By Clive Jefferies

The topic of the work on the first day is mass attacks. Once again the concept of finding the gap is ever present in the work and here it is more important than ever as getting caught up with one attacker is one of the worst things you can do as it leaves you unable to deal with any accomplices that he/she may have. Not only did I find the slowing down of the movement of great importance but also the breathing (correct breathing) for the situation added a whole new dimension to my own work. It reinforced the point that the core of what we do is based on the principle of breathing. Another point I took home was the during the mass attack drills was how a lot of the movement, including the strikes came from the hips, Vladimir also explained how we should keep the hips moving, especially as we grow older as it helps keep the prostate in good working order as well as keeping them in good working order for other activities!

The warm up drills were focused toward the main theme of the day, it involved being stretched, pulled and
twisted by two people. So, in groups of three we did various drills which included; holding your arms together as tight as possible while the other two people tried to force them apart, the same drill was also done while the person was laying on their back and the legs were crossed. Another drill involved you laying on your back while the other two people twisted and pulled, the emphasis here was on relaxing the hips enabling a greater range of motion as opposed to letting the knees and ankles do all the work. One of my personal favourites also came up, doing twenty push ups whilst two people kick you from either side. The idea here is to push the exhaling breath back into the body making it stronger. I have heard Vladimir call this creating a shield with the breath. We also worked on having two guys trying to lock arms, then using breathing, relaxation and movement and keeping the form trying to prevent the lock becoming incapacitating. This evolved into using the initial movement to find ways of taking the attackers down and if possible tying them together.

Next Vladimir made us work in a large crowd explaining that in this sort of situation you have to know what sort of a crowd you are working with, is the crowd hostile?, do you have friends in the crowd?, is it a crowd that is in a panic? Then act according to the situation. Back to the drills which included pushing in a crowd plus grabbing and escaping in a crowd. The last drill that I can remember from this segment was where everyone had to stand on each others feet; the explanation of the benefit of this drill is that it helped your mind and your feet to become friends, to work together.

Then we went back to groups of three and worked on drills where one person stood on either side of you and you had to jump on their feet, then the same drill but instead of jumping on the feet of the attacker you had to strike them using elbows and finally using punches. On a personal note I realised around this time that if you are tired or getting too involved with the drill that you must return to the basics, escape and breath, this will enable you approach the problem again and with a fresh set of eyes. Other three man drills included two people or more punching, grabbing or kicking whilst one person defended. Primarily escaping, only using arms or legs if necessary and finally the same drills with take downs included. I found it useful sometimes to use one person as a human shield.

We then progressed to a situation where you are surrounded by a larger group of would be attackers, the first drill shown here was to have five or six people push one person with the back of their arms and the idea is to tense your hold body so that they have something to push against, then to relax the whole body so that their support is taken away, this should then unbalance them enabling you to feel for an opening and slip away. Other drills that required a larger number of people was one person standing in the middle whilst others patted the head, using a combing motion to protect the head from incoming blows. This drill progressed to the person defending in the middle keeping the arms relaxed and using the hips to hit in a whip like motion to keep the attackers at bay as well as defending against any punches.

Vladimir showed the correct thing to do when you are on the floor in a crowd fight, make sure you are on your front, and then curl into a ball shape, then grab people to pull yourself up. It is information like this that makes you realise that this art was designed to save your life, not show people how high you can kick. After this he started showing some high level work which I struggled to understand. To finish with we did some all against all work starting from being on the floor with an opponent and when Vladimir clapped his hands, standing up and joining a large crowd fight in the middle.

During this seminar I came to realise the importance of keeping the training and drills at a slow speed. It offers you so much more in terms of seeing movement and keeping the movement as simple as possible.
One piece of advice which I think pretty much everyone who is reading this can benefit from was not to get aggressive by the actions of others, if you get hit ‘so what’, do not get annoyed and maintain a professional attitude.

The focus of day two was sensitivity and pre-emptive striking. To start with Vladimir showed us some exercises that we could use for an everyday warm up. The breathing work basically the stuff that we are used to now but another idea was shown. Instead of isolating a body part to tense, a body part was isolated and kept relaxed while the rest of the body was kept tense. After this we did some walking, in-out breathes to the count of 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11 and holding for 1½ or 2 laps and also walking a lap with the eyes closed. We also did push ups, leg raises and squats to the count of 1-7 and back down again. Some other work shown was crawling over a person with the arms holding the trousers, going forwards and backwards and the going the length of the body but rolling. Also shown was some more advanced rolling where the person holds a pole behind the arms and rolls or the pole is put through the sleeves of the t-shirt and he rolls. Another variation is the pole goes down the leg of the trousers and the person rolls. The reason for this type of work is to allow the person to roll with obstructions or the fact that there might be something on the floor with they may have to roll over.

