Swarming

Not all attacks by multiple opponents are the same. Some groups are more dangerous than others. Every now and then the conditions are right for the group to swarm the individual. Sometimes this happens when the individual has copped a few knocks, gets a bit disorientated, and the rest of the group can see an easy target. It’s not always the case though; some groups just attack harder than others.

If you are serious about training multiple attacker defence then you need to have an answer for these ‘higher functioning’ groups that can swarm the individual. The only way you can train for these types of groups is to spend some time getting the ‘attacking’ group up to standard, so that they can give the individual a much more challenging training experience.

Swarming by the group will pretty well destroy any technical approach the individual has to offer. Yes, I see more than a few martial arts touting their solutions for multiple attackers but against a higher functioning group, none of it is going to work. Technique is garbage at this level and your attackers manoeuvre faster than you do and come at you from different angles simultaneously. One or two of the attackers are sure to be hanging off you, slowing you down. Some gangs are actually proficient in working together to get the outcome they desire; they have had plenty of practice.

Every art usually has some multiple attacker curriculums, but most exponents cannot even get out of a corner when the group is only mildly dangerous. The Corner Trap is an exercise that gives you a reasonable indication of whether your skills for defending against multiple people are up to scratch. It will also inform you as to whether your group of attackers needs more training. You can find more about this exercise on the following link.

http://www.endofmartialarts.com/the-corner-trap-exercise/

There is lots of fun to be had in wrecking the delusions of students of the arts who believe they can effectively deal with multiple attackers. If your training group is good enough then it’s not a matter of if you can make the individual go internal (mentally) but how long it takes you. Still, it’s all in a good cause.

As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor

Lineage and Other Bedtime Stories

A few decades ago someone told me about how the structure of his martial art came about. There were some basic techniques, strikes and drills until one of the main exponents went to Hong Kong in the 1960's, saw that the head of the style didn't have anything else much to offer, and so decided to fill out the framework of the art himself. It seems he didn't get any credit for his actions but I saw a few years ago that the style was welcomed back into the Shaolin temple after being 'lost' for the last couple of hundred years. You can trace one of the originators of this style back to the early 1900's in Hong Kong and then the monks of Shaolin start appearing in the narrative as you go back further in time, which is a red flag. It sort of indicates to me that the art might be of a similar age to Judo, which was created in the 1880's.

Just recently the same person told me about a book he read on the origins of Tae Kwon Do. The founders were a group of young Koreans who studied Japanese Karate before the start of World War II and continued to borrow from it in the 1950's. No doubt there was a bit of borrowing from other systems as well as some original stuff. The history and origins of the art were manipulated by the North and South Korean governments over the years in the name of nationalism.

I never would have guessed that Tae Kwon Do and Krav Maga are about the same age. Aikido came about in the late 1920's. By now my interest is piqued so I did a bit of reading. Most of the Chinese martial arts today may not be much older than Judo.

Shaolin temple seems to have a similar problem that the monasteries  in England in the 1500's faced. Buddhist temples controlled large agricultural tracts and were economically important in their local area, which meant they were collecting revenue and amassing assets that government thought was diluting the tax base. Economic influence also means political influence. Burn a temple out and some of the tax revenue might flow again. If you are a temple then you might want a few warrior monks to head off the local bandits and give the local government types something to consider.

It's in the 16th century (1501 to 1600), after their temple getting burnt down, that the Shaolin Temple had a bit of a reputation for pole fighting which was your basic training for the average soldier carrying a spear. The spear was the primary infantry weapon at the time. The temple is a bit of a hub for military people, other warrior monks, etc. Unarmed combat was not all that popular; it was mostly about training weapons, but there is always some form of unarmed combat training for any soldier.

Unarmed martial arts suddenly got popular between 1580 and 1640 and the area around Shaolin had a bit of a renaissance in unarmed combat arts which the monks picked up on. Shaolin was sacked in the 1640's, the temple fell into ruin and had a few monks wandering around in it for the next 100 years.

So where does the Shaolin legend probably come from? Well, in the west there was a TV show in the early 1970's called 'Kung Fu' starring David Carradine and a movie in 1977 called Shaolin Temple where I seem to remember the final fight scene going on forever. In China a young Jet Li starred in a movie called "The Shaolin Temple", which revitalised the Shaolin temple's fortunes after the hardships during the cultural revolution from 1966 to 1976. Imagine tens of thousands of kids across China running away from home to become kung fu masters at Shaolin temple, all because of a movie.

