Two people circling each other is the most fundamental form of fighting. We begin there.
Walking is one of the most underrated bases, not just in the AMSB system but in combat sports as a whole. Before I started writing this, I thought about how the only time most of us ever actually train to walk is when we're babies. You teach yourself to stand, you teach yourself to move, and after that human walking becomes pure instinct. For everyday life that's enough. For combat sports it isn't.
It doesn't matter what your stance is. Whether you're orthodox or southpaw, you can walk left or walk right. At a fundamental level, when you walk left or right, you shouldn't be crossing your feet, at least not intentionally. You can also walk away orthodox or southpaw, you can walk backwards left or right depending on stance, and you can run away orthodox or southpaw if the moment calls for it. All of it is stance dependent.
Walking is the kind of rudiment or fundamental that we should be training every day as a systems check, especially for anyone competing, amateur or professional. We all walk during competition, and we all walk in training. It doesn't matter if you're a boxer, a kickboxer, a Muay Thai fighter, or an MMA fighter. You cannot look through any film and not find an athlete in the walking base at some point. It especially happens when people get tired.
Think about Stephen Curry. He dribbles every game and he shoots every game, and if you watch him before games he's drilling the dribble and drilling the shot. Now think about the military and the close-in weapon system the Navy pronounces "sea-whiz". They run through a long list of system checks before they ever fire. We should treat our walking base the same way, because it is your default base. It's where you end up when you're fatigued, when you're overloaded, when you're coming off a round or losing a round.
That's why this tool shows the fundamental way to walk alongside case studies of walking in live competition. In some videos you'll see the athlete cross their feet. Of course you will. It's a fight, and they probably don't train this. But for us at AMSB, they are still in the walking base. The goal is to read what they're doing with their feet, and to spot the drills you've been training. We've also included unconscious mistakes in range, where someone genuinely wasn't ready to fight and got knocked out for it. Nothing is ever perfect. The goal is to stay conscious of our own imperfections so we can correct them.