Revolution Coach's blog

Wagamama at T5

2008-05-14T13:35:00.000+01:00

The cool thing about travelling is the slightly surreal world of airports. I'm in the new T5 at Heathrow just about to have wagamama for breakfast. At lunchtime.

My flight to LA heads out at 16.00 so I've got a bit of time to mooch around here and see if I need to buy anything before a few days punching people in the head in California.

I'll be posting updates as I go and adding photos when I get home.
Phil Wright
Performance Enhancement Coach
Revolution Performance Centre
Licensed CM Elite Trainer
Accredited by the PCWA
http://www.revolutiongym.co.uk

Rodney King and John Will Seminars

2008-04-04T13:14:00.004+01:00

May is a busy month with seminars with two world-class coaches at Revolution.

Friday May 2nd - John Will BJJ Seminar. £50 with £20 deposit required to book a place.

Saturday May 24th & Sunday May 25th - CM Head coach Rodney King is back for his first European seminar of 2008. £60 for both days with a 10% discount for CMD Pro members.

Email phil@revolutiongym.co.uk for details.

Double Header Seminar

2007-12-04T09:48:00.000Z

The double Header seminar run by Gordon Scott-Russell and myself was a great success. With Gordon bringing two car loads of the Scottish horde down with him, Revolution matching that number and Jamie Ward and one of his guys down from Sai Martial Arts, it was a pretty full mat.

GSR and I have very similar ideas on training and coaching so it was great to see our respective students mixing in and working with each other throughout the day. A room full of people training solid material, without ego, and in a healthy and alive environment – couldn't be better.

Grappling for strikers

First up we had Grappling for Strikers, in this session I was working to build everyone's understanding of how clinch can be used to keep a fight standing. By looking at what grapplers are trying to get from a clinch situation we could then look at what a striker needs to do to negate the grapplers game.

Focusing on making and breaking contact, defending level changes, controlling the position and grips and how you could create opportunities to strike safely in a clinch situation, my session was a whistlestop tour of the things a striker needs to have in their clinch game.

There was a range of experience levels on the day and I was really impressed with the progress that everyone made. Great job all round. From big ideas to tiny details I’m confident that everyone took something away from today that they can add to their game.

Especially bearing in mind that this isn’t the main area of focus for most of the people who were training it was good to see people stepping out of their comfort zones and getting stuck in.

Padwork and Power

Gordon’s sessions on padwork and power are always a huge success and today was no different. His knowledge of, and coaching of, kickboxing are fantastic and I spent the whole session playing with new toys and tucking away really nice ways of explaining key ideas.

Gordon and I have overlapping styles of standup, but with some significant differences based on the formats we train for – me MMA and Gordon K1-style kickboxing. These differences meant that even the most experienced of my guys got a lot out of the session.

Gordon emphasises live padwork. The striker is working but so is the feeder, so the round looks almost like sparring, with both sides working to get the best out of each round. With movement, returned shots and counters all part of the experience for the striker, this is a method of padwork that needs to be felt as a workout. Fantastic coaching, great details and big improvements across the board. Thanks Gordon.

Working together

The best thing of the day is seeing clubs with very similar philosophies getting together to train. Even though we're hundreds of miles apart. It was particularly good to see Paul (from Gordon’s gym) and Gaz (from mine) working together throughout the day, swapping ideas, tips and techniques. Fab.

We'll be doing this again, probably up in Scotland next, and it would be great to see others taking the opportunity to get some great training in. Regardless of your style, I think we can all agree that working on new ways to improve your functionality in striking and clinch is only going to help anyone.

I know that everyone who was there today can say they have boosted their game. Thanks everyone.

Absolute genius

2007-09-25T16:35:00.000+01:00

Action men as tool for demonstrating techniques. I love it.

Check out B Stuffs blog

90% rock

2007-08-22T11:22:00.000+01:00

Spent time recently looking at solidity of structure within CM and have been talking about the gaps that people leave.

From a CM standpoint closing these gaps is vital for ensuring your defence works. if you put up a guard but it has gaps in it you are doing little more than putting a house of cards in front of your head for protection.

