Tactical Edge last night

Tactical Edge is the name given to Mark Davies' combatives system, and it's linked to the krav maga class I go in Edinburgh. Last night was the first time I'd ever gone along to the class, although I'd been interested for a while.

Tactical Edge is not light and fluffy, and like Tuesday's Combat Sport, I was the only female in the class. I'm not sure why that is, but I guess that some of the content could make women uncomfortable. In actual fact, this is the stuff that women need to learn if they're serious about learning self-defence. Still, I guess it's all down to taste.

In terms of material, it wasn't at all dissimilar to the stuff I learned with Kupso and with CREST. There was the warmup from *hell* - loads of running with random changes of direction (dangerous with socks but there was *no* way I was going barefoot in that temperature!!), random situps, pushups, knees to chest, floor touching etc thrown in for variety. It was so cold I did the warm up in my hoodie and although I was out of breath, I wasn't even really sweating at the end.

Then we moved onto some padwork, working pre-emptive elbow strikes. From there we moved onto a basic takedown then into defending a clothing grab using strikes to either side of the head then a neck rotation.

We then looked at defending against edged weapons and this is where I saw the parallels with what I've learned previously in terms of taking joint locks into weapons strips and disarms. Marcus then demonstrated the use of Filipino-style circular techniques to defend against edged weapons. This did make me smile because it's what I learned in CREST as the sambut sambut drill.

I had a complete brain-fart about 10 mins from the end where nothing worked for me the way I wanted it to. Luckily my partner was v patient! Actually, I felt really sorry for the poor guy cos I didn't half crank on a few locks and I heard his elbow crack a couple of times. I kept trying to encourage him to 'get his own back' on me!