What is your favorite spontaneous class drill?

[teej]

Instructors, what is your favorite drill that you run in class to produce natural reaction or spotaneous responses from your students? The drill that you use that get the most students to react in the shortest amount of time?

Students, what spontaneous/reaction drills in class do you like doing most? These are drills where you don't have time to think of which technique to do, but react.

On the other side of the coin, which is your least favorite drill to participate in as a student?

Instructors, what is the worst reaction drill that you have seen?

Yours in Kenpo, Teej

 

[Andrew Green]

Sparring or isolated sparring

 

[RichK]

Single line drill, tell each attacker a different attack and see how the attackee deals with it. When everyone goes through the line a new person becomes the attackee. My least favorite is when I am on the mat and my fellow instructor does his favorite. You stand there and he calls out a technique that you immediately do, not stand and think about it. I hate when he does "maces", I get confused on which one I am doing since there are so many of them. Quick brain drills I call them.

 

[jdinca]

Single line drill, tell each attacker a different attack and see how the attackee deals with it. When everyone goes through the line a new person becomes the attackee. My least favorite is when I am on the mat and my fellow instructor does his favorite. You stand there and he calls out a technique that you immediately do, not stand and think about it. I hate when he does "maces", I get confused on which one I am doing since there are so many of them. Quick brain drills I call them.

We've got a version we call "Technique Jeopardy". The instructor says something like "the attacker is throwing a right hand punch" the first person who does a technique for that attack gets a point. Or, "what's the first technique in the system with a walking rear kick". I'm not a big fan of this one. I also hate stance competitions.

I sometimes will have my students get in lines facing each other. One line throws punches, the other throws blocks to counter. The lines are just far enough apart that nobody gets hit.

Another drill is the put together a hand strike combination with each strike given a number. I'll call out the numbers in sequence until they have them down, and then I'll mix it up.

 

[KenpoTex]

My favorite drill is probably one that we call the Gauntlet--Two rows of students facing each other, one person at a time walks in between the rows and gets attacked at random. Depending on the ranks of the students you can restrict the types of attacks or limit it to one attacker at a time. The other night in brown-belt class I had them doing it with any attack with an option for multiple attackers.

I also enjoy "tiger in the cage"--one person in the center of a circle, the people around the circle attack one at a time. This forces the person in the middle to respond to attacks from 360-degrees. Once again, you are limited only by your imagination when it comes to thinking up variations and "twists" to this drill. For example: categories of attack (all attacks are grabs, etc.); defender has a predetermined sequence of basics that they must use after their initial defense, regardless of the attack; defender starts with their eyes closed. Like I said, you can come up with numerous ideas on this theme.

 

[RichK]

I've used both of Kenpotex's drills before and enjoy them too. I do like the "tiger in the cage" term as oppossed to "bull in the ring" which I grew up with.

 

[Carol]

Blitz rounds. My dojo does them for stripe testing, I wish we did them more often.

We do it with half the class holding focus pads or kick pads, and half the class in the middle, each person lined up in front of a padholder. We have 10 seconds to kick or punch the heck out of the pad, then switch to the next person. After 3 minutes, the drillers and the padholders switch.

The agony is beautiful...