River Training

Mark and I did some training in the river today. What made the training a little more interesting was the significant strenth of the current. Any takedowns, strikes, or movement in general had to be adjusted to work with the current. Since the water was thigh deep, the current had the greatest affect on one's footwork. Some of our work would result in us both falling to the ground due to too much focus on breaking the structure, etc. The density of the water prevented our feet from regaining any balance disrupted by the current. Regaining balance in the water with or without a current seems to be one of the significant differences between training on the land and in the water.

A fun drill Mark came up with was avoiding all the plant debris floating by while striking eachother. Other drills involved being held and struck underwater. I found that being brought up momentarily then shoved back down was the most difficult to deal with psychologically. Strikes, chokes, and being crammed pretty hard against the bottom were relaxing until I started to run out of air. I'm advanced SCUBA certified and I've always been comfortable in the water, so a lot of the drills were no less intense than all the roughhousing I did in the water as a kid. One of my favorite SCUBA exercises is "dive and don", as it is the most difficult for me to do:

Wade out into at least ten feet of water with a mask, fins, and weight belt. Swim down to the bottom and weigh your fins and mask down with the belt. Come back up. Catch your breath and then swim back down. Put on your fins and mask at the bottom, then clear your mask (tilt your head back about 45 degrees, pull the bottom of your mask away from your face about half an inch, and blow out with your nose). Swim to the surface.

This exercise is pivotal in learning how to stay calm while doing a task underwater. Initially, most will rush down to the bottom and usually panic before they even get to their mask and struggle back up to the surface. I thought I figured it out the first time by not rushing. So I slowly and calmly swam down to the bottom, put on my fins, then panicked before I could get my mask on and struggled back up to the surface. It took me three or four tries before I could actually do the exercise, and even then my actions had some panic in them. Our instructor demo'ed this exercise for us by going down, putting on all the gear, clearing his mask, then swimming up halfway, and hanging out there for another twenty seconds.

Anyhow, back to training, though there isn't much more to it. We did a few more exercises in the water. One fun one was receiving an "onion" then getting dunked, held under, and punched some more. We definitely concentrated more on the psychological aspects of the water rather than the mechanics of doing work in the water.