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