China in the early 1800's had a huge number of fighting styles, most of them being village or family affairs. Over the next 100 years they were transformed and melded into popular brands or they disappeared. Of course if you need to compete with a style that is much more popular then it doesn't hurt to have a great lineage - it's all about marketing and money making - nothing too different to modern times. Nor were they above just declaring themselves to be a particular popular style. In that case it helped to have a lost lineage story when the local school heavies came to pay a visit to see why you thought you could get a free ride on their reputation.

The creation of modern Wing Chun is probably from around the time of Judo's beginnings or a bit before. Of course the creation story starts with the burning of the Shaolin temple. Surprise, surprise. There were plenty of cheap martial arts novels floating around in the early 1900's in China, much like the cheap "dime novels' in the US. It seems that characters from these martial art novels were borrowed for the creation stories in some of the Chinese arts.

The lesson seems to be that martial arts need to continually reinvent themselves to keep attracting a sufficient market share of students that will enable them to survive. Lineage is just another part of the marketing aspect of this.

Measuring - I got my eye on you

Whether you are dealing with a single opponent or multiple opponents, they still need to measure your movements in order to get their way. When the attackers in a group want to execute a tackle or a take-down strategy, they still need good timing to be able to disrupt the individual’s stability. If the measurement and timing of the group members is incorrect, it gives the individual more of a chance to escape.

The effective use of measurement and timing is all about improving power and energy transference. Importantly, you can only time the event if you can measure it. One of the reasons you use acceleration to affect your opponent is that it affects their measuring ability, which also affects their timing.

The more you force your opponent to re-measure, the more their progress stalls.  This means you are messing with their targeting system. A strategy that does this well is reduction, where you force a change in the opponent’s vision while making your head the only viable target. Flight is another strategy that makes it difficult for the opponent to determine how fast you are coming in, allowing your mass to invade the attacker’s space with less resistance.

The harder you accelerate directly at the attacker, the more you force them to re-measure your actions, the more you affect their timing. What you cannot afford to happen is to allow the group to force you to re-measure your own actions and end up hesitating as a result.

Weapons always provide a clear example of how you can be suckered into re-measuring your actions. If one of the attackers was waving a weapon around as a part of a group attack, then what do you do (apart from wondering why you aren’t already running away as fast as you can)? You don’t have time to back off while other attackers are bearing down on your position. Going back to first principles, the attackers will use a weapon to stall your progress, to make you re-measure the situation. Weapons are displayed to grab the individual’s attention and the role of each attacker in a group is to slow your progress to make the job for other group members easier and this builds group cohesion.

The important lesson here is that you don’t wait to be distracted by attackers; just accelerate, aiming to change the attacker’s vision. The more you force them to re-measure, the more you force them into a defensive action, which hopefully gives you the time needed to escape the situation.

As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor.

How Narrow Vision Can Hold You Back in the Arts

I was a student of the arts prior to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and MMA coming on the scene. At that time you didn't have to worry about getting taken to ground and you weren't even worried by the possibility. I never even imagined a ground fighting system of any value. It is a pity in a way as it would have focused me more on things that would have improved my martial arts no end.

The system I studied didn't have takedown defences as such, at least there were no techniques. It did however have some good strategies for avoiding getting taken to ground, although I think these were modifications added in by my instructor because I don't see them anywhere now. A low, fast moving footwork that produced a significant mass effect, in combination with tenets of protecting the waist and non grab seemed to stop you from being dive tackled in group attack training. If I really had to worry about the current generation of fighters though, then I probably would have got closer to the Energy World solutions that my instructor had developed (but hadn't articulated at that time.)

I'd like to think that I would have avoided taking the obvious path of incorporating a few takedown techniques and learning a bit of ground fighting in the hope it would help me get to my feet again. When you look at MMA they seem to be using the cage a lot of the time to try and prevent takedowns but a lot of the matches I see still end up on the ground a large percentage of the time. I cannot see anything to indicate that an aggressive opponent can't take you to ground if they are serious about it, especially if you are relying on technical approaches to prevent it.

