Toptomcat

Hip tosses will always be out of the question without a significant difference in skill against someone who's shorter and heavier than you are, because to do them properly you need to get your hips lower than his- and his hips start lower than yours. Look into some judo foot sweeps, particularly osoto gari and sasae tsurikomi ashi.

I'm having difficulty understanding exactly what the drill is, too. Is it that you pummel for a while, then go for whatever sort of takedown you can, with wrestling for position to follow with a bit of sub work? I can tell you that from a judo standpoint the classic answer for tall people having difficulty with shorter, stockier ones is foot sweeps, foot sweeps, foot sweeps.

Come to think of it, I do almost exactly the same thing as a setup to a shuto-uchi variant to the side of the head. Not in point, though. Maybe I ought to start.

Is this really worth getting into a scrap about, guys? There are two valid methods of Romanizing Japanese words. In Chitsu's experience, one of them is more common than the other when dealing with JMA. End of story, nothing to fight about.

He does have me wondering if he's incredibly gullible or an absolute master at deadpan humor. I hope he shows up again, too.

Our school doesn't score hammerfists to the top of the head: the crown of the skull is a very hard target that we view as not worth targeting with a comparatively weak strike like the hammerfist. My favorite simple technique in point sparring is a backfist from the lead hand: my favorite complex technique is to feint a side kick to the body, then switch to a backfist to the head.

[OBLIGATORY FLIP-OUT WITH SUBSEQUENT EMBARRASSED EDIT]

Come on! Evenhandedness is well and good, but you've got to draw the line somewhere. Anyone selling a combat system that can be learned in hours without hard exercise, training partners, works without legs, requires no regular practice, made Allied soldiers in WWII discard their firearms as 'slow and clumsy', paralyze a man twice your size and weight even if you miss what you're aiming at, works despite a disadvantage in size, weight, surprise, and numbers, allows unarmed men to consistently disable people armed with firearms, and will dramatically improve your personal life, your work, and your golf game is selling you a bill of goods. Judging from the system's name, the garbled history the website gives, and the videos, the actual fighting system seems to have its origins in the Close Quarters Combat military variant of Defendu put together by Fairbairn and Sykes during WWII, which by all accounts is not a bad system when taught by someone who actually has business teaching it.

Let's not get too ahead of ourselves. There are obvious benefits to a school that allows the instructor to focus full-time on teaching their art rather than doing it as a volunteer sideline to whatever brings home the bacon for them: while plenty of frauds overcharge, there are also plenty of dedicated teachers who use the financial autonomy provided by being able to charge for their lessons to give them much more time to give lessons, train themselves, and figure out how to give better lessons. There should be such a thing as a professional teacher of martial arts, and the martial arts as a whole would be a great deal poorer without them.

You're stuck in a fairly common trap. Rather than being dead-set on learning to block hits, experiment with different methods of mitigating hits- pre-empting them with constant offensive pressure, evading them via whole-body in-and-out evasion, evading them via boxing-style bobbing and weaving, static blocks, active parries, rolling with body shots, checking low and mid kicks a la Muay Thai, shoulder rolls, playing with distance to rob your opponent of their best tools, circling away from your opponent's power hand/leg, being willing to take a hit to hit them back twice as hard so they're afraid to hit you again. There's a universe of functional defensive paradigms out there, and experimenting with which of them suits you best will get you much better much faster than getting hung up on any one of them.

I would generally agree with tonydee's comments, and add specifically that the issue with aikido is a lack of resistant randori a la judo. Some schools of aikido, like Yoshinkan, do train with resistant randori and end up with a perfectly practical fighting method. Most do not, and end up with a lot of well-trained movements but no context for them or idea for how to unify them into a functional whole.

Krunchyfrogg- I have a free place for you if you don't mind driving half an hour. PM me if you want details.

Everything's new to someone, I guess. I wish I were just discovering Fight Quest- it's a really amazing show.

I see. The reason I ask is that kicking out the supporting leg is an option that works very well as a counter to someone on one leg while still permitting you to cover up the body and head- thus making it a good idea whether they're blocking or attacking.

Are you allowed to kick to the legs?

That ought to be enough. You just need enough context to think critically.