Instead you need to look at being like a pyramid, easily 90% rock, if you ran up to one of the Giza pyramids and smacked it you'd hurt your hand, bounce off or do a combination of the two. Take all the gaps out of your guard and structure and you begin to have the same effect.

When I bring a hand up to cover my head I want to make sure two things happen:

1) My head is solidly supported by my traps (I imagine trying to raise and cross my traps over before pulling my neck back into it), this allows force to be channeled straight down into my body.

2) My arm must be stuck to my head at the forearm and bicep, with the elbow pointing out the front. This locking of the arm to the head means that the shot is carried down into the body. Keep your arm loose and your shoulder will move (so will my head because when I stick my arm to my head, my head sticks to my arm - both are supported). If your head and shoulder move you will tend to find your guard buckles and your head takes the shot.

Which sucks.

Close the gaps - think 90% rock and see what happens.

28 hours at work

2007-08-16T12:08:00.000+01:00

Is rubbish. I've just spent most of the last three days chained to my desk trying to get something out the door. Just sorted it now which is a relief.

But I have been working for 28 hours straight now. So I feel more than a little puchy.

Balancing coaching with the rest of life

2007-08-15T08:47:00.000+01:00

You may have noticed that I've been quiet of late. This isn't due to me having nothing to say, anyone who knows me would have to argue with that, but because work has taken a huge step for the busier and is eating more of my life than ever before.

Which is both good and bad.

Good because after 15 years working in the design and web design industry I am finally getting to a position that allows me to bring a lot of my skills to the table, from design to people skills to communication to coaching. It's hard work and I'm currently snowed under following an increase in work load caused by the sudden removal of my line manager from the company.

Bad because it is over-running a lot of other things and is competing with the time I get to spend at the gym and at home with the family.

So if I am somewhat sporadic with my postings you know that it is probably due to me being up to my neck in search engine optimisation reports or trying to put together an eleventh hour pitch for a new client.

Using shadowboxing

2007-06-25T10:32:00.001+01:00

I have an admission to make - I’m a big fan of shadowboxing.

I haven’t always been but that was largely due to trying to think about what I was doing and trying to put together moves that looked cool. In recent years I have learnt to play while shadowboxing and have begun to see it in a whole new light - as a tool for my own training and as an invaluable aid to coaching.

Many, many people make shadowboxing an external thing, concentrating on (and feeling self-conscious about) how it looks. This is often exacerbated by people being urged to imagine the person they are fighting, adding another external response.

Just say no kids. Shadowboxing is a tool for internal awareness.

When I’m sparring I try to be as consciously unaware of my opponent to maximise the amount I am unconsciouosly aware of them. The less attention I pay to them the more aware I am of myself. Shadowboxing helps me learn this state.

Go inside, feel your balance, your movement, your breathing, your own rhythm.

Just throw things, never plan. Let the punches come out, let the movement come out. Play your own tune. Shadowboxing is your perfect 10 moment, no pressure to hit hard, no energy from an opponent to absorb.

Just you, the floor and your own skills. It's a thing of beauty.

Check it out

2007-06-11T11:07:00.000+01:00

Jeff Rockwell's Blog

There's some great stuff on here. I've only had a quick flick through but it looks solid to me. Enjoy!

John Will Seminar

2007-06-09T10:49:00.001+01:00

What a great day. John is a fantastic and inspirational coach. We've all got a ton of stuff to work on.

We spent the afternoon working on half-guard. John has had a look at what he thinks I should be working on to develop a game that suits me.

This alone is something that we have struggled with as we spent all but a few weekends of the year just trying to work our collective BJJ game without input from outside. So when we have the likes of John and Rodney across it gives us a major boost in our development.

The evening seminar was a mix of things that all linked together. John and I had discussed what we had been working recently and what we thought people might be missing and he planned the session based around that. John took us through some great, hig-percentage moves from closed guard, looking at timings to break people down working to sweep them. After plugging in a batch of sweeps John switched to attacking from here with a great set up for armbars and triangles.

From here we switched to passing the guard looking at breaking down a pass incrementally and waiting for them to give you the energy, space or movement needed to complete the pass - something John calls the Patience Point. A fantastic idea which takes a lot of the ‘battle’ out of passing guard.

