Portland Boxing – A look inside A.F.T #2

October 27th

The Rhythm of Reaction: Portland Boxing at NWFA

If you are a fan of Jackie Chan movies, you should

try to catch some of the bonus features included on

his DVDs, especially where he talks about fighting

and choreography. I recall one such special where he

described how he and his stunt fighters trained for

a movie, and how difficult it really was to pull off a

good fight scene, despite making it look easy. He

went on to say that if you were a good martial artist,

it didn’t follow that you would be a good stunt

fighter. Good stunt fighters had to have a knack for two other things: timing and rhythm. Without these, the fights were not only non-realistic, there were a lot more injuries in the process of creating a fight scene.

Thursday night Professor Jeff had the class drill one of the longer combinations, the 15 Count Thai combination. When demonstrated by some of the more advanced students (Daniel, Carlin, and Eric) it reminded me a lot like a Jackie Chan fight scene. Compared to the 6 count combination that I described in my previous Portland Boxing article here at NWFA, this one sounds a lot more intimidating and was quite a bit longer. But with the additional length, the combination highlighted another fighting concept for me: rhythm. Rhythm is not so apparent with shorter combinations.

Here’s how it went, by the numbers:

15 Count Thai Combination:

1. Left parry (vs straight right)
2. Right shield arm block (vs right hook) - keep elbow down
3. Left elbow (opponent holds gloves as target)
4. Right elbow (opponent holds gloves as target)
5. Right #2 knee (vs straight right)
6. Left Thai kick
7. Right straight cross
8. Left hook
9. Right #2 knee (vs straight right)
10. Right Thai kick
11. Left foot jab (vs straight right)
12. Left slip (vs straight right)
13. Left hook
14. Straight right
15. Hop back, hard Thai right kick.

ADDITIONAL NOTES
When Professor Jeff asked my training partner and I to demonstrate the combination at the start of the class, it definitely did not feel like a Jackie Chan fight scene. Some of this was due to the lack of familiarity with the sequence, but I think there was more to it than that.

What was it?

Imagine if you had two windup boxing toys, each with the sequence programmed. If you let them loose on each other, what would happen? More than likely they would both end up on their backs after their arms and legs clashed hopelessly against one another, which is kind of what it felt like to me at the start of the class.

NUANCES, TRAINING INSIGHTS, AND TRY THIS NEXT TIME
One of the things that I really like about the AFT class is that Professor Jeff constantly changes training partners during the course of the hour. What I discovered from moving from one partner to another was that the combination became easier when I simply stopped paying so much attention to what came next and started simply responding to what my partner was doing at that specific point in time. This had the effect of synchronizing our actions, so that our timing did not have to be perfectly meshed (like the fighting toy robots).

Certainly there were times when we simply got lost in the sequence (for example, when one of us either initiated or reacted with a technique that was out of/not part of the sequence), but that really didn’t matter. It became less a thinking drill and more of an extended action-reaction-action drill (the simplest example in Portland boxing at NWFA being the 3 count sequence of jab-catch-jab), which was really the point.

We simply reacted to one another in the movement from one sequence to the next, each leaning on the other to move to the next step. Initially, when neither my partner nor I had the sequence down, this was more difficult. But since Professor Jeff had the students drill the combination over and over, everyone had it programmed by the end of class. The extended length of the combination had the benefit of letting me explore the concept of rhythm in a much more evident way.

So the next time you get shown a long sequence of techniques and are struggling to keep it straight, try thinking less, and keying off of your training partner more. Simply respond to his or her actions and see if that helps, and see if you can discover, like I did, a comfortable rhythm along the way.

-Howard


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