A Question About Falling

[Pilot]

I think early Mantis training should be classified as a ground martial because I spend a lot of time on the ground :D. I was just curious if other people spend much time on falling (or recovery) and not necessarily ground fighting. For example we have done some tumbling type training where we fall, roll, and back up on our feet asap. We even jumped over objects, rolled, and came up, and then get back in line to do it over and over again. It's fun anyway.

[EarthDragon]

absolutley!!!!!!!! 8 step has 5 main falling techniques as we have shuai chiao in our system and must have break fall down to the tee before you can begin to learn how to throw. side break, forward dive, backward sommersult, forward sommer, and frog flats.

Every style needs to learn how to fall during practice because when it happens in a street fight you know how to react better than your opponent. If you think for a second a steet fight doesnt end up on the ground 9 1/2 out of 10 you need to be in more street fights :)

[Oso]

falling and basic tumbling skills are good and if nothing else teach you even more about how your body works and what you can do with it.

we start off with basic breakfalling a la` judo/jujitsu and the shuai chiao type falling and move to standing rolls in all 4 directions and then flying rolls for distance and height...sigh, there was a time where I could take two steps and dive over a 5' tall stack of kicking sheilds into a roll...now I just crash through them:p

[Three Harmonies]

Basic breakfalls are the first thing I teach a student regardless of the system they train under me. This is two fold;
1) I do a lot of takedowns / sweeps / throws so it is necessary to learn how to protect yourself in class.

2) Proper falling is the ONLY technique I can **** near gurantee you will use sometime in your life! Not all of us, actually hardly any of us, will get in a serious altercation in our lifetime. But the odds of us tripping over the cat, slipping on ice, or getting light headed and collapsing are extremely high especially as we age.

I do not cover much roll outs and what, and I caution students with doing too many of them. I admit they are easier and more fun than flat out brek falls. But all too often they build bad habits. A student must be able to take a full throw because they may not have the opportunity to "roll" out.

Cheers
Jake :)

[Oso]

Basic breakfalls are the first thing I teach a student regardless of the system they train under me. This is two fold;
1) I do a lot of takedowns / sweeps / throws so it is necessary to learn how to protect yourself in class.

2) Proper falling is the ONLY technique I can **** near gurantee you will use sometime in your life! Not all of us, actually hardly any of us, will get in a serious altercation in our lifetime. But the odds of us tripping over the cat, slipping on ice, or getting light headed and collapsing are extremely high especially as we age.

I say the same thing.

I do not cover much roll outs and what, and I caution students with doing too many of them. I admit they are easier and more fun than flat out brek falls. But all too often they build bad habits. A student must be able to take a full throw because they may not have the opportunity to "roll" out.



Agreed 100%.

However, if you can take the circle away from your opponent enough to control the momentum yourself you can decide to roll or counterthrow or both as needed. :)

[Three Harmonies]

Very true. Did not mean to imply otherwise. Though that is something I think you are more suited for than your average beginner!
Cheers
Jake :)

PS Oso- any of you or your crew coming to Martello in October? I just heard from some of Cottrell's pose and they are coming. I was hoping we could have a mini Mantis Gathering reunion! You know you and your crew are always welcome in my casa!:D

[Shaolinlueb]

any style that has "fighting" on it should teach you how to fall and absord impact, IMO.

sometimes all we do is takedowns and stuff and we are throwing each other all over the place.

[Three Harmonies]

Sounds like my kinda crowd! :D

[mantis108]

This would be by far the closest to the traditional Chinese ground fighting concept with or without the knife IMHO. Enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNowKE2FtRE&NR=1

You can compare that with your training and that of BJJ.

Mantis108

[Three Harmonies]

I would like to see someone actually attack him with something. His "opponents" were lame at best. I also never understood this approach with multiple attackers in that they wait one by one to attack. Every fight in real life I have witnessed that included more than one assailant had everyone dogpiling and stomping the **** out of the cat!
A lot of what he was doing was merely flailing around.
Not saying it would not work, but would like to see more "live" opponents.
Jake :cool:

[Oso]

Very true. Did not mean to imply otherwise. Though that is something I think you are more suited for than your average beginner!

possibly...but age doth creepeth upon me. I just try to not be the one falling.

Cheers
Jake :)

PS Oso- any of you or your crew coming to Martello in October? I just heard from some of Cottrell's pose and they are coming. I was hoping we could have a mini Mantis Gathering reunion! You know you and your crew are always welcome in my casa!:D

I don't know about Jim's folks but it's a bit far for us and as usual I'm struggling with keeping the doors open. We're hoping for a good crowd from the colleges over the next couple of weeks and then I can breathe easier. I'd love to attend one of Shifu Martello's events and the price is certainly right.