As a natural progression John worked us through some knee ride material - at which point Gaz began to wish he'd picked someone lighter to work with. John was emphasising how grips work and how they can be set up before you take the knee ride.

To finish off we looked at setting up the spin choke from here. A great cross-lapel choke that uses rotation to lock it in and feels like a monster. I want to play with that on a lot.

John Will BJJ Workshop tomorrow

2007-06-06T10:23:00.000+01:00

Just got off the phone with John, who is currently down in Coventry with Geoff Thompson, and we're all set for tomorrow night.

Adam, Doug, Gaz and I all trained with John last year in Singapore and are really excited to get the chance to train with him again. John is a walking encyclopaedia of BJJ and he has some fantatsic insights into training from big picture to the tiniest details.

Getting him over to the work with us, as part of a mini tour of the UK, will help us take another step down the path as a developing club. We've come a long way in the past year or so having gone from working pretty much in isolation to having regular contact with some great BJJ coaches like John, Rodney and Revolution's Man in Arizona, Cecil.

Can't wait to see where we go next.

I'll be posting pictures of the workshop.

Team UK Spring Camp photos

2007-05-20T20:05:00.000+01:00

The Plastercast - Removing the weakest link

2007-05-15T16:37:00.000+01:00

This weekend saw the first PCWA UK Spring Camp with a great turnout and a fantastic weekend of training. We devoted one day to BJJ and one day to CM and crammed a fair amount into the weekend with a couple of major ideas to help boost everyone's game significantly.

The most important one of these is the Plastercast.

I have spent a lot of time recently looking at how to make clients' standup more efficient and more consistent and have come to realise that getting people to really understand the mechanics of what is happening when they are moving, throwing strikes or absorbing is key to developing this consistency.

Often I can ask someone how a certain punch feels when they throw it and they will swear blind it feels great, even if I can see that they are almost falling over, generating no power and struggling to recover to a safe position. I think a lot of this comes down to experience - when you have thrown a great punch you raise your own 'bar' and understand how bad the not great punches feel. If you keep on pushing the bar up your game constantly improves.

Unfortunately you can't keep on raising the bar by just looking at what you do, often you need to look at what you don't do and don't realise to see where the limitations of your game lie.

This is the key to improving consistency.

'But how do I change the things I don't know I do?' I hear you cry...

That's where coachs come in.

--

I've recently put some material out on our newsletter that covers how to consistently achieve traction and drive on punches with our Formula 1 CM idea. The plastercast is an extension of this idea and specifically addresses what you need to do with your foot and ankle to maximise power delivery.

Most people do the bulk of their work when punching with the extremities of their bodies, pushing with their feet and throwing with their hands. The key to maximum power transference is to efficiently drive off the floor, up the legs, through the body and down the arm without 'bleeding' energy at two key points, the ankle and the elbow.

Of these two the ankle is most important, it is the weak link, the achilles heel, of any punch. It is also the part of the body most people are least aware of when they are throwing punches.

The plastercast works by immobilising the ankle on the drive leg as if it was held solid in a cast. The calf muscle is used to raise the heel but the muscles in the foot and ankle are then used to hold the ankle static in relation to the rest of the leg. If anyone is struggling to identify which muscles do this, just think of where your foot bruises up when you sprain your ankle. That is where you need to focus.

Above - correct alignment and angle of the ankle

Once the ankle is held still with the heel raised a number of bad habits can be removed from the game:

a) Collapsing of the heel to the ground

b) rolling over onto the toes

c) lateral breaking of the ankle.

d) letting the foot slip, lift or slide behind you when throwing punches.

All four of these common mistakes break, or seriously compromise, your contact with the floor making it impossible to drive through your punches.

The single, most important aspect of the Plastercast is that the point of contact with the floor becomes the fulcrum and pivot for movement of the leg rather than the ankle. Your whole leg rotates as one so your foot and knee always point in the same direction, this brings the big muscles front and back of your leg into line with the force of the punch and is key to generating drive.

This single fulcrum works forward and backwards as well as rotationally. By locking your ankle and making the contact point with the floor the fulcrum for this movement you can drive off the floor with the big muscles in the top of your leg without your ankle giving way and comprimising that drive. As you throw a cross, your knee drops and your heel raises and comes forward but because you have set your ankle your foot maintains contact with the floor and there is a definite feeling of the top half of your leg driving forward.

