Clear Water Gunting Seminar Review
Review of Techniques.
We covered the Horizontal-Vertical techniques 1-5. I've always known that there was about a half dozen ways to follow up any of these techniques. Once you've planted a guy on the ground, it's pretty easy to do with him what you want. But now I've refined my understanding of the techniques and how they can be changed up in the middle, to create slightly different outcomes. Don't forget to use those elbows, Guntaholics! I'm sure I've just scratched the surface. Very cool stuff, can't wait to teach it. We also did some Hubud, added some arm breaks into it, and then did it with the Gunting, using Hubud to lead into an outside wrist lock and a Gunting push to the neck takedown. We covered takedowns from a choke hold and from a single hand or double hand grab.
Slice and Dice
All of the open blade techniques we did with large blade training knives. I think Bram was feeling a little blood thirsty! We covered Three count Cover-for-Cover (Sumbrada), thrusting drills with a disarm, a high line Cover and Slash style exercise, A Pac-man cut to a leg thrust (am I remembering all this right guys?!) We did a horizontal scissors into a circular cut that went from neck to thigh, reversed over the thigh again and came up to a disarm. (Like the guy was going to be able to do anything, bleeding from his neck and with his quadricep cut in half...) and on and on and on and on. I think this was a little preview of what Bram will be doing in Israel at the Commandments of Steel. If your squeamish, don't bother going, when Bram says that he is "un-P.C." at the Commandments, he's being modest. (Or P.C. now that think about it.)
Faces to names
It was nice to finally meet some of the folks who's names are mentioned on the forums. Mary, Jody, Rex G., Dijos, Jim Clifton, Peter (From the Instructor's View tapes, whom I thanked for keeping our fearless leader out of jail, to which he replied "Which time?"! LOL!) I'm hoping to send some pictures to the webmaster of www.cssdsc.com so that they can appear in the Photo Gallery section there.
GM Neal Hummerstone
Also at the seminar was a man by the name of Neal Hummerstone, a Grand Master that teaches Akido and Arnis, often combining techniques from both styles. Looks about twenty years younger then he really is, and muscles on his muscles.
....... You know when Bram starts moving someone around, and your not sure quite how he's doing it, not because it is really fast, it's just really, deceptively smooth. GM Hummerstone had the same kind of familiarity, the same kind of comfort level, moving from on technique, to another, to a third, smoothly. That's when you realize how much more WORK you got to do! He would occasionally point out an important point, or variation of the techniques. On the second day of the seminar in recognition of Bram's knowledge, GM Hummerstone presented Bram with a 5th Dan Ar-Kido certificate. So Kudos to Mr. Frank!
All in all a successful, and as usual, STUFFED seminar.
Lunumbra