Modern Army Combatives By: Jimmy Mullins

MMA is growing into a very popular sport. UFC president Dana White predicts that someday a MMA will be the most popular sport in the world. He could very well be right, the sport has grown insanely big in the past few years. It all started with the finale of The Ultimate Fighter Season 1. Forrest Griffin VS Stephan Bonnar is one of the best fights in MMA history. 

After that fight the sport started to steadily grow faster. How has this affected the rest of the world? For one, more and more Army soldiers are starting to take a great interest in the Modern Army Combatives Program. The Modern Army Combatives Program is the Army’s self defense training program. It all begins with a one week course often called Combatives Level 1.

Being a huge MMA fan myself I wanted to get an opportunity to take this course to see how it worked. From previous knowledge of Army Combatives I knew it was based on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Having had a little Jiu-Jitsu I thought I would be at the top of the class. Little did I know, it’s a little different than straight Jiu-Jistu.  Let me clear something up, first I had only began to work on learning Jiu-Jitsu before this class. So I really didn’t have much of a jump on anyone else.

The first day of class was learning what is called Drill 1 and 2. Drill 1 starts with you being mounted by your opponent. Your objective is to trap their arm and roll them over so you end up in their guard. This is called the arm trap and roll. From there you will escape your opponents guard and come to a side control, this is simply called pass the guard. From side control you will achieve the mount. This is Drill 1, they basically have you do this over and over until you can do it without even thinking. Drill 2 is you having mounted your opponent you will execute the arm push and roll to the rear mount, then work on escaping the rear mount. Both of these drills are pretty easy, but the Army has a certain way they want you to do them, and everything has to be perfect. 

The second day of class was spent learning submissions, straight arm bar from the mount and from the guard, bent arm bar from the mount or side control, rear-naked choke, and the cross collar choke.  All are pretty simple moves, with lots of rolling during the class. The third day of class…my favorite, on the third day you will roll….ALL DAY.  You will spend the day rolling, at first rolling for dominant position, then rolling for submissions. 

The fourth day is the clinch drill, we started out by learning a few clinches, after learning the clinches we had 1 minute to achieve a clinch against someone in which we couldn’t swing back. Thank God they wore boxing gloves is all I have to say, because no matter how fast we got the clinch we all ate some punches. The final day of class we were tested on teaching the moves we learned back to our instructors. We had to teach 8 out of 10 random moves and not miss a step.  Easy day of class, we did roll at the end with slaps and punches.

I was very glad to have the opportunity to go to this class because of my love for MMA, this class was very focused on MMA and we did go over some striking but not a lot. The instructor was a big UFC fan so everyday in class we watched a UFC fight that ended in something similar to that day’s lessons. It was  a great experience and I’m hoping to get Level 2 very soon.

By Jimmy Mullins who is the host of http://twitter.com/drtapout