Part of the commentary I see in the ongoing drama of MMA verses TMA is the idea that because someone participates in and focuses on competition then they have a lack of orientation towards self defence. Having such a narrow vision of other fighters is not going to push TMA exponents in the direction they need to go. It is a fabulous delusion to think that an MMA exponent is forever constrained to operating by the competition rules of the ring. I'm pretty sure they are like everyone else and can fight dirty if they want to, but it obviously just gets you disqualified in an actual competition. Certainly if you are spruiking self defence then you shouldn't demean MMA in one breath and then demonstrate something likely to fail as a solution in the next.

Self defence is a poor driver in any case when you are facing multiple opponents. Some arts talk about survival but that is not a real driver, it's more a desired outcome. Freedom taken to an extreme is the best driver that I have come across for group attack. People who understand this basic philosophy know they cannot allow themselves to be grabbed, or go to ground, and it starts to broaden your thinking as to how you have to move. Accelerating your whole system and creating a mass effect seemed so obvious once I got my mind around freedom. After a while you look back at the technical solutions you used to rely upon and wonder how you could be so narrow of vision.

Rolling Rolling Rolling

Sometimes our impression of a particular martial art can be skewed, particularly when we are unfamiliar with it. When I first saw Brazilian Jiu Jitsu it reminded me of a boa constrictor going to work. Now that I think back to it, the Gracie in question knew that he owned his opponents once he got them to the ground and he had no time limits that he had to worry about. This meant he could take his time and not take too many risks.

Yet when I see practitioners of BJJ who have an aggressive approach, I'm amazed at how fast they transition. I realised my earlier impressions were quite limited in scope and I also wondered if the same applied to some of the commentators on self defence.

It all comes back to time. Some of the TMA exponents believe that they are going to pull off elimination moves like eye gouges, strikes to the throat, neck, etc. before they get wrapped up and choked unconscious or get a limb extended in a direction it is not meant to go. I remember going through a brief phase of considering elimination techniques before I finally grasped the issue of limited time. In battle you never have the time you imagined you would, especially when you have to defend against multiple opponents.

I wonder how many other students of the arts have the same misconception in regards to the time available to you, as it has a big impact on your ideas. Training is usually done at a speed where the exercise works, that is, at a pace where it doesn't break down. Demonstrations of techniques are usually static, so even if the handwork is fast, the overall motion of the system is slow.

We create solutions for battle in an environment where everything is slowed down for everyone to see what is happening. When you add a lack of resistance into the equation then you get a recipe for creating delusional garbage. It doesn't help the process that people love the movements and shapes of their martial art as much as anything else it has to offer.

It also explains why a lot of technical solutions start to fail when they meet the pressure and resistance of battle. They weren't really designed for it in the first place. Strategies have to be pressure tested to ensure they will hold up. You have to go beyond sparring and drills to achieve this. A lot of TMA exponents unfortunately get suckered into the belief that 'it will be alright on the night'. Like being fascinated by the movements in the arts, people also like to think they are a little bit dangerous and they don't want reality interfering with that vision.

Battle always looks scrappy because of that pesky resistance from your opponent interfering with your plans and movements, sometimes to the point where any particular martial art is hard to recognise. It's not a coincidence that simpler solutions are more likely to work - it's all you usually have time for. So forget about the illusions of elimination concepts as they are a trap; pressure will likely deny you time and opportunity, especially for multiple attackers. Self defence is sometimes hijacked in the arts by the practitioners pushing the idea of being deadly. The more you think in battle, the more you are wasting time, and aggressive opponents will make you pay for those types of lapses.

Time and pressure are key elements in battle and against multiple attackers they are vital. The time is not available for using the opponent as a shield or lining attackers up. Time and pressure are generally your enemy if you are static. The more accelerated the movement of your whole system, the more time and pressure work in your favour to dismantle the group.

As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor

You’re the expert - solve my problems

A few years ago I was talking to someone from a TMA school who told me that his instructors basically ignored the possibility of getting taken to ground. The first rule of takedown defence was they don't talk about getting taken to ground. To counter this point of weakness they fill the students heads with ideas of lethal strikes - yes, keep training and one day all this deadly knowledge will be yours grasshopper.

