JT ran an excellent DART session today at his venue in High Wycombe Great day , lots of bruises and exchange of ideas .. Thanks John Smurf
Is it the hulk? Massive thanks to John as well. Awesome day. If you live in the uk and haven't trained with him yet then you need to sort yoursleves out.
Although I was an observer in this session rather than a participant, I can still say that it was an excellent day. In addition to the training it was nice to meet some more MAPpers. JWT is looking to run regular sessions, so drop him a PM or e-mail for details of upcomong events. I took some picture which I'll try and post tomorrow. Video footage will follow once jwt has edited it.
JWT's self defence, armoured assailant training sessions. Look around MAP and you'll see a number of threads about them going back over a number of years including many videos and descriptions from many participants. Mitch
Looks like great fun! I'm envious you guys are close enough to each other to get this type of thing organized.
We are lucky. Several guys all within a couple of hours car drive from jwt. I would say that if anyone is interested in some self defence, but worried that they have only just started martial arts, they should definately come along to one of these events. Guys of all different ages, abilities, levels of fitness and so on, but not a hint of egotism in the place. You take some hits (in armour and headguards), you give some hits, then watch the video analysis together and discuss the good and bad points. For me these sessions are as much (if not more) about awareness and understanding of aggression, as the actual physical skills.
I found the whole session really valuable, Simon is spot on about the mix of people and the lack of egotism, plus the atmosphere was always friendly. The hardest part of the day for me was playing the role of aggressor as you can probably infer from the inane grin on my face in the first post I'm not an aggressive person naturally so it always felt very forced doing that. I really enjoyed the legal perspective of self defence too. One of the scenarios involved a preemptive strike, to the guy making the strike he felt justified in his decision but to a lot of us it looked like he had just assaulted him, and on the footage it looked just as bad. It really was a valuable lesson for all of us about the application of preemptive action.
It was great fun. Many thanks to JWT for organising it. I already have some friends who are expressing an interest in future sessions. One of the most interesting lessons I took away from it is that knives are almost invisible to me in the heat of the moment. And on a less serious note, my strongest martial arts skill seems to be chucking people on the floor and sitting on them.