TCB Fight Team

GREAT FIRST DAY AT NEW LOCATION!

tcbfightteam — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:16:52 +0000

Starting this week: prospective members can come in for a one week trial! Existing members: buy 6 months and receive a one month membership gift certificate and a private session to give to a friend or family member!

Awesome beginners class followed by mma. Jehiah drilled arm bar, triangle, and omo plata defenses. Keep it up team!

NEW LOCATION STARTING 12/12/2011

tcbfightteam — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 12:38:40 +0000

WE’LL BE AT THE NEW LOCATION STARTING MONDAY 12/12/2011. OPEN MON-FRI CLASSES STARTING AT 6PM EVERY NIGHT. 479 S. HWY 62 AT THE CORNER OF HWY 62 AND E TUCKER CHAPEL RD. JUST ABOUT 6 MILES FROM THE LAST LOCATION SO NO EXCUSES! SEE EVERYONE SOON! STOP BY FOR GIFT CERTIFICATES FOR CHRISTMAS TOO! LOTS OF DIFFERENT PACKAGES TO CHOOSE FROM. 4796331373.

BOXING CLASSES AVAILABLE DURING THE DAY NOW!

tcbfightteam — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:46:38 +0000

Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 11am and at noon. Come by and try it out. Email us at tcb2032@ymail.com or call/text 4796331373.

Check us out ASAP!

tcbfightteam — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 21:44:09 +0000

Boxing, kickboxing, muay thai, judo, Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, taekwondo, wrestling, mma and cardio/strength training for adults and kids. Private sessions available as well. No contracts. 3 month or 6 month or 1 year packages to chose from right now.

We have a 3 month special for $199 or else it’s $80 a month. Gimme a call for more info!

TCB Kids MMA Sparring

tcbfightteam — Sun, 15 May 2011 23:10:33 +0000

Once a week our athletes are allowed to do live sparring in the cage under tight supervision/coaching and with much attention given to weight and experience level.

TCB Kids Youth Wrestling/MMA

tcbfightteam — Sun, 15 May 2011 23:04:50 +0000

Our TCB “cage kids” is in full swing preparing for our summer program. Our kids MMA is primarily composed of Wrestling, Boxing, Submission Grappling, and Kickboxing. Classes are an hour and a half which gives us plenty of time to drill/practice multiple facets of each discipline. It is ideal for athletes of any sport that wish to cross train, get in better shape, improve coordination, and learn REAL self defense. Once a week our athletes are allowed to do live sparring in the cage under tight supervision/coaching and with much attention given to weight and experience level.

Kids are only allowed to spar just enough to leave them wanting more. Our kids take pride in being the very best students, athletes, and competitors they can be. This is the real deal not a martial arts mill that’s charging parents hundreds of dollars for colored belts and a false sense of security. We don’t take children that are not ready to listen or that do not want to be there. One visit to our class and you will find the very best that this area has to offer.

We guarantee it.

Phonics by Proust, ABCs by Emerson -Jehiah Burchfield

tcbfightteam — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 06:25:58 +0000

Imagine trying to teach a child to read by teaching them each word of a famous poem or piece of literature. Trying to convey the nuances and depth of great pieces of writing to a new reader would require constant steps backwards and excessive repetition; and while some gifted few would eventually grasp the beauty therein and simultaneously learn to read, most would suffer in frustration and miss the opportunity they had both to experience a superb art form and to acquire a valuable utility.

In other words, if you learn the basic elements first, everything else has a chance to fall into place; and poor methodology can ruin even the most potentially beautiful activities (insert sexual joke here).

Things work the same way in the gym. If you don’t know the basic stuff, you won’t be able to play the game as quickly or as well, which means you will appreciate your time on the mat less. There is nothing fun about constantly getting your guard passed and/or getting choked from mount over and over and over and not really getting much better at prolonging the inevitable. However, if this is happening to you, the answer is not to work on the latest way to control someone’s hands with their gi skirt while pulling a crazy upside down helicopter guard “whose your daddy?” toe hold sweep-I don’t know if that even exists, but if does, leave it alone for now.

Focusing on things like that will continue to get you smashed.

Actually, no matter how you train someone will smash you, but if you want to get smashed less then focus on what is actually holding you back. I will bet you money it is something very straightforward that you simply have not practiced enough. For example, at the end of a long rolling session the other night one of the students asked me “How do you keep passing my guard?” to which I replied “I move your legs out of the way”. I was partially joking with him by giving an understated answer, but the comment was also meant to encourage him that it really is pretty simple stuff that makes the biggest difference. So, we talked about that briefly, and it turns out he could tell some of the main reasons why he couldn’t pass my guard and I could pass his-he just needed to reinforcement that he was on the right path.

There is a concept known as “capacity constraint resource” in operations management, which basically means you need to identify the primary limiting factor of a system if you want to make the most useful improvements to its performance. Obviously there are a number of things you could get better at; the question is which one has the best tradeoff in positively affecting performance? There are a lot of data out there to be considered, but what you need is information that can be put to use.

I realize that many athletes do not come to the game with the ability to do this for themselves, and it is my opinion that coaches should be primarily working on providing this service. A student can run you tube searches for the snazziest technique of the week, they do not need me for that (and honestly, I know disappointingly few). On the other hand, what will put them on the fast track to actually being able to play the game they have chosen to play is to learn their way around it so they can get to the business of rolling instead of continuing to be confused spectators in their own grappling matches.

This is what I strive to provide, and this is what I want from a higher level BJJ coach when I go train somewhere. I would rather have someone simplify what I currently see as complex or correct me on something I am already pretty good at. That changes your game much more than a glut of new techniques. A coach should have a sharp eye attuned to the present moment; they should be a source of relevant information, and a dispenser of the next thing that a student needs to hear, not the next thing the coach wants to say.

