My interested started to wane and I was soon bored of the 'wrestling' and longed to kick and punch like the guys in the movies. People like Van-Damme and Dolph Lundgren were the playground heroes of the 80's. Bruce Lee had been moved aside for the Blonde haired, Blue eyed, musclebound, not-gay-at-all stars of movies like Bloodsport and Rocky 4 and we wanted to be like them. Hollywood wouldn't lie to us surely! We wanted to palm strike a stack of bricks and only break the bottom one. We wanted to be able to fight blinded using some kind of sixth sense that only Karate would teach us.
So it was that my Mum finally relented and took me down to a nearby Shotokahn Karate class. I instantly loved it. People in different coloured belts, walking up and down in lines punching, kicking and standing in silly stances while screaming at the top of their voices at the end of each set. Yes! This was for me! I joined up, got a gi and set about learning my lunge punches, rising, inside and outside blocks and the never-can-fail knife defence of the X-block. I memorised the ever useful Japanese terminology that would allow me to ramble meaninglessly if I ever met a native. Imagine how you'd feel if a foreigner came up to you and started saying "Hello! left inside block, right reverse punch in forward stance! Thank you Sensie OSU! This didn't strike me as being the useless Asian sycophancy that it was at all, I could speak Japanese!
I was even told that I might be able to skip grades, I was learning that fast. It turned out that I didn't skip any grades, after telling everyone I knew, what an obvious Karate bad-ass I was. I got to Orange Belt before leaving and it would be a 2 years before I came back a much leaner young man with even more of an obsession with bad-assery. It turns out that I was actually a complete pussy and learning a Martial Art that contained next to no sparring at all was quite possibly the worst thing for me but more about that later. One of my Karate friends lent me the first few UFC's on VHS. I couldn't believe what I was hearing, it was like The Kumite from Bloodsport but real! Not understanding that movie fighting and real fighting were about as far removed as movie sex and real sex, we didn't understand what was going on. Why were they all falling over? Where were all the jumping spinning kicks and people falling into the splits to punch someone else in the nuts? What a load of crap! And that was that. I could have had an epiphany then about real fighting and not wasted several years of my life but I was too young to understand and goddam did Van-Damme look cool in Kickboxer.
The false sense of security I had got from learning almost twenty Katas and being able to execute a super fast side snap kick in Horse stance, led me to receive a good kicking from a gang of teenagers after we responded to their shouted abuse. I was totally unprepared for any attack that didn't start with the perpetrator either shouting (in Japanese of course) what level they're attacking or stopping inches before my face. Aggressiveness, Adrenaline, resisting opponents; Karate had prepared me for none of these. to put it bluntly, I was fucked. They punched me to the ground and set about kicking until their feet ached. I got away with minimal injuries thanks to my patented Fetal position stance, made famous by Fred Ettish - another Karate-ka who found out the hard way that using Karate in a fight will get you in serious trouble.I realised that what I'd suspected for a while now was true. I didn't know how to deal with conflict. I hadn't been prepared for the adrenaline, contact and unpredictable nature of a real fight. My Brown and White belt was a lie and my pretty certificates with the emblem of a tiger all over them weren't worth the card they were printed on. Being able to do advanced Katas like Bassai Dai and Canku Sho didn't help in the slightest. Well, bye bye Karate and thanks for nothing.
It was then several years until I started to yet again dabble in Martial Arts. Chasing girls, drinking, recreational drugs and heavy metal were now my preferred pastimes but it was during an unusually sober party that I began talking to my friend Russ about Wing Chun. Apparently, there were very old men who were Wing Chun masters that could use their chi to root themselves to the spot so strongly that several body builders couldn't move them. Then of course there was Bruce Lee's one inch punch tricks to salivate over. Oh we were sold man! We turned up to the class and met the instructor, a very nice guy who took us through the basic guard, movements and explained about the centre line theory: The shortest path to a target is a straight line. Of course it is! Why didn't we realise before that a straight punch using just the arm and no body torque would be preferable because it travels in a straight line, rather than those silly looping boxing punches? We spent what ended up being two years of two man drills, silly sticking hands exercises and occasional pad work with the odd bit of sparring thrown in before I decided Wing Chun was too boring. Up to this point we had all the books, were looking into how to make a wooden dummy and thought Bong Sau was the be all and end all of fighting. Vertical punches using the bottom two knuckles seemed perfectly logical, as did attacking vital areas whenever you strike. Why incapacitate someone when you can maim them? Right.....?