[Oso]

Very true. Did not mean to imply otherwise. Though that is something I think you are more suited for than your average beginner!

ftr, my curriculum has a category for 'falling/rolling' at each level. The first level is basic breakfalling and then adds basic forward rolling at the next level and then side and back rolls later and then we start rolling over, under and across objects as well as off angle rolling.

[Three Harmonies]

No worries brother, I can totally relate to trying to keep your head above water. I am perpetually broke. Once you accept it, life ain't too bad;):D

Jake

[Oso]

oh, i'm ok with being broke, been that way all my life...I just signed too long a lease and am pretty much ready to head to the park and fvck the commercial aspect of the biz

[Oso]

lol, hey Jake...you just broke a thousand posts...git yer ass back to training :D

[Three Harmonies]

No **** eh!? Too much free time!

[MasterKiller]

Tuck your chin. Tuck your elbows. Bow your back.

BAM! There's your break-falling curriculum.

[Oso]

enh, I think there are +'s and -'s to both methods.

[Pilot]

Basic breakfalls are the first thing I teach a student regardless of the system they train under me. This is two fold;
1) I do a lot of takedowns / sweeps / throws so it is necessary to learn how to protect yourself in class.

2) Proper falling is the ONLY technique I can **** near gurantee you will use sometime in your life! Not all of us, actually hardly any of us, will get in a serious altercation in our lifetime. But the odds of us tripping over the cat, slipping on ice, or getting light headed and collapsing are extremely high especially as we age.

I do not cover much roll outs and what, and I caution students with doing too many of them. I admit they are easier and more fun than flat out brek falls. But all too often they build bad habits. A student must be able to take a full throw because they may not have the opportunity to "roll" out.

Cheers
Jake :)


A true story:
About 25 or so years ago when I first learned to stop forward momentum by tuck and roll, I was with some friends. I was young and drank quite a bit back then with my friends. One of my friends had a pickup truck and we fools were on the back drinking. I was actually standing on the bumper holding on to the tail gate because he was giving all of us a ride a couple blocks away and the back was full. Of course, to show off, he gunned the throttle about the same time we hit a pot hole. I went up and off the back falling in the direction that we were moving. It was a road where cars were parked on the street on both sides. As I came down, I did a perfect forward roll and stopped myself in a kneeling posistion after the roll. When I lifted my eyes to see what happened, I was looking at a bumber of a parked car about a foot away from my head. That training kept me from plowing uncontrolled into a parked car. I do not drink much anymore and I do not do stupid things like standing on bumpers on a moving vehicle :D

[John Takeshi]

The truest story:

A couple of years ago I was running from some government spooks after assassinating a high-profile arms manufacturer accountant in Albuquerque, and stowed away on a train, in between two cars. I tried climbing up on top of the train (it was a freighter, so it wasn't moving like a bullet, thank God Almighty, through whom all things are possible, who grants the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, change the things we can and thing the way we change), but I slipped. I actually fell down in between the cars, and was now being dragged across the ties, holding on for dear life to the car couplings. There was a chain attached to the coupling, and I made a desperate grab for it when my hands slipped from the coupling. Now, had I just let go, I would have been crushed by a cross-beam underneath the car behind me, because the cross-beam was low enough to the ground that had I been lying flat on the earth, it would have flattened me like a pancake. So what I did was hold onto the chain, flip to my stomach, and executed a multitude of forward shoulder rolls until the chain was wound around me like a yo-yo, and I wrapped in a chain cocoon. I rode 60 miles that way, tied to the undercarriage of that train, before it finally came to a stop and I managed to extricate myself.

[wiz cool c]

The truest story:

A couple of years ago I was running from some government spooks after assassinating a high-profile arms manufacturer accountant in Albuquerque, and stowed away on a train, in between two cars. I tried climbing up on top of the train (it was a freighter, so it wasn't moving like a bullet, thank God Almighty, through whom all things are possible, who grants the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, change the things we can and thing the way we change), but I slipped. I actually fell down in between the cars, and was now being dragged across the ties, holding on for dear life to the car couplings. There was a chain attached to the coupling, and I made a desperate grab for it when my hands slipped from the coupling. Now, had I just let go, I would have been crushed by a cross-beam underneath the car behind me, because the cross-beam was low enough to the ground that had I been lying flat on the earth, it would have flattened me like a pancake. So what I did was hold onto the chain, flip to my stomach, and executed a multitude of forward shoulder rolls until the chain was wound around me like a yo-yo, and I wrapped in a chain cocoon. I rode 60 miles that way, tied to the undercarriage of that train, before it finally came to a stop and I managed to extricate myself.

You really need attention don't you.