Earlier that week, we were having a discussion about the effectiveness of high kick. He was saying that high kicks are dangerous, you lose your balance, someone can catch your leg, and so and so forth. I think he appreciates them more now.

[Happy Panda]

4 years of Wing Chun? He looks like he'd have trouble walking down the street without tripping over himself. Not even WC could make someone that bad, that takes a certain amount of talent.

[Drunken Bear]

4 years of Wing Chun? He looks like he'd have trouble walking down the street without tripping over himself. Not even WC could make someone that bad, that takes a certain amount of talent.

Would have to agree, but you can still see the chun in him. The low hands, the funny walk (footwork?), poor defense & lack of any power in his "techniques".

[TheMightyMcClaw]

4 years of Wing Chun? He looks like he'd have trouble walking down the street without tripping over himself. Not even WC could make someone that bad, that takes a certain amount of talent.

Sorry, I should've been more clear. He did Wing Chun four years ago, not he's been doing Wing Chun for the past four years.

[Omega Supreme]

First Brendan sucks. Show him this post and tell him never to lay claim to boxing ever again. You're missing an inside leg kick in your arsenal. On a critical note about your sparring your foot work is all wrong. You need to move side to side, not straight back. It'll probably come over practice...I'll be adding more comments as I see the rest of the videos.

[Omega Supreme]

Okay, tell Jimmy never to lay claim to his wing chun either that sucked. I'll reiterate what I said before. You need to work on your foot work. Move more side to side. (Good side kick btw). Add the inside leg kick to your arsenal. I'm glad you did a change up on your kick when kicking his leg then went to his head on the 3rd or 4th kick.

[TheMightyMcClaw]

It's funny that you mention the inside leg kick. I used to kick almost exclusively with my lead leg, and I was surprised at how much right leg kicking I was using when I reviewed the videos.
Regarding circling, when should I be moving left and when should I be moving right? I come from a Shotokan background, where the only two directions are backwards and forwards.
Thank you for the advice. I'll try and work on these things when I spar again tomorrow.

[Torakaka]

You want to be moving, in this case, away from the walls keeping control of the open/center area. You want your opponent to be the one with his back against the wall or right about to back into the corner.

Generally you want to be moving to your opponents outside, meaning outside their lead hand to keep yourself outside of their "box" and away from their punches. If you move straight forward you're going to find yourself running straight into their attacks. If you move straight back you're merely giving your opponent room to attack with full extension and have the momentum of forward motion behind what they throw, in addition to backing yourself into a corner and getting yourself stuck.

Another thing I'd like to add is that you're throwing things out of range way too often. Be a little more aggressive and move in as you strike. This way you will be much more likely to connect, your strikes will have much more weight behind them, and if you don't hit your mark you won't be left in a shitty position like having your back exposed after missing an out of range kick.


One more thing... get some damn boxing gloves. I HATE when people do standup sparring with MMA gloves. Maybe everyone I see doing it just has 0 punching ability to begin with, but it always seems to make people afraid to actually punch. And the whole MMA thing is not an excuse. The MMA fighters at my old gym always sparred with boxing gloves when they did standup, even if they were doing takedowns, so that's no excuse.

[TheMightyMcClaw]

You want to be moving, in this case, away from the walls keeping control of the open/center area. You want your opponent to be the one with his back against the wall or right about to back into the corner.

Generally you want to be moving to your opponents outside, meaning outside their lead hand to keep yourself outside of their "box" and away from their punches. If you move straight forward you're going to find yourself running straight into their attacks. If you move straight back you're merely giving your opponent room to attack with full extension and have the momentum of forward motion behind what they throw, in addition to backing yourself into a corner and getting yourself stuck.

Another thing I'd like to add is that you're throwing things out of range way too often. Be a little more aggressive and move in as you strike. This way you will be much more likely to connect, your strikes will have much more weight behind them, and if you don't hit your mark you won't be left in a shitty position like having your back exposed after missing an out of range kick.


One more thing... get some damn boxing gloves. I HATE when people do standup sparring with MMA gloves. Maybe everyone I see doing it just has 0 punching ability to begin with, but it always seems to make people afraid to actually punch. And the whole MMA thing is not an excuse. The MMA fighters at my old gym always sparred with boxing gloves when they did standup, even if they were doing takedowns, so that's no excuse.

I have some boxing gloves, but I'm not terribly fond of them. I found that I was getting into bad habits from boxing gloves (relying on the size of the glove to shield me, for the most part) which is why I switched to the MMA training gloves (after an interum of using tiny krotty handpads).
This might indeedbe me having shitty punching skills, or not using what punching skills I have. I tend to be very kick-oriented in my stand up, mostly because I think hitting people with my legs is fun.
I also had a bad experience of breaking someone's jaw with a straight right early in my karate days, which left me feeling extremely bad and hesitant to throw rights.
I'll try and do a round of pure boxing next session, with full boxing gloves.

[Draven]

You all suck. Join a Muay Thai club. Or boxing, kickboxing...anything.