This is such a small idea but it makes a huge difference to power delivery.

New booklist up online

2007-04-22T11:57:00.000+01:00

Visit our booklist to view, buy or suggest recommended books.

Adam Adshead coaching Weds BJJ class

2007-04-20T09:36:00.000+01:00

For those of you who haven't had a chance to get down yet I'd pleased to announce that Adam is now coaching the Wednesday BJJ class. Adam's insight into grappling is astounding and he has some plans both for the group and for individuals to really accelerate the development of BJJ at Revolution Martial Arts.

Alongside this he is looking at putting together some conceptual BJJ seminars with a focus on the development from white to blue to really help speed up the progress of the newer guys at our club and the other PCWA groups around the UK.

Adam has been instrumental in getting the BJJ game where it is now. His approach, attitude and commitment to a technical game have set the tone and I can't wait to see how his increased input is going to help us all. I'm training in these sessions for my development because Adam is already pushing me to a new level.

Everyone should do the same.

Private session write up

2007-03-13T11:19:00.000Z

Hey Everyone

Mike A did a personal coaching session with me last night and put the following write-up on the Membership Site Free Forum. I thought I'd put it up on here because he does a great job of describing what can be gained from personal training.

--

After the Manchester seminar last week, which I found immensely useful, I still felt that the fundamentals of my game were still not there. The biggest frustration with me is that I knew where I was going wrong, as I take a lot in during coaching sessions / the seminar work but I just couldn't make it all come together.

It's like a million things are rushing through your head - move you lead foot back a little, make your stance wider, hunch over a bit more, step a little to the left when throwing the cross, BREATHE!!, shoulder up on body shots, fluid movement, don't drag your feet!, er.. BREATHE! (i forget to do this a lot, no exaggeration!! worrying eh?) - but the speed they're going at you just end up looking rushed with poor form and posture and basically like you've never even trained before, like a physical mirror image of your mental thought process.

With this in mind i booked a private session with Phil (Wright) as soon as i could. Phil started off (as ever in privates) by asking what i wanted to do or know, and I said that my fundamental game was not there.

The thing that Phil is excellent at is telling you where you're going wrong both phsically and mentally, he gets you to admit that, yes, there's too much nervous energy or you're too expectant of how good you should be (my major flaw).

The exercise i think where it really all came together was where he got me to think of 3 words that described the shadow boxing i'd just done (after correcting some of the more glaring errors)

The three i came up with were -

Current
Fluid
Twist

We talked a lot about what kind of feeling you should be having when doing something as simple as moving around the mat , or throwing a simple cross/jab. As I said to Phil the way I could best describe it (being an electrician! ) was there being a current running down from my body and almost rebounding back up off the floor and through me all the way to the punch. I'm sure you've all had it before but there was a moment and it was - ding! - lightbulb time. The fluid and twist are relatively self explanatory and relate to how I felt I was moving on the mat.

Despite all this the really big thing about the whole session came from the talks in between which are as (if not more essential) in my eyes than the physical side of the game, the understanding has to be there.

Even in the relatively short 2 hour session, as my game was improving my mental state was changing drastically. The best example was the last bout of shadow boxing [eyes shut]. As Phil said I was 'away with the fairies'. I thought i'd been doing it for about 2-3 minutes when in reality it had been 7-8 minutes. I was in almost another state (don't worry i'm not gonna start chanting or anything ) but it all came together.

Crazy Monkey for me , is totally about self awareness and concentrating on (for want of a better phrase) 'inner energy'. It's about becoming totally at ease with yourself, as comfortable with yourself as possible and realising about where the physical force comes from - the mental state. The jab being thrown isn't just coming from your body in a physical motion, it's about manipulating your energy and the flow of it from the ground. Indeed the physical motions on the whole are only an outward expression of what, and how you feel inside.

A constant example I brought up with Phil which I can relate to is The Book of Five Rings (one of my favourite books) by Miyamoto Musashi, the most famous Samurai of his era. He is constantly referring to how good Martial Artists are often intelligent and express themselves in many different ways - painting, calligraphy etc. and it's constantly pointed out about knowing how aware you are of yourself, and how the Martial Arts principles can be applied to anything in life.

