In making an effort to catch up on important news and events we roll back to Feb 2023 and a seminar session on some basics of self defence application and focussing on what happens if other defences have failed and you find yourself on the ground.
Technical Context
Just for a little context, I have been involved in Martial Arts pretty much my entire life with Childhood Judo through primary school then a teenage gap, then full on since I was 20 (I will be 50 later this year). I have progressed through ITF TaeKwon-Do for nearly 30 years and spent many other years in Aikido (5 years), Silat (5 years and still practicing) and several unarmed combat, self defence, control and restraint systems.
Master Dennis has even more experience and importantly live fight scenarios within the context of professional Mixed Martial Arts where he has competed successfully many times. Remember this for the rest of the article...
Ground defence vs Ground Fighting
Ground fighting is learning to fight on the ground, which is great for a competitive bout of MMA of BJJ but not what we would teach for learning to protect oneself. We would always teach that fighting on the ground is an absolute last resort, you 100% absolutely want to get OFF the ground as fast as possible if you are experiencing the need to defence yourself against violent attacks.
Bearing that in mind, remembering Master Dennis is an MMA fighter, remembering my experience outlined above, don't take the photos you see out of context. You will see people on the floor, they will be struggling for position and trying to get up quickly but the photos don't see that.
Self Defence
Self defence doesn't need to be complicated, and much of the seminars I run for 6th formers at school cover very simple solutions to protecting oneself and generally revolves around increasing alertness, awareness and avoidance then moves into rapid escapes, soft responses and increasing hard responses - taking into account legal ramifications.
This Seminar was Defence from the Ground
TaeKwon-Do is a Martial Art of Self Defence and can certainly be used as such and sometimes an extended training session is needed to lock in how to use techniques in unexpected scenarios.
The focus here was to briefly cover stand up phases and then bring in the next ground phase if and when a persons response to an attack fails. So it goes like this and the session content was 4, 5 and 6:
Pre-Contact
Fail
Defence from standing attacks
Fail
Get up quickly
Fail
Kicking from the ground
Fail
Defending from the ground
Escaping and Getting Back up
Self Defence isn't unarmed combat
Give it a try
Sometimes we run Self Defence seminars for the general public, mostly we run sessions like this for enrolled students in the art. For more info or to get involved please make contact using this website.
Contact
07850 438 898