Do you have some past experience in some more resistant grappling system, such as judo? In my opinion aikido can make for an interesting and useful supplement for something more resistant, but taken by itself as a first grappling art it can lead to bad habits. Happy exceptions like Yoshinkan aikido aside, of course.

First of all, I think you're underestimating the breadth and depth of the karate systems. Most of the features that you mentioned as immutable aspects of any karate school anywhere are really just the emphasis of the traditional curriculum of those karate styles most influenced by Japanese budo. The non-traditional sport sparring curriculum of Shotokan both incorporates combinations and has a heavy emphasis on the kind of in-and-out evasive footwork Machida often displays, and the traditional curricula of some of the less Japanized, more Okinawan karate systems that stem from Miyagi rather than Funakochi contain some of the technical aspects you identified as unique to Muay Thai, such as hooks and kicking with the shin. This mistake is perfectly understandable, since all of the karate systems you mentioned can ultimately trace their lineage through Funakoshi, who more or less defined the differences between Okinawan and Japanese karate. Even if you hadn't made any mistakes on that front, I think you're employing something of a double standard: if muay thai incorporates enough boxing to drastically transform its stance and tactical approach it's just the difference between 'modern Muay thai' and 'classic Thailand Muay Thai', whereas if karate does anything but hip-chambered reverse punches and kata in the ring they've just replaced their karate with Muay Thai. Similarly, the fact that someone competed in a non-karate ruleset (Bas) or even trained extensively in other arts after first learning a great deal of karate (GSP) doesn't mean that they've crossed some threshold that makes what they're doing 100% not karate. Of course you have to cross-train for success in MMA: that's true for nak muay and karateka alike. That doesn't mean that I can claim that Anderson Silva is primarily a BJJ guy just because he has serious rank in that system, or is primarily a boxer because he has a pro boxing record. Everyone in MMA mixes martial arts: don't insist on different standards of 'purity' for different arts.

Really the fact that they want to lock you in for a full year is a bigger danger sign than what the amount comes out to if you work it out month-by-month.

In Jeet Kune Do, there's stepping on the foot as a quick control, immediately followed by a hand strike. Toptomcat, do you mean that uke is about to stomp on the foot, but tori turns it into a foot sweep? I found two half-minute videos on de ashi barai. An interesting move. Yes, that's it exactly. Interfering with the opponent's footing to set up a hand strike is a sound idea, but I'd be uncomfortable trying to accomplish it by stepping on their foot because of the opening it gives to get yourself swept: accomplishing the same goal by making an abortive or not fully committed foot sweep would be my preference.

I'd have to disagree. While he's picked up elements of Muay Thai, as has everyone at a high level in MMA, his standup strategy does indeed flow from karate. Orthodox Muay Thai is very fond of block-and-counter, with little emphasis on evasive footwork: Machida's primary method of standup defense is evasive footwork. His trick of appearing to stop to reset, then countering when his opponent steps in to take advantage of it, is Shotokan through and through. His stance is very far from a Muay Thai stance: deeper, more mobile, southpaw, and more leg-kickable as Shogun Rua showed in their recent fight. He doesn't even check low kicks, which is considered extremely basic in MT, because the stance changes needed to do so would interfere with his footwork. Also, Machida is far from the only karate guy in MMA. GSP and Bas Rutten are both karateka. He is the only significant karate guy in MMA not to base his striking on Kyokushin karate or one of its offshoots, but that's a different story.

The Filipino martial arts are known for their knife and stick work. I would advise you to start there.

That's only cheap when you do it to someone who doesn't grok grappling. You will get swept so hard the first time you do that to a decent judoka. Uke stepping on tori's foot is *the* setup to ashi barai.

$1750 for a year is insane by any standard. $50-75 a month is the upper limit for what I'd pay. The difference is definitely not a style-by-style one, being instead school-by-school.

Taking a butt-kicking is perfectly acceptable, so long as you take a hard look at what's going on every time you do get your butt kicked and resolve never to take an identical butt-kicking again. Try working drills that specifically address the attributes you're having trouble with- in your case, rounds of pure defense in the pocket, maybe countering off of a beautiful slip or parry but not initiating anything.