Day Seven CFIC
After a week of training with a top team of instructors, I’ve completed the Combat and Fighters Instructor Course. It’s been a long seven days of hard training and a bombardment of information. I’ve learnt and re-learned so much during this week, that’s it’s hard to know where to start.
I think as I mentioned in an earlier blog that we covered the basics a lot. This is normally what I try to spend most of my time in class teaching – and we’ve spent a lot of time working on them on this course. My movement and speed has definitely improved and also thanks to Jovan’s help, my striking ability has increased tenfold.
Eyal definitely brings the smart way to fight to the table and learning off him is always fun. Fakes are something I’ve always incorporated into my fighting but using ranges to fake is a new idea to me. Also his ideas in overcoming failed attacks was great. Normally if one of my attacks fails I give up on it and try a different path. Continuing along the same path just with a different type attack is a level of adaptation that is still difficult but with the basic building blocks in hand I’ll definitely be continuing to practice this.
Day seven was dedicated to testing and it was long and gruelling. First off – everyone had to fight. We kitted up in the 360 suits and were told to pair up. Most people pair with those they feel safest with (I had actually pick my partner because he was next to me… Lazy much?) so after we had picked we were told that they were the only people we wouldn’t be fighting. The first person to asked me to fight was by someone who didn’t want to fight me due to my experience, which was really one of those things that automatically earns respect. To have someone come up and say I don’t want to fight you but I’m going to, is just awesome and shows a great deal of dedication. Some of the smaller people had to fight people who were massively bigger and heavier – but no one backed down. The only rules were to make sure you control you temper and that your friends after your fight is done. No one broke the rule which as I said previously show the quality of the people that I got to train with. It did however leave a lot of things you could do in the fight and I’m a tad hurting today.
After the fighting it was on with the teaching test. Everyone had been given a subject and with twelve people to get through it was a very long session. This is my least favourite part of any course I go on. Teaching other instructors is different to teaching in regular classes and as well as that I had four senior instructors watching and listening to everything I did. I was also give a subject that I hadn’t gotten to spent much time on, but it was an aggression drill which I alway enjoy doing. After I’d finished Eyal gave me some feed back but overall said that my teaching was very good and that was great to hear from the top.
Time is always something you need to give in order to get anything or anywhere and I’ve just done over sixty hours of training in the space of seven days. That’s a lot of hard work but it’s what’s needed. This is something that everyone should know already but needs to be reinforced often. How much time do you put into your training and fitness? Is it enough? We have a grading coming up in a few days. Some people will be back to training on the Monday. Make sure you’re one of them and you’re definitely on the right path.
Thanks for reading,
Sam

