The best form of defence is evasion. You can evade passively or  you can hit at the same time as evading. This is the beauty of boxing in that most times your hitting your opponent whilst evading his attack. There are basically two types of evading. First with footwork and then with body movement. Becoming good at evasion takes time and a bit of courage as the natural thing is to use your arms to block or ward off blows.

The thing is to work hard at it so that it becomes natural and you can evade under pressure. For the body you’ve got four types of evasion. First left to right slipping. Think of this like a metronome going left and right. Practice this standing in front of a mirror first and raise and lower your body as you do it. Then add punching between the beats.

The idea is to be mobile so that they can’t hit you. Then slip or bob forwards as if putting your head near their armpit. Again start by doing this rhythmically in a mirror or against a partner attacking slowly. Eventually you’ll be doing it at full speed but you need to start slow.

Third you’ve got bobbing and weaving. Bob and weave under their blows in particular hooks and wide swings; those that come around from left and right. Use your feet to move and let your body follow. Think of making your body twist like a helix. Eventually the head does hardly any movement you just disappear. Do bobbing and weaving and slipping pro-actively don’t wait until you see the blow. Think about having a slight bounce in your knees so that it’s easier to get started.

The last form of evasion is snapback where you use your rear foot and bounce back out of range using a rearwards step or just by bouncing on the back foot. Keep your leg fairly stiff and think of it like a little trampoline that you’re going to bounce of off. Normally you get about eighteen inches extra distance without doing a step and can get almost a meter if you do a six or eight inch step backwards. Remember to do the small step and then bounce back. Drills like the jab-catch drill are great for teaching this.  This is one of my favourite ways of evading.

Do the drills first slowly in a mirror and then in shadow boxing. Ring the changes and don’t stay still or in one place for two long. The secret if there is one is to overdo the evasion in training so that you’ve got the body knowledge when you spar.

Start using it in sparring by going slowly or having it as a theme. Getting your opponent to hit the air around you is the ultimate aim. To hammer the point home give them a nonchalant look.

I’ll cover the footwork part of evasion in the next post.

Watch great boxers like the early Roberto Duran fights to see a master evader at work.

Our congratulations to David Onuma and Steve Payne who both won gold medals in the European Brazilian Jiu-jitsu championships. David won in the brown belt group and then went onto win the bronze medal in the openweight against a huge opponent. Steve won in the white belt divisions which was incredible as he’s only been training for a year once per week. Great coaching by david as usual and best wishes to Corey Donoghue who was unlucky in the blue belt division. Looks like there’ll be more to come.

A good few years ago I did a tour of Italy with a group of other top martial artists. The tour lasted ten days or so and we did demonstrations all over. It was great fun and we got to make friends with some great guys. On the first day all the performers were doing their thing. Most of them had a rehearsed demonstration. The capoeira team had a routine but there was an element of play in it whereas most of the other guys had their Kata or pair routines. My training partner Savash Mustafa and I didn’t have any of that. We just had a a few basic setups and a theme, everything else was improvised. Initially I was disappointed as we didn’t look as sharp as the other guys who were superb. However things changed as the days wore on. We started boxing with the capoeira guys before they went on as they liked the freeform way we trained. This was great fun against guys who could box and who were great athletes. One demonstration in Florence we were doing knife. We had a start point and a finish point of a disarm if I could find it, or if not we’d find something significant to finish on. Early on Savash got cut up near his eye and the blood started to run. It seemed a lot of blood in the heat and lights but it was just a nick. Together we entered a bubble where everything went slow, we could hear the audience but they seemed distant. I said to him ‘you’re cut’ which he acknowledged, I too had a nick on the hand. Slashing and stabbing we relaxed and went with the flow and had an unbelievable but bloody time. The audience loved it. After the finish a close friend who’s a very high degree in Karate spoke to me with tears in his eyes. He said your doing what I always wanted to do, what I wanted my Karate to be like. I’ve wasted 25 years!

I don’t think he’s right, but the huge knowledge base he had, also had little or no improvisation in it. You get better at improvising if you do it all the time. The trick is to have drills so you get to see common body shapes. Then build skills through repetition, but, repetition has an effectiveness curve to it. Too much repetition of the same thing and you lose the ability to flow. Therefore what you’ve got to do is do rigorous training in repeating skills but adapt those skills so that there’s always a different element like an entry or the energy is different. Disguised repetition like this keeps drilling interesting. Then you’ve got to do your technical sparring and try using the skills you’ve trained. If you don’t use it you don’t know it. As the saying goes no plan survives contact with the enemy. Training in all its forms is great and hugely rewarding but pulling techniques off in the moment, catching them on the wind is one of the best things that can happen to you. When you’re in what Tennis coach Timothy Galway calls the ‘inner game’ then you’re in that zone where you are an observer just watching your training unfold in response to the challenges of the moment. You often hear a hum which is the sound of your body working, then you know you’re there. Many people don’t like training like this, they like to know before hand the outcomes of anything they do. They don’t like to take risks. However, risks are what you have to take. The more you train and live this way, the more you realise that there are always opportunities as long as you relax and just follow the path that your body dictates. Have a concept that your are working on or an intent and go with the flow. Wayne Shorter a famous Jazz saxophonist was asked how he rehearsed. Broadly he said ‘How can I rehearse when i don’t know what’s going to happen’. The answer then is drill the basics hard, add variation, then spar and learn to relax and go with the flow. You’ll probably enjoy it. As to the tour were we the best? the answer, probably not. When we were good we were great but fixed demos look better to the untrained eye. Like a Jazz band or rock group you’ve got to catch them when they’re hot. We’re we the best at improvising? Probably because that’s what we were working. In the street and in Life there are no set ups, no form, you have to go with the flow. Enjoy!

We’ve had an incredibly strong start to the year. Last weekend David Onuma won the European Brazilian Jiu jitsu championships at brown belt and Steve Payne also won the white belt competition. David also got bronze in the open weight. So a huge congratulations to them.  At the club it’s the same thing, maybe it’s the increased spirit of optimism that’s swept the U.S which also seems to  be affecting us this year.  We’re doing really well, with the classes full all evening, even the late ones. This has been helped by adding even more great instructors to the mix. Gordon McAdam one of my old black belts and a veteran of Thai boxing and Silat is teaching on a Monday and doing privates plus Tony Thompson another veteran of Wrestling, mixed martial arts and kickboxing is also back in the fray. Owen and Glen are both back from five weeks Thai boxing training at Fairtex in Thailand where the coaches were all highly impressed. It’s good to know we’re doing good work and others can see the quality.

However, it’s not only these hard core people who are doing well. The whole training level throughout the club is back with the same sort of bite that we had in the eighties. There’s lots to be optimistic about and we look forwards to a great year. Best wishes to all, keep optimistic, keep training, keep strong.