After the conditioning work Vladimir spoke to us a little about comfort zones and sensitivity. He explained that that not only do we have visual zones but also fear zones and memory zones. He went on to explain that the zones do not have perfect boundaries and that it is in fact possible to move within them avoiding detection from the person, he moved his arm in what looked like an upwards snake like way to illustrate how you should move. This can be very unearthing for the opponent as you suddenly appear in front of them. When demonstrating this we were told to look in between the two people at what was going as opposed to the people themselves. I guess this type of work requires a good understanding of other people’s areas of awareness and subtle ways of moving without startling any of their senses, difficult to do but very interesting none the less.

Val Riaznov then went on to explain sensitivity and how our every day lives constrain this. We tend to spend most of our lives living through our eyes and forget about the rest of our body. If we do not keep our sensitivity sharp we it ends up dulling and we then have to work to get it back up to the level it should be. To start with we did work from the back, as our back does not have the benefit of eyes, therefore we should use sensitivity training to develop this. The first drill we did involved standing behind the partner, then push on their back but using intention, we then slowed the push down but still kept the intention, the idea was for the person to ‘feel’ for this intention and react accordingly, I found that this worked 50% of the time but sometimes I caught myself trying to anticipate the push instead of waiting until I could feel the intention, I had a feeling I was not the only person doing this. I guess in terms of analogy sensitivity is like a knife the more you use it the blunter it becomes, therefore you must sharpen it, to keep it working effectively. Another interesting point we were told is learning to trust our instincts, as they are there to serve and protect us, yet we often ignore them using our minds to analyse the situation usually to our own disadvantage.

We moved on to working with the legs and doing drills that again help the head and the feet work together. One of the drills was holding onto your partners shoulders whilst trying to kick their legs. The movement to this work was almost dance like; I also found that the person’s arms seemed to be an indictor of where the person was going to go next. We also did some work where you had to direct the person by pushing their head, the partner then had to walk whilst maintaining his form. Once again I noticed the importance of the hips, something I will be concentrating more on in training. This same drill was done in a half and full squat position. The form was then tested by pushing on the top of the head of the partner who was in a full squat, if the person bounced back it was noted that they had good form. We then moved onto similar work that involved trying to do judo like trip whilst holding the shoulders, stepping behind, the idea was to simply move the leg so that the trip became ineffective. After this the same drill was performed but the person tripping was taken down using any points of tension.

After lunch to get us warmed up we did the pushing drill, taking turns to push and escape, standing, squatting and legs apart. To follow we were shown how to stop a person from getting up from the floor, using tense spots to put them back down, then using the hand movements to create tension and make the person go down without touching them. At a more advanced level he showed how to relax the person enough so that they in fact unable to move their arms and legs. Another variation of the drill was to lie on the partner and as they get up shift the body weight towards the area in which the person is trying to gain leverage.

The next set of drills we had allowed us again to use sensitivity in a different way. They were similar to the previous drills but instead of holding the shoulders you had to hold on to one arm of the opponent and either punch, hook or kick, again to start with just escaping, then using their movement to escape, in quite a few cases just a quick tug on the arm was enough to put you in an advantageous position. Like with the previous work I found the movement becoming very dance like, I have seen this in Mikhail’s movement also. I also found myself able to keep my head looking forward and work without looking at the partner’s feet; I guess this is what Vladimir meant by making the head and feet friends.

To finish the day we looked at short and quick work or pre-emptive as some like to call it. There were a lot of examples but as Vladimir said there was no point in giving us too many as we would find it overwhelming, this and the fact that people tend to lose motivation when the work starts getting painful. Some of the highlights included working from behind the person, using an eye tap followed by a sharp pulling of the shoulders, grabbing the ears, tapping the throat, grabbing the fingers and twisting sharply so the person goes down and hitting pressure points on the back of the hand if they are strong or resisted. If the first attack didn’t work it was suggested that a combination of rapid hits were used to disorientate the attacker.

Also shown was the correct way to do a throat grab, moving the hand to the waist then up the body, this enabled you to move undetected and positioned the hand so the grip was good. He also showed the correct way to do a double handed grip so that if the person tried to pull the hands apart it caused the thumbs to rip the throat. We were shown the how to correctly break a neck (classified). Another way to attack from behind is to work on the leg, one way which could break the persons ankle is to kick from behind the knee and scrape downwards, this exposed the ankle which would then just need body weight to snap it, very nasty. Pressure points on the back of the leg were shown which only needed to be hit correctly once to drop a person though I found this work had to be very precise for it to work.

In Vladimir’s concluding comments he said that after doing the work on a physical level which doesn’t take all that long, it is then that the goal becomes learning to relax ourselves, doing the work trying to wear ourselves out so that we rid ourselves of the stresses of our daily lives. What else can I say? Like a fine wine Vladimir’s teaching gets better with age. When he said it was the end of the seminar it was clearly visible that no one actually wanted to go home, I think another five hours would have been enough to keep the crowd happy! With this art there seem to be no known limits, only that of the imagination and human ingenuity, which I think really separates this from other arts. There is no ceiling.