Combination attacks: In an ideal world, all of our submission attempts would succeed on first try. Unfortunately the world rarely cooperates with our desires. Most of the time our opponents anticipation and resistance, combined with imperfections in our technique, result in a failure of the first attempt to get to a submission. This is where combination attacks come in. Combinations allow us to break through resistance and defense via a second, third or fourth attack which compliments the initial attack in some way that hopefully will take advantage of those defensive reactions and get the break though. The notion of combination attacks become more and more important as you climb in skill level, as your opponents ability to read and foresee the set ups to attacks increases. I find that students quickly learn to appreciate the value of combination attacks and work hard to incorporate them into their game – but then a new problem emerges – the problem of COMPLACENT ATTACKS. Students start thinking that since the real attack will be the third or fourth attack, they might as well put little or no effort into the initial submission attack that begins the combination. This is a crucial failure. A good opponent will simply not feel threatened by the initial attack and either not react in the way needed to set up the subsequent attacks, or worse, launch into his own counter attack off your weak attacks. It is critical that the first move be A GENUINE THREAT. Only then will you get the kind of reactions needed to drive the combination forward to success on the second, third or fourth move. That is why it is good for students to have several very strong and threatening moves that opponents know and fear. Faking these moves will always elicit strong and predictable defensive reactions that can be exploited via combination attacks. If there is no plausible threat at the onset, the subsequent moves are unlikely to be any more threatening. Here I work on leg attack drill combinations with Ms Ottavia Bourdain, looking to create predictable reactions off an initial attack that has to be taken seriously and thus set up a chain of events that will get to a submission.
