Started with breathing exercises designed to get us thinking about stress and discomfort and its affects. Start lying on your back and hold your breath as long as you can, not a lot of fun, using burst breathing until you’re back to normal. Then repeat while doing very very slow situps and pushups. Then one person leaning their fists into the other persons abdomen, idea is to breathe through. Then breathing through while one person rolls slowly up and down the other. Interesting.
An exercise falling on the floor, quite hard, from seated and then from squatting. About not freaking out about falling.
Then a close-quarters drill where you first simply provide pressure to push an aggressor away. Focus on the push from he body not the arm, getting a good firm position, pushing to their centre. Agressor is at first simply walking slowly into very close range but becomes progressively more active, grabbing etc and the responses get more varied. Loren decided our movements had got very zombie-like so we stopped and did a simple “lead the person indifferent directions as if they are on wheels” drill to remember the Systema way of moving. Then back to a more full-on version of the first exercise with multiple attackers moving in quite fast. Idea is to be quite detached and just deal with it. I loved this, coped really well.
Loren inserts two or three quick exercises to get our brains relaxed – moving from seated to lying on your stomach without using you arms.
I missed this stuff last week.