Martial Arts Articles By Scott Sonnon

Scott Sonnon is one of the world’s best known and most successful coaches in the mixed martial arts discipline of Russian Sambo. After living for many years “behind the Iron Curtain” as the first American to study with Russian National and Olympic Coaches, he also served for many years as the USA National Sambo Team Coach and as the International Category Referee. He is an International and Grand National Champion, who earned the USSR’s most coveted athletic distinction, the Distinguished Master of Sport. In the 1990s, he was appointed chairman and ask to establish the rule structure for Sambo’s mixed martial art competition called Combat Sambo and functioned as the International Combat Sambo Commission Chairman for the Fédération Internationale Amateur de Sambo (FIAS) – the world governing body for the sport recognized by Fédération Internationale de Lutte Amateur (FILA, the International Amateur Wrestling Federation.) (Read Biography)

Doctors claimed my joint pain related to osteochondrosis, which basically means as I grew my connective tissue didn’t adhere to my growth plates like normal children and causing conventional sports and athletics to shred me, requiring my mother to rub my joints with liniment nightly as I screamed through tears trapped in a corset of agony. Severe learning disabilities - several types of dyslexia - left me with a motor skill acquisition issue, which prevented me from learning sports which came natural to other children. (Read Article)

For the past 20 years, I've developed what I call the "Six Strategies in Jacket Wrestling." This is a theory that I compiled over years of coaching and traveling internationally as US Sambo Team coach. Most people bicker about the Tactical level of implementation in Sambo. They say, "I'd rather do it this way, rather than that way," or "I'd rather wrestle for submission rather than try to throw him for total victory." But this kind of debate between players is of low value without a comprehensive appreciation for the Strategic level that influences and determines the Tactics one employs.
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SAMBO, the English translation of the Russian acronym meaning "self-protection without weapons" (SAMozashchitya Bez Oruzhiya). SAMBO is a curriculum of martial tricks, covertly taught in the former Soviet Union to the Soviet special forces ('Spetsnaz'), since the Communist Revolution in October of 1917. Sambo has been the object of a voluminous amount of clandestine research, experimentation, and propaganda. For this very reason, Sambo was the Soviet attempt to suppress the patriotic and liberating tendencies of indigenous Slavic martial traditions, entitled "Russian Martial Art". (Read Article)

This history of Sambo matches Winston Churchill’s description of Russia as a “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” I spent well over a decade researching, traveling and studying it’s many onion layers. What you read of this history may not be the ultimate truth, but it is the most sensible collection of convincing lies that no one to date has been able to accurately debunk.Only a decade ago, no information could be located anywhere. The new generations weren’t alive for the “Cold War” and the phenomenon of clandestine subterfuge that it had institutionalized Sombo.(Read Article)

I’ve invested 20 years in my formal martial art education, 30 years in combat sports. I didn’t do this for glory. Initially, it was just so I could keep myself from the daily harm and humiliation I endured. Imperceptibly, my training evolved into a form of personal development, to continue my transformation - physically, but also mentally, emotionally, even spiritually.
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