This got me thinking about how sometimes instructors of all levels can create poor solutions for their students. It can be a difficult thing to teach martial arts. You are in front of students who are willing to give you a fair degree of respect for your knowledge and they want someone to solve the problems they are experiencing. As the instructor you start to believe that you can solve every problem put in front of you, a delusion in its own right. It's a trap that most instructors have fallen into at one time or another. Basically you are put on the spot and feel obliged to come up with an answer, after all, you are the expert.

How do instructors get caught out? Simple really, the student gives you a very particular scenario which focuses you on a single issue. Take for example the issue mentioned above of getting taken to ground. If you train a martial art that does not consider this problem in the context of an opponent who is skilled in submission grappling, then you will not have extensively trained any solutions. Your instructors aren't trained to handle the problem so what sort of answers will they give you? The answer is, they will make something up that probably won't work.

Instructors are far more susceptible to doing this than you might think. Some of the error on the instructors part is allowing themselves to be narrowly focused on a particular scenario and then trying to come up with a technical solution to beat the problem put forward. Everything is performed in slow motion with students acting the part of willing dummies, so the flaws are not obvious to all and sundry and it doesn't fall apart on the spot. I have seen someone get trapped by this process for more than six months and everything created was completely impractical.

As I said, anyone can fall into the trap. Have a look at this link to a you-tube video of a famous Wing Chun master, titled "William Cheung against grappling" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G-occarX0w  I think he got caught out exactly as I have described above and it's probably not something he would have ever considered doing in battle. The most balanced comment for the video was as follows: "I expect most people who understand anything about mma or wrestling/jiu-jitsu know this is a poor defense. Mr Cheung has too much ego and not enough knowledge of take down defense...and embarrasses himself a bit here. Doesn't make him a bad kung-fu guy but stick with what you know."

Multiple attacker training can be a great help in orientating exponents to avoid the creation of solutions that don't work. You just need to ensure the group of 'attackers' is up to scratch as they will ensure your testing ground is appropriate and any flaws in your strategy are immediately apparent.

Testing

Did you know that MMA is a sport and has no value for self defence on the street? If you are a traditional martial artist (TMA) then keep repeating this mantra to yourself, as maintaining this fiction will help you feel better about your art for a bit longer. I love the logic of it all. MMA has wrestling, boxing, Muay Thai, BJJ, and a few other martial arts but it's a sport with no street value. Krav Maga was put together by a guy with boxing and wrestling skills and bits of other systems were added over time with the odd original technique or two and it is heavily marketed as a self defence for the street.

The TMA's that are desperate to differentiate themselves from MMA always talk about the sport verses the street. They forget one tiny little detail and that is the martial arts world is filled with garbage. You need to test your strategies and your skills to ensure you aren't being delusional.

You might sneer at competition but TMA's got right into competition a few decades ago and the rules made it a pretty poor spectator experience. The issue for them now is that MMA does it so much better. These cross trainers have built themselves a testing ground where they regularly see if their skills are any good. It might not be the greatest testing ground ever devised but it is one never-the-less. A lot of TMA's on the other hand are rarely going outside of their individual clubs. I saw someone in a blog describe it as 'inbreeding grounds' where they train against the same people doing similar things.

You need a testing environment to see if you really have the skills that can handle the reality of a serious battle with a serious opponent; something you cannot fake. You need something that will get rid of any illusions you are holding onto.

MMA has come up with their version of a testing ground where it is hard to fake the outcome. Sparring in a TMA environment will produce a fake outcome almost all the time. So which system is training for reality?

Another test that cannot be easily faked is multiple attacker training particularly when the group is half decent. You either get taken down or you make it to safety. Dealing with multiple attackers is another area where TMA is desperate to point out their advantages over MMA. They should be careful about making any claims to greatness in the area, as from what I have seen they would not enjoy going up against a decent group.

Wet Noodles & Lethal Strikes

The reality of fighting a group of people is that you rarely have time for the strategies that you might use against a single opponent. You would do well to ignore just about every video on the internet dealing with multiple attackers. They are filled with students giving the resistance of a wet noodle and instructors demonstating strategies that you are unlikely to have time to enact. More likely you would get swarmed by the group.

