I’m going to take a break from the 10 principles of fighting to write about our experience(s) of beach training on Saturday. Firstly, I’d like to thank those who turned up to try something a little bit different from our usual training experience(s) in the studio. I think everybody started to get an idea of the benefits of training in different environments and I’d like to explain and detail some of these and why it is so important to “mix up” our training from time to time.

I’ve been involved in martial arts and self-defense virtually all my life (since age 8); and I’m still as passionate/child-like in my learning and training 22 years on. The excitement I have when I gain a new understanding about what we do, how something works or an enhanced appreciation of something I’ve done for years but only now start to see its real genius, is something that keeps me coming back to the mats, over and over again. I sometimes get this when I’m teaching, some realization of a particular point to a technique or similar that has just becomes so pivotal to everything we do that I get lost at how to communicate it fully (it then takes me the rest of the day, night etc to think about the best way to explain it). Beach training on Saturday was one of those moments.

When I saw the Human Weapon Episode on Krav Maga, one of the lines that stuck in my mind was when Dennis Hanover and the Hisardut guys, who was training on the top of Masada in the heat, was asked about him choosing such an outside location for practice said, “This is called Survival, this is not a gym, this is nature”. It is sometimes easy to forget that what we train in the gym is not actually for use in a gym. There is also something very “real” about training outdoors i.e. we are basically animals and this is our natural environment. The world we have created for ourselves, indoors, is an artificial one. I don’t believe we were designed to sit at a desk all day etc, rather that we are creatures that need to move and engage in physical activity – one of the reasons that training gives us such a buzz/high. When we couple our need to engage in physical activity whilst performing it in our natural environment it’s extremely invigorating. There was definitely something primordial about Saturday’s training!

Don’t get me wrong, training on the mats is essential. This is where we build up the necessary skills and can create a “controlled” environment however it’s great at times to take this training to an “uncontrolled” environment and try and work what we do there e.g. try generating power in a kick whilst in water and standing on sand. Will you ever have to do this in real life, probably not but if you can think about what you will be able to do on a flat surface such as concrete. If you don’t hesitate and commit to a defense, even when you realize a wave is going to put your head under water, think about the lack of hesitation you will have when doing that technique/defense in another environment. Mixing things up and training what you know in different ways is a great way to start speeding up your training curve, or certainly getting over those humps when progression has slowed down.

Being able to adapt to your surroundings is a key survival skill and at essence what we train for is survival. We will always be a mat based, studio based school; we will be bringing a car in as soon as we get the green light, so we can have a “reality based” training area but on certain occasions it’s good to get back to nature and train in our first and natural environment.