Entry Playbook vs the Taller Fighter

Mat Manual companion guide to "The Shorter Fighter's Problem: Getting Past the Teep and the Jab." Print it. The article explains what the teep and jab are really doing and names the four entries. This playbook drills them: entry cards for the parry, the catch, the crash, and the invitation, rhythm-timing progressions, inside-work sequences for the seconds an entry buys, angled-exit drills, and round formats against a live taller partner. Height is simulated honestly here — your drilling partner plays the tall fighter's game at the tall fighter's ranges, whoever they are.

Name: ______________________________ Gym: ______________________________ Coach: ______________________________ Playbook started: ______________

A note before the cards. This playbook grades entries, not worth. A shorter fighter's rounds will always contain minutes where the tall game simply works and nothing in these pages fires, and those minutes are the cost of the matchup, not a report card on the student. What the playbook promises is narrower and keepable: that the entries will exist, trained and chosen by triggers, so the minutes stop being the whole round.

BEFORE ANYTHING: THE SIMULATION AGREEMENT ☐ The partner playing tall fights the tall game: teep and jab at real range, honest rhythm, no charity entries given. ☐ The catch is a one-handed scoop at the heel. Nobody grabs a leg with both hands or drops their head into knee range, in any drill, at any stage. ☐ The crash is drilled against a fed jab before it is ever drilled against a live one. A mistimed crash in training is a lesson; the same crash improvised in sparring is an injury risk. ☐ Contact on entries is technical. The entry is the skill; the strikes inside are thrown at control until the gates say otherwise. ☐ Knees during catch and clinch follow-ups stay light and to the body, and stop the instant a partner's base breaks.

Part 1: The Entry Map

The playbook rule. Entries are chosen by what the tall fighter is actually doing, not by preference. A partner who teeps everything gets E1 and E2. A jab-machine gets E3 after its rhythm is proven. A partner who will not lead gets E4 and patience.

Height is a relationship, and it moves. The measurements in Part 2 are taken against one partner and expire quietly: your regular tall partner learns your entries, leans back a fraction further, and adds an inch to the dead zone that no growth spurt explains. This is why the catalogue (Part 22) records habits rather than heights, and why the playbook re-measures quarterly even when nothing seems to have changed. The other direction matters too. A shorter fighter who grows, fills out, or simply learns to step longer will find old entries arriving early and payments mistimed, and the log's success column falling for reasons that feel like decline and are actually progress wearing a disguise. Re-measure before you re-drill; several apparent slumps in this book's history were a tape measure's worth of change in the relationship, corrected in one session once it was named.