What makes the videos interesting is the commentary. People still go on about the 'lethal strikes' that the instructor could have used in a real situation. I still remember all the talk about lethal strikes when I first started in the arts 30 years ago. The first thing I learned of any real substance was that any significant pressure from the group made a mockery of the notion of lethal strikes. People watch too many movies.

I cheered in the 1990's when the Gracies started challenging 'lethal' people and dismantling their delusions. It seems that the lesson has got old. That's a bit of a pity cause it's a good one.

Absorption

In training how to fight multiple opponents, you need the ‘attacking’ group to give you the right experience. One of the skills a group member has to learn is absorption. This is where you slow up or stall the momentum of the individual.

The idea of absorption is that you don’t let people get past you easily. In fact, you make the individual spend time with you in battle so that the rest of the group can come in from the sides and behind and take them down. You want to be like some chewing gum on the bottom of their shoe, that is, hard for the individual to peel off. Even better if you can hang your weight off the individual.

Absorption occurs because you are effectively throwing your body weight at the individual and asking them to deal with it. There are various ways of absorbing people. One method is to use your arms to funnel them onto your upper body so that you can body-check them and then make them carry your weight. This method has its risks in that you are planning a collision with the individual and you need to get the timing right in order to make it effective and also protect yourself.

Another method of absorption is to wedge the individual upwards out of their footwork, by extending your arms onto their torso and retreating a step or two. You may have to counter a large amount of the individual’s momentum at the point of impact. It’s about reverse ‘E’ where all parts of the body move back at the same time; essentially you have to relax and let yourself be pushed / carried back. You need the skill of keeping your system together in order to be successful with this method of absorption.

Absorption is not a new idea by any means. American footballers for instance are good at absorption and they use strategies such as replacement to break up an opponent’s charge. There is plenty of scope outside of martial arts to learn the skill.

In an earlier post on how to train an attacking group, I made mention of a number of training strategies, one of which was the ‘line up’ as represented by the diagram above. The groups’ job is to stop the individual from getting through the line, so group members have to learn how to absorb the individual’s efforts.

As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor

Shielding

Every time I read an article on how to defend against multiple attackers I invariably see something on shielding. Want to learn how to fight multiple opponents? Just use one of the attackers as a shield to stop the rest getting to you. You can find videos of someone demonstrating how they can use one person as a shield and strike others as they come at them, or lining other attackers up behind the person being used as a shield, etc. These demonstrations invariably have a couple of things in common; they are always in slow motion with students playing their part to make the demo work.

When the group members become more activated, they are not so easy to man-handle or manipulate. You are not going to get that Vulcan nerve pinch you were aiming for, or easily throw them into other attackers. More importantly, an activated group has real intent to get the individual. If the group members can measure what the individual is doing, then it’s much more probable they will get them. Then you will see the typical shielding scenarios start to fail with alarming regularity.

You can expect a different type of response from a high functioning group when you try to use one of the group members as a shield. For starters, active group members are unlikely to allow themselves to be used as a shield, they will be far less compliant than demonstrations would suggest. The other thing you will find is the group is so intent on getting you that you won't have the time to try and manipulate someone as a shield, the other group members don't hang back to give you those few seconds needed to attempt shielding.   

For some reason we are socially conditioned to see fellow group members as objects we need to move around in order to get to the individual, and shielding as a technical solution relies on this. Once the group members understand that this is just a conditioned response which can be overcome, they then go after the individual much more forcefully. As an 'attacker' in group attack training you can path straight through anyone being used as a shield or just accelerate the shield into the individual.

When you are playing the part of an attacker in the group, don’t let anything stop you from getting the individual. Get a couple of other group members into the same frame of mind and you will see a big difference in the group and in the strategies the individual can safely use.

In my earlier posts I have discussed elements of the strategy for dealing with high functioning groups, which is to create a mass effect by accelerating straight through the centre of an opponent’s attack. When dealing with multiple attackers, you don’t have time to attempt to manipulate your attackers. If you are to avoid being taken down by the group then you only afford to spend one moment for each attacker you encounter. Obviously if you keep hold of one attacker to use them as a shield then you break these rules.

So what can shielding look like when you are accelerating through the group? Have a look at the diagram below but just remember that diagrams are open more than one interpretation. As seen in the example below, the individual ‘Y’ is using their accelerated mass to enable them to deflect attacker 1 into the path of attacker 3.