Everything changed when I discovered that my Sifu also taught Preying Mantis style. I checked out a class and this what I wanted. The class was full of over stylized movements, jumping spinning kicks and lots of weapons. This was finally it! After all the years of searching I'd finally found the style that would make me look like my favourite movie stars. Out was Van-Damme and in were the likes of Jackie Chan and Jet Li. There were 83 forms to learn but I was never intimidated by this ridiculous number because every form we learned made us look cooler than the last. There were really low stances, one legged stances, everything you could want to make yourself look like a Kung Fu movie badass. My training frequency went from once a week to twice, to three times and then four after I joined the advanced instructors classes. We spent an awful lot of time learning forms as you would imagine but there were also whole classes dedicated to conditioning and we sparred more than I'd ever sparred before. We never used any sorts of protective gear, gloves and gum shields were for wimps. I was a convert. In fact, I was a zealot. I would tell anyone that would listen to me that Preying Mantis had everything you could need and was so tough that it would harden anyone up. Now I'm sure this is true for physical conditioning but have you ever tried to punch someone while standing on one leg and leaning over? Or turned your front foot out to the side and leaned your back knee all the way down to the Achilles heel and tried to hit someone in the groin? It's not particularly easy. But none of that seemed to occur to me at the time, I looked like something straight out a Kung Fu movie and that was much more important. I spent years learning my forms, learning Sword, Spear, Three Section-Staff; the list of weapons is endless. The Three Section Staff was by far the stupidest thing I ever tried, having managed to hit myself in the head and groin simultaneously several times. I went on training holidays, performed demos for Chinese New Year, I was a true believer and I would have lived and breathed Kung Fu if I could. It should also be noted that at this point, I thought groundwork was unnecessary because I would just knee anyone who tried to take me down in the head. Having had no experience of double leg take downs, I must have believed that had my knee connected, my attacker's momentum would just stop dead.
About Three years into my training, I realised that I couldn't kick terribly well and this was a major crisis. How would I ever be a true Martial Artist if I couldn't kick properly? It was this need and also a life long curiosity that led me to a nearby Muay Thai School. My inability to kick soon became more apparent when I had more than just the air to hit, but now that I was kicking more and more, I soon noticed a progression and this encouraged me to train at the Muay Thai School as much as possible. At Kung Fu, people started noticing the change in my style. Pad work now result in a lot more knees than usual and my roundhouse kicks no longer just tapped the pads but rather powered through and made my partner's arms ache. In sparring I would go for more low kicks and started checking other peoples kicks with my legs rather than the traditional (and totally preposterous) double forearm leg block. Eventually I became quite friendly with the guys at Muay Thai and went on two trips to Thailand. The training was intense but I was prepared to train until I dropped (which happened more than once).
It was around this time that my Sifu asked me to teach a San Da class at the Kung Fu School. As San Da, like MMA is a ruleset rather than a style, the idea was to teach a Preying Mantis influenced style according to the rules. I relished the idea and set to work training the guys who started turning up on Sunday mornings. The class was tough, I mean real tough. I was training these guys as I want to be trained myself, that is, until they were collapsing. The guys loved it and I was very proud that they were standing out in the Kung Fu classes as being sharper in their techniques and fitter than their class mates. There was, of course a heavy Thai influence in the San Da that I was teaching but I did my best to keep a Chinese flavour to it. The problem I had was that I was discovering most of the Kung Fu techniques didn't work either against a resisting opponent or with gloves on. I also had a responsibility to teach these guys effective technique so out went the spinning double hammer fists, the Mantis style grabs, hitting with the back of the hand in a wrist breaking way and in came everything you'd expect. Jab, Cross, Uppercut, Hook. Exactly the same happened with the kicks, jumping spinning hook kicks were gone and in were roundhouses, front kicks and side kicks. I taught jumping crosses, I don't refer to them as the cringe inducing 'Superman punches', jumping back kicks and several throws. I kept some of the spinning back fist-like Chinese techniques but emphasized their low percentage nature. We started sparring and I was very happy with the team that I was building.
