Sunday, May 23, 2004

The 'Play as the way, Coaching kids in the MMA' videos arrived last week. It is a three tape set fill of drills and ideas on teaching kids Mixed Martial Arts (Grappling and Stand-up). The first tape is mainly concerned with describing the origins of One Dragon Martial arts and their approach to teaching kids. The second tape is fill of drills and games to teach kids to get used to contact, ground work and striking by 'playing'. The tapes liken it to how animals learn in the wild. For example, Lion cubs learn 'rough and tumble' through play, biting, chasing, etc. Over time they learn to apply this to the hunt. By conditioning the kids to light contact via playing games they learn how to dodge, break fall, take a hit, without even realising it. The third tape is a question and answer session. It covers common questions that they've received and their answers. Things like 'how do you compete with McDojos?'. 'How do you handle contact with kids?'. 'Should kids do submissions?'. The picture and sound quality of the tapes is 'ok'. The sound tends to vary in intensity across the tapes and the picture quality is not the best. But this could mainly be because the tapes are in NTSC format rather than PAL. It's common for most of my NTSC tapes when I play them on my multi-format system to be a bit below quality. The content though is excellent. Lots of great exercises and drills and full of good advice. I think the 'Play as the Way' approach is a good one and seems to work well. I can definitely recommend them if you teach kids Martial Arts. 5:54:33 PM

John Will, Brazillian Jiu Jitsu Black Belt, has a new 'Master Class' tape set out specifically aimed at kids. It's called 'Matrats Grappling Program'.  This adds to his already existing 'Master Class Grappling' tape set for adding a grappling curriculum to an existing school. 5:45:01 PM