Surviving on the ground 101 for Karateka

Let's start by saying that "surviving on the ground" is not the same as "winning a fight on the ground".

For countless reasons that I am sure you have already read elsewhere fighting on the ground is not the best of the strategies when your life is at risk.
If you had the bad fortune of ending on the ground, be it on top or on the bottom, then your main goal must be to regain your feet.


If you have a gentleman like this on top of you preventing you from standing up, then I have some recommendations that, surprisingly, I forgot to include in my book (you got my book and sent me a donation via Paypal, right?).

-Cover your face/head at the best of your ability to avoid taking heavy shots that can knock you out.
-Keep your neck covered to avoid being chocked out or strangled.
-Keep your arms and elbows tight to the body to prevent being caught in armbars and such.
-Keep the other guy close to you to disrupt his striking, but,
-Create space between the other guy and you so to find a scape.

Creating space to find my way out
Now I have a (long) video where I roll with this gentleman and with another one, in the middle of yesterday's MMA class, where we only rolled (no striking):

As you can see, this was "fighting" in the sense that we tried to "win", not to "scape". The environment and goals of different settings are different, and I use them all to improve my self-defense. You can watch me using all the recommendations above to keep me safe from his submissions attempts.

If you find yourself in a real fight in the real life and you really "need" to win that fight, make sure you are standing up and that the other guy is alone before you start banging the crap out of each other (not that I recommend anyone to do that, by the way).





PS:
In the video you can see my world-famous kesa gatame, my less than ideal throwing attempts, my well rehearsed ukemi and me tapping to a really nice Kimura / ude garami that, sadly, was out of the angle of the camera.
Oh, and some of my training partners as really convenient background.

PS2:
We are having some renovations going on on our usual place so we are using the conference room for training this month. Weird.








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