Then I discovered the UFC
Rather than the usual epiphany, my realisation came slowly. I started having doubts about the effectiveness of the Kung Fu. I was getting sick of turning up for class, only to be told to sit down and go through theory. Yes, you read that right, theory work. I needed to know the terminology for countless techniques, the founder of the style and his students etc etc and valuable training time was taken up with this nonsense. I remember very vividly having been in a seminar, learning how to use the Gim (straight sword) and thinking to myself 'What the hell am I doing jumping about with a sword? How practical actually is what I'm doing?'. It was a steep down hill journey after that. I owe a lot of the change in my mentality to bullshido.net - a website dedicated to exposing frauds in Martial Arts and their advocating of alive training. The nagging in the back of my head that had been there since the Karate years was building to a crescendo. "How can I know these techniques work if the person I'm practicing them with isn't resisting?" became the recurring thought running around my head in every class. Due to a change in my working situation, it was a huge struggle for me to get to Kung Fu on time and I eventually stopped going and concentrated on Muay Thai for which I now had a fight lined up.
The fight training was good. I was getting fitter than I'd ever been and my body shape was changing dramatically. I'd agreed to fight at 85kg, a whole 10kg below my normal weight. I took to the training with a vengeance, sprinting up hills before training with my coach, running every day, extra sparring after class. My diet was awful, I was hardly eating and drinking less than a litre of water a day but I somehow still had the energy for training. Fight day came and one thing was clear, I was up for it. I wanted to smash the guys face in. Then the fight started and he hit me... It was all over from then on. Even though I had been training for this fight, I had never done any full contact full-on sparring. The fight or flight response kicked in and it was set to flight. I have been told to watch the video and that I won every time we were in the clinch but that's not how it felt. I felt like I ran the whole time and let the guy go to town. On reflection this couldn't have been true as I made it to the end but I felt like I'd been on the receiving end of a sound beating. I didn't have the mentality to fight, the aggression wasn't there and there was no way I was going to be someone's punchbag. My whole world collapsed around my ears. I had a few weeks off training to recover from my injuries from the fight: a perforated ear drum, black leg and hurt ribs and came back determined to train as hard as I was previously but my heart just wasn't in it. I'd been cross training at the local MMA club Team Sure Grip for a while and was feeling a passion for grappling, my whole purpose for training Muay Thai was destroyed and I wanted to be able to compete in something that didn't leave my body in ruins. Now I have to point out here that TSG is a gym full of amazing fighters with a top level coach in Dan Burotta but they were only doing one Gi class per week. As much as I loved MMA, I wanted to concentrate on Jiu Jitsu. I was also still feeling the sting of the realisation that I couldn't handle being punched in the face and I think this may have also been a contributory factor for not wanting to join the MMA classes.
In August of 2006 I took myself down to the BJJ class taught in the Budokwai. I loved it but felt way out of my depth as a beginner in a class of Blue belt. This then led me to make the journey from Southend to Ladbroke Grove on a hot, sunny Saturday afternoon to attend an introductory class at the famous Roger Gracie Academy. It was comprised of basic drilling, a choke and a sweep. It felt amazing wearing the Gi and practising the moves I'd seen Royce defeating people with in the early UFC's. The gym was huge with a large mat and large pictures of BJJ legends on the walls. It was obvious that if I wanted Jiu Jitsu, this was the only place to train.