I realise to a certain extent i'm preaching to the converted on here but I hope everyone understands what i'm trying to get across. I came back from last nights session absolutely buzzing as it was 5000 lightbulb moments at once. I feel now I actually understand about where all this is coming from I can go on and pretty much do anything in terms of CM if the grafting is put in, and how this can benefit myself. My mates are going to have a hard time over the next few weeks as I try and get them all down to the gym

First PCWA Europe Trainers Clinic

2007-03-09T09:42:00.000Z

We've just wrapped up a week long visit from PCWA head Rodney King which included a 5 day tranier's clinic, a Crazy Monkey Defence Programme (CMDP) seminar and workshops in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Mental Game.

It was a completely stacked week with people coming in from around Europe to take part. The whole week has been a huge success.

The PCWA is pushing the boundaries of how martial arts can be viewed, coached and experienced on a daily basis. For example, our membership site provides an incredible resource that can be accessed as a perfect complement to the time our clients spend in the gym. The CMDP is a revolutionary programme that takes martial arts training that works and delivers it in a way that leverages positive developments in the gym and allows you to apply those changes to life outside the gym.

The trainers clinic is another example of the PCWA's cutting edge approach. Five days of development on personal game, technical knowledge, coaching ability, philosophy, mental game and business methods... I don't know any other group in the field that is offering anything even close.

At the end of the clinic all the participating trainers were assessed and licensing promotions were awarded as follows to the Revolution crew.

Adam Adshead - Licensed Trainer (with an emphasis on BJJ)
Ian Mochan - Licensed CMDP Trainer
Gareth Rogers - Licensed CMDP Trainer
Dave Kari - Licensed CMDP Trainer
Phil Wright - Licensed CMDP Elite Trainer.

That was the year that was

2006-12-29T10:49:00.000Z

2006 has been a good year for Revolution and everyone who trains here.

Highlights of the year:

Opening the new gym
Hosting Rodney twice for seminars
Seeing the PCWA grow and particularly seeing the UK network build
The Singapore retreat - some great training and some new friends made
Working on the Sanctuary material with Cecil
A bunch of blue belts for the mat rats
Seeing how much people have taken the MA-life material onboard
Lots of new faces

2007 will be even better. We’re looking forward to a redoubling of committment from everyone in the New Year, myself included. We’ve developed a lot in 2006 and I want to keep that momentum pushing over into 2007. We have Rodney over again in March, the new CMDP Trainer programme launching, Cecil is coming over in February to play - and eat fish and chips - and we can expect Chris over from the IOM on a regular basis. Singapore should be bigger and better this year too.

So if we haven’t seen you in a while make sure you jump back in to your training in the New Year.

Payment gateway for Rodney King 2007 Seminar is up

2006-12-28T16:24:00.000Z

Hey everyone

I’ve added the details for Rodney’s CMDP seminar onto the shopping cart.

Book your place or miss out.

Seminar follow up & book links

2006-11-26T21:27:00.000Z

A great fun weekend with people coming in for the Singapore Catch Up seminar. Check the write up on virtualcrazymonkey.com to see what you missed if you didn’t come down.

After the seminar we were talking about some books that people should have a look at, here are the links on amazon.co.uk:

The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker

Protecting the Gift by Gavin de Becker

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Singapore retreat notes (from virtualcrazymonkey.com)

2006-11-16T13:04:00.000Z

Here is the write up I put up on the membership site of what we covered on the Singapore retreat.

This is the diary that the three musketeers kept too, documenting their pink wristband terrorism.

Sanctuary - the next step

2006-11-11T06:36:00.000Z

After a great reception for the Sanctuary session I coached at the retreat we're looking at what the next step in the process is.

Having spent many hours discussing this with fellow PCWA coach, Cecil Burch, we're going to collaborate and put together a master version which includes both our work on the same material.

