Cutting Thought: Use your Opponent’s Acceleration
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Loading ...As I alluded to in previous pots, you can hose your defender by getting him on his heels, or by getting him to commit his hips and then going the other direction.
I’ve also alluded to the notion that it’s possible to compensate for being off-balance (ie, having your hips committed) by having a good degree of strength. It is often (or occasionally, depending on your level of play) not enough to simply get your defender to have her hips committed.
You have to catch him accelerating.
If your opponent is still speeding up in the direction her hips are committed, she will not only have to turn those hips, but fight the force she’s just been applying in order to change direction. This is in contrast to cruising at a constant speed (or accelerating/decelerating slowly), where all force applied is going to change speed and direction. There is an inertia to an accelrating defender that you won’t see at rest or when cruising.
So, how do you create and exploit such an opening?
This is where the beauty of the juke comes in, of the chop-step, the two-step feint. It’s all about a quick change of motion. Particularly if you are already in motion, a quick one-two in a different direction will have your defender scrambling to keep pace–accelerating harder than you–and you’ll have an easier time changing it up than they will at that point.
I’ve already touched upon this briefly in my post about juking, but with a bit more time and a bit more thought I feel like I can phrase it more clearly now. You really should be getting your opponent accelerating as hard as he can here–the harder (faster) he can accelerate, the bigger the potential to exploit it when they’re going all-out. If you’re sub-maximum, your opponent is more likely to be accelerating under control–and while you might still be able to exploit the gap in acceleration between you, it’s less likely to win you big separation. Some knowledge and feel for your opponent is necessary here (as is often the case).
This works especially well if you are a fast/explosive cutter (or at least, if you are relative to your opponent/she thinks you are relative to her). If your defender knows that she cannot keep up with you in a footrace, when you set up footrace-type cuts (i.e., taking what she gives you–running straight in from the back of the stack without faking or with a quick chop-step) she’ll compensate for the speed gap by pushing hard to accelerate to top speed in the first few steps while you’re still in a lower gear to try and get ahead of you. This is what I really mean by using your opponent’s acceleration–know what will cause her to speed up too much and lose control, if only for an instant, and be prepared to exploit it when she does.