I was then presented with the sales pitch; an irresistible offer of my first month's training, a gi and an RGA t-shirt for £100. I signed up on the spot and was hooked. I felt like I was making progress over the months as I obtained my first three stripes for my White belt and I started obsessing over Jiu Jitsu; watching DVD's, Youtube videos, websites, pretty much anything I could get my hands on. I was a convert but never a zealot. I would walk away cringing when listening to over zealous newbies crowing on about how BJJ could destroy just about any other Martial Art and let's not even go into how many new guys were trying to master Rubber Guard before they could even do an armbar from guard properly!
Sadly though, the journey from West London to Southend after training was taking far too long in the evening and attending a Saturday class meant a 5 hour round trip, so I eventually stopped training at RGA. I then spent a few months just weight training with not a lot of success other than increasing my waist by 6 inches and my weight to 110kg. It's true what they say about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. I knew that Protein was important for muscular growth so I was stuff my face with as much Protein as I could find, safe in the knowledge that any excess over my body's needs would be excreted through my urine. Was I correct? Kind of, but I wasn't thinking about the amount of calories that I was taking in or knew anything about the potential damage on my body by having such a high level of acidity in my blood.
After a while the Jiu Jitsu bug had got hold of me again and I spent a couple of months looking for a place to train. Someone suggested the RGA school in Farringdon taught by Nic Gregoriades. After a few phone calls it was clear that Nic no longer taught there but the class was still in full swing so I phoned VIE (the gym that the class is in) and spoke to a lovely young lady called Kelly about joining, times and fees etc. The reason I'd dismissed Farringdon before is because some of the classes start at six and I thought there was no way I'd ever get there in time but Kelly assured me it would be possible from where I worked so I tried and I could indeed make it. My friend Andy and I went down, signed up, got a free Gi and that's where my Martial Arts history becomes my Martial Arts present.
Other than a long layoff due to surgery that I am currently in my fifth week of, I have been training at VIE ever since. Always wanting to be humble I took the stripes off my belt and allowed my new coach Cesar Lima to evaluate me himself. I got my three stripes back after a few weeks, my fourth some time later and eventually by Blue belt. It's hard to describe what an anti climax getting my Blue belt was. When I was a White belt, the Blue seemed this mythical far off level of grappling awesomeness and imagined myself glowing with pride but when I eventually got there I didn't really feel any different. In fact, and this is quite common it would seem, I didn't actually want my belt. I didn't feel ready for it and I hadn't yet competed at White belt. The idea of competing at the bottom of the skill tree of Blues wasn't terribly appealing. Since then I've certainly felt like I've grown into my Blue belt but have recently got myself into a training rut. I'm hoping that the time off will help me re-evaluate things and maybe even help with my retention. I think I was burning out as I was was approaching my surgery date so I'll be interested to see how I approach my Jiu Jitsu when I get back.
During my BJJ training I have attempted to supplement with Judo but received a serious shoulder injury in my first ever competition which led to me being out of action for a few weeks and gave me a serious phobia when it comes to being thrown. I tend to cling onto my partner like a Koala Bear rather than letting them throw me when we're drilling or worse, I put my hand(s) out to stop myself rather than break falling properly. I know this is a serious issue I need to overcome and I do need to work on my stand up grappling A LOT. To that end I'm going to train at TSG in Southend at their Wrestling class. As good as Judo is, I don't think it's necessary for someone who only wants to know a few takedowns for BJJ competition and I'm not particularly taken with some of the habits that Judoka pick up; falling flat on your face, turtling and giving up your back for some throws to name but a few. All I want is a good double and single leg which I think a freestyle Wrestling club will be a lot better for than learning the intricacies of Ippon Seo Nage.
As of May 2010, I've accrued the following grades (for what they're worth)
- Shotokan Karate - Brown Belt
- Judo - Yellow Belt
- Preying Mantis Kung Fu - Blue Sash (assistant instructor)
- Muay Thai - Level 4 or Green belt/arm band
- BJJ - Blue Belt 3 stripes
Cool - nicely done, Ben! Looking forward to part two.
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