The basic idea of advanced group attack skills is that you have to move through each attacker in your progression to an exit. Though when I look at this diagram I cannot help thinking that unless the exit was just behind opponent number 2, you would not bother with that person, as attempting to use shielding would just be wasting time unnecessarily. You would just go straight through attacker no.1 with enough acceleration that attackers 2 and 3 could not get you.

 

Sometimes attacker no. 1 will move slightly to the side to avoid the full force of your mass effect. If this happens, then as you go through them your action accelerates them in the direction they were going, sending them into the path of the attackers coming at you from the side or from behind them.

If you are fully energised with a sufficient mass effect then shielding is something you will realise you don’t need to bother with, as it will happen within the group as a by-product or consequence of your actions. You will shield yourself by your accelerated action going through each attacker.

Never forget that you may have to account for skilled opposition in a group; attackers who are not pushovers. You could meet a group member who has good absorption skills and you don’t get through them but are instead deflected off at an angle. However, even as you deflect off them, the opponent will likely not be able to handle your full mass effect and will be moved out of your path and hopefully into the path of another attacker.

 

As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor

The Student / Instructor Demo

Every time I see an instructor demonstrate (with their students) a strategy for dealing with multiple attackers, I can’t help thinking how it always looks so clean and precise. I guess they have to give the impression that if it was a real situation they could somehow deliver decisive strikes to multiple opponents in quick succession.

However when the student has a training experience against fighting multiple opponents, they get a far messier outcome, and those unanswered strikes on their opponents are nowhere to be seen. The attackers won’t let themselves be used as shields and the rest of the group starts hammering you from all different angles. The student can find it difficult to correlate between their own experience and the demonstration they witnessed, but it would be a mistake for them to believe the reason for the difference is all down to the skill of the instructor.

Demonstrations that involve the interaction of the instructor and the students have one thing in common; the student will always play their part to make the demonstration work. In traditional martial arts the instructor / teacher in any school is highly respected by their students, and sometimes it is to a degree where their students place them on a pedestal. This is of considerable benefit to the instructor when teaching, as the students are extremely pliable when you are trying to demonstrate something. The student will basically act their part to ensure the demonstration is successful.

One of the reasons students act like this might be the socialisation process that occurs as part of belonging to that school or club. There are behaviours that students learn from observing the behaviour of other students and the newer students tend to copy the ones who have been there for a while in order to fit in. That is one of the reasons why it’s rare to get a student who will actively resist their instructor and you almost never see them throw a decent strike at their teacher or dive-tackle them to the ground as part of group attack training.

Of course to work effectively, demonstrations are all set up so that students are at the right distance for the demo to proceed smoothly and the students move at the right speed and trajectory to make the choreographed situation work. It’s important for the student to realise that even when it is speeded up, it is still choreographed; there is no randomness to the ‘attackers’ actions. It’s a different story when it’s you verses your fellow students, as they are your competitors. You will actively seek to disrupt the intentions of your fellow students, whereas you would not consider doing the same to your instructor. Basically when it’s your fellow students you are up against then you want to win the game.

When I look at a demonstration for dealing with multiple attackers, I imagine the group activating to really try and get the individual, and it generally gives me a good indication of whether the strategy will fail badly or not. Just remember that the big difference once the group is active is that you are now dealing with behaviour that is much more difficult to control. The more your strategy can deal with the randomness and chaos that a group attack can produce, the better your chances of exiting the situation safely.

One of the less desirable outcomes of the student / teacher relationship is the development and propagation of self-defence techniques that won’t work when the group is really trying to get the individual. Don’t take my word for it; just get a good, active group together and test those techniques and strategies out. You will soon get an indication of the point where the strategy will fail and it is generally based on the level of pressure being delivered by the group. The higher the pressure, the greater the rates of failure of strategies that you might think have some legitimacy after observing them in demonstrations.

If you want a bit of a laugh, have a look this video of what purports to be a Kiai master who is obviously a huge fan of the Jedi and the Force. It is an extreme example (if it’s not a fake) that students will follow observed behaviour patterns and have the desire to make the instructor look good, even if it’s ridiculous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhhWcRGRtOI

As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor.