Floor work

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Use your skills

Floor work addresses the underlying skills. You learn how to use body weight, rootedness and composure to your advantage. Being aggressive and using tension simply wears you out, whereas letting-go gives you strength. The deeper floor work skills are about introducing other jing into the exercise, and doing even less.


Sticky

Your body weight and sinking have more effect if you can maximise the physical area of contact. Use your entire frame to adhere to the attacker. Smother them. This is called 'controlling' jing. The assailant struggles and forces, but you just remain sticky. As with a boa constrictor, you gently tighten the noose.

Hardness and softness are divided,
there is action and understanding.
Thunder and lightning combine into a pattern.

(I Ching)

Neutralise

Use body weight and monkey paws to smother movement. Encourage the attacker to waste energy struggling to force your inert body into action. Be the anvil that they hammer against. Let them tire themselves.


Slippery

Cease struggling and slide out. This is remarkably easy and effective. Once you see a gap, and become boneless and loose, you can just withdraw your limb with ease.


Yield

Yield when they exert, then use weight to collapse back. This is clever because it provides the illusion of victory, and then reinforces the loss when you drop your weight. Everyone weakens. Let your partner burn themselves out and then sink once again.


Stop controlling

Allow your partner their movement, without interference. Just monitor and avoid compromise. This is harder than it sounds because there is an innate need to control. Don't.
Let your partner do all the work, and simply sink and be rooted. Give up your need to win and let your partner do all the work.


Legs

People ignore their legs. Women in particular need to be conscious of their legs: men are strong in their upper bodies, women in the lower body. Legs have very powerful muscles, and feet are very tactile. Use legs for increased leverage, especially around the neck. You can also be sticky with your legs.


Kick defence

It is important that you can get up off the floor when someone is kicking you. There may even be a number of people seeking to kick you. Most martial arts schools ignore this scenario. We do not.


Women & men

Men and women approach the experience of combat differently. For men, it is considered manly and strong to defeat someone else in combat. Historically, women, were culturally conditioned to feel uncomfortable with being assertive.


Women

Floor work is all about avoiding your partner's strengths and exploiting their weaknesses. To accomplish this, women need to be really good at rooting.


Emotional, psychological, physical

When you play the attacker or the defender, it is essential that you explore how you feel emotionally, psychologically and physically. This experience can be very insightful.
Your emotional awareness enables you to use your skills more effectively against the opponent. Ideally, you want to 'break their spirit'. When the attacker loses their will to fight, they feel weak, helpless and vulnerable. They are at your mercy. You can do with them as you like.


Reversal

Much of what Sifu Waller teaches revolves around the notion of reversing the situation. Instead of being the victim, you change everything and suddenly the attacker feels that they are now the victim. The skill lies in doing this sneakily. You must accomplish the goal without the assailant realising what has happened. Suddenly, they are the one of the floor, fearful and confused.


Mind & habit

Pulling off the skills initially depends upon concentration and 'being in the moment'. In time, the abilities become trained and familiar. A habit. You no longer need to think at all; you just do.


Standing-up

Floor work is very important because the proximity to the ground teaches you how to improve your root and rely upon sinking to a greater extent. Your aim eventually is to take these skills into normal combat. The skills are particularly pertinent to finishing someone off effectively after they have attacked you and been neutralised. If you are good on the floor, your floor work (control) skills will be effective.  
 

I’ve loved every aspect of the floor work!! Especially the back to back work explored last night. It was insane how much effort had to be put in by the attacker…. I was still sweating from playing the attacker when I left the hall at the end of the evening ha ha.

The concepts Sifu showed us made a lot of sense and despite being much bigger than both Maria and Dawn, those concepts made me have to work an awful lot to try and pin them down. It was great to see and experience. And psychologically it really does have a massive impact, as you as an attacker get to a point where you just want to give up as you aren’t getting anywhere, no matter what you try or how hard you try… which is the other great part of this, the attacker ends up trying so hard it is exhausting. The person being attacked, being relaxed, heavy, loose, slippery (not from sweat ha ha), and unflustered almost makes being attacked fun and pleasurable in a perverse way.

(Gary)

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Page created 18 April 1998
Last updated 15 August 2023

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