In a later piece, I will write about the one conceptual model that has most affected my learning and teaching in the last couple of years, and that I feel brilliantly captures the points I am making above. I came upon it through SBGi ( www.straightblastgym.com

) where I primarily heard the concepts from a man named Cane Prevost, who is one of Matt Thornton’s black belts from Portland. Matt has spoken for years of the value of training and coaching the basics, and I owe much of my game and approach to his material and teaching.

The truth gorilla: J

I would leave you with this thought-try to pay attention to what is missing and what is working well in your game. A lot of what is important will be clear to you if you pay attention, and guidance will provide you with a number of shortcuts that will be completely common sense as soon as you see them. If you ever feel I have strayed from this path and am showing you something extraneous, feel free to call me out on it. If it is not apparent why something is useful, ask, because maybe it is not.

This Place -AK

tcbfightteam — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:09:33 +0000

This place.
This place is my brother, my father, my teacher, and my friend.
These mats are my playground, my gym, my confessional, and my home.
These walls contain greatness, pain, sadness, and sacrifice.
These people are my teammates, my opponents, my coaches, and my family.
This cage is my foundation, my medicine, my property, and my trade.
This game is ruthless, violent, peaceful, and poetic.
This gym is my love, my passion, my heartache, and my blood. It IS our DNA, it is us and we are it. It is my breath.
AK-

BJJ, TKD, Boxing, Kickboxing, Wrestling, Strength/Conditioning…ect…

In one place.

Let’s Kick Some Ass -Jehiah Burchfield

tcbfightteam — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 03:40:36 +0000

“Let’s Kick Some Ass!”

I hear these kinds of statements all the time at fights and it never fails to make me smirk. I will make no bones about the fact that I find this kind of “pumping up” through junior-high level poseur bullshit amusing at best. This is another thing I like about the way it is with the TCB team backstage. No mean frowns while singing Slip Knot songs, no wildly gesticulating Eminem imitations, no putting your face in front of a teammate and telling them that they are a “bad mother fucker”, demanding that they “get mad”, etc. I will detail below what I think is so important about getting this approach right.

Take off your mask

Displays of aggressive music, chest thumping, etc. leading up to a competition-think about what is behind that. Very often these behaviors are a response to fear-they are an attempt to cover up the truth that there is a certain aversion to what is about to happen. There is a certain attraction to it as well, but I believe you miss the most attractive part if you insist trying to cover up your concern by blasting your favorite music for angry souls and loudly proclaiming that you are going to “destroy” or “kill” your opponent or whatever other pretentious overstatement you prefer.

This guy never threatens to kill his opponents…

…which should make you feel silly if you do.

By doing this, you are missing the opportunity to face your fears for what they are-you are failing to be honest with yourself and you are putting up a front to keep the fear at bay. This is why I have always liked fighters like Randy Couture, Fedor Emeliananko, GSP, etc. These kinds of competitors have the air of the quiet professional; they don’t feel the need to convince anyone that they are there to fight, they know that the fight will happen soon enough and that it will be what it is. I also have respect for each of our competitors who step up in the cage and face their own fears with composure. It is a maturing experience if you let it be, and you can see the mark it leaves on people’s lives when it is handled correctly.

Not quiet professionals:

This is why I don’t like trash-talking and self-aggrandizement. Time and time again in my life I have seen the loud over-actors break and quit. What that looks like to me is that some people spend a lot of energy trying to convince themselves that they are not afraid of something when they are, which leaves little energy for actually rising to a challenge. It is more authentic to simply recognize that humans have natural aversions to certain situations and that they respond psychologically to these types of predicaments. In my opinion, the only worthwhile reason to subject yourself to this is to grow from the experience. However, if you never look deeply enough at your experience then the opportunity for increased self-knowledge is missed and the growth does not occur.

This spills into other areas of life as well. For instance, if you can learn to not experience excessive anxiety when your ego, reputation, or body is at risk, if you can be sincere in trying circumstances, you will experience a level of authenticity that will greatly change your entire life experience. You will learn more about worry and anxiety through true introspection in difficult conditions than you would learn from reading 200 self-help books and continuing to blast “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” every time you “need to get psyched up” for a situation involving a modicum of stress.

I have faced a (very) few combative situations where death or serious physical maiming was a real possibility, and I never left the situation feeling more arrogant for having escaped unscathed, I never felt like fist-pumping or “raising the roof”. I know a number of men who have more experience in this regard than I do. Without exception, those experiences have left them more humble, friendly and realistic. They are not your boastful caricature of a “tough guy” who acts like a one-man mosh pit at parties, I can promise you. I think the reason for this is that facing your own mortality is not the kind of experience that makes you mouthier, it makes you quieter. As Denzel Washington’s character in American Gangster said “The loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room”.

Combative sports can be viewed as a microcosm of this kind of confrontation with your own finitude. They offer the opportunity to experience the fear that comes from threats to self. Maybe not all-or-nothing, “death in battle” threats , but very real threats to ego and to physical comfort. And I believe they are superior to all other competitive activities because of this. So if you are ever at a fight and see me respond to someone’s fervent plead to “kick his ayy-uss!” by chuckling to myself, now you know what I am thinking. Enjoy your training.

-Jehiah Burchfield

TCB Goes 2-0 in Springfield, MO

tcbfightteam — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 18:18:49 +0000

Steven Pierce improves his MMA record to 3-0 Saturday night at XCF in Springfield, MO via GnP, 2nd rd TKO!
Jesse Beck improves to 3-1 via GnP also, TKO 2nd rd against veteran of 250 plus boxing matches and undefeated pro Adrien Armstrong!
Great work guys! They were both tested a little bit in different ways so all in all it was a GREAT night. Thanks to the people that came to support! Go TCB!