Having discussed the problem with teaching clinch, rather than wrestling, a number of months ago we had both identified the same problems:

There is a gap between stand up and wrestling. If you look at the posture that wrestlers take (especially their hand position) this becomes very noticeable. For example, to protect your arms from arm drag entries you have to tuck your elbows in, which takes your hands away from your head.
Teaching wrestling to people with no exposure to it (almost everyone in the UK) is difficult. There are very few reference points that are based on broad ideas, like position, rather than focused ideas, like techniques. Introducing clinch as a series of wrestling techniques causes real problems with people getting lost trying to sift through a number of options, none of which take precedence for them, or getting stuck in an eternal pummeling drill because that is what they are used to.
Working clinch against anyone working the CM structure is extremely hard. They protect their necks, lock their structure into their bodies and their arms stay braced between you because of the hand-head attachment.

Above: How we believe a clinch game fits in to the big picture, particularly for beginners.

Both Cecil and I have been working on this problem concurrently and from differing start points, him looking at reverse engineering wrestling and me looking at nullifying stand-up, we have come to almost the same results. There is massive overlap between our solutions and we had each answered some of the major sticking points in each others material. The most important aspect of both of our findings has been contact, how to get it and, vitally, how to keep it.

From this we had both worked towards a master control position that, for the sake of changing the position of one hand, was exactly the same (what we have been calling Sanctuary 2). We are working to develop a small programme that will enable people to safely control that skills gap between stand-up and wrestling that:

Doesn’t rely on attributes
Has reference point positions to allow for easy navigation when in clinch
Enables you to safely disengage, the most dangerous aspect of clinch
Can be picked up in a few hours

So where does this take us now? Over the next few months Cecil will be coming over here and I will be going over to him to refine what we think is a system that fills a hole in most people’s training. How do you get in, what do you do when you’re there and how do you get out safely again? We’ll be filming the whole thing and releasing it for public use.

If you want to be kept posted on the progress of Sanctuary please drop me a mail at phil@revolutiongym.co.uk and put ‘sanctuary’ in the subject line.

Singapore photos

2006-11-10T21:15:00.000Z

Rodney introduces the 2006 PCWA Retreat

How to set up the body shot

Straight right to the body

Rodney and Nuno demonstrating

John Will and Adam rolling

Nuno - sneaky uppercuts

John Will pimping my pommie ass

Kon - Striker v. Grappler

Phil - Sanctuary clinch for beginners

Discussion at the beach

Bobby K - Vale Tudo

Retreat attendees

Matt Jones, having been through the retarder machine

Palawan Beach, Sentosa Island

Mr Turtle

Mr Polar Bear

Mr Shark

CM - Singapore stylee

We're not in Kansas anymore

Even the playgrounds aren’t safe

Who let this lot in?

On my way home from Singapore

2006-11-09T12:49:00.000Z

I'm at Changi Airport now. Chris, aka Biff, has just gone through for his flight on to see his folks in OZ and I've left the 3 Musketeers landside because their flight isn't until some ungodly hour this morning. That having been said we've pretty much been up until 3-4am everyday this week hanging out with Cecil, Matt, Nath and Ben which has been pretty much the coolest thing of the whole trip. Even if the aussies are absolutle filth. ;)

The retreat has been great. I've posted some day-by-day write-ups on the Membership site if you want to go and have a look.

We've got a tonne of material for the end of year seminar with the input from both Rodney and John Will being phenomenal. Thanks to both of them, Kon for hosting and all the other guys who made it such good fun.

Start saving up for next year guys. It's been worth every penny.

I'll post a load of the pictures up when I've got back to my mac at home. Gotta love free net access in the airport though.

Boxing Monthly article on the UFC

2006-11-02T19:23:00.000Z

I'm not sure if any of you have seen this month's copy of Boxing Monthly. It has a short but interesting article on the rising impact of the UFC with an interview with UFC president Dana White.

An unusually well-balanced piece on the subject for a boxing magazine, the article looks at the rise in PPV figures and the surge in advertising interest that has been generated by the UFC with it's exposure on Spike TV.

Dropped in at the end of the article was a small piece on new UFC employee, Marc Ratner. This is a huge deal as Ratner, former Executive Director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, has been instrument in the sanctioning of boxing in the state and, more recently, the legitimisation of MMA in Nevada.

It seems his input will only help the sport gain credibility from here on in.