Wastelander

I do not, personally, throw roundhouse kicks to strike with the ball of the foot--it's very difficult to pull your toes back while kicking at an angle like that, and I've messed up my toes enough that it's hard enough pulling them back for front kicks. That said, I would say sitting in kiza is probably your best option for stretching your toes, but you will still need to develop the muscles in the tops of your foot to be strong enough to hold your toes back or you will just have flexible toes that still don't bend back any further.

You are going to tear up your knees if you kick the air full-force to full-extension. It's going to take a while longer before you can increase to full-force kicks in the air, but still don't fully extend them because that is going to seriously stress the ligaments and cartilage in your knees. It takes time to develop your kicks in the air, and it will teach you to have very good control with your kicks later, so take your time so you can keep kicking into old age.

I'm 6'1" and 176lbs and physically quite weak for my size. I have only trained in karate and I can hit as hard as my strength, body weight and leverage allow. I have sparred with a former pro boxer and his comments were only on my head movement and some of my angles of attack, not my power. Boxing is not the be-all-end-all of powerful striking.

Dehydration is bad--we don't take breaks from class specifically to drink water except during intense classes or kids' classes, but we are always allowed to keep a water bottle next to the mat and grab a drink when we need it.

How long has he been training?

I go through kata or yakusoku kumite just about every day, and at the VERY LEAST I work some kihon every day. You aren't just a martial artist when you're at the dojo

And that's fine. There is nothing wrong with schools that compete a lot, and there is nothing wrong with schools that compete very little--it all depends on what the martial artist wants out of their school.

Try to keep your competitiveness under control--forcing your children to compete if they don't want to isn't going to do anyone any good. As far as tournaments go, they are decent promotional events for getting people to know the martial arts schools in the area, and they do make some money for the organizers if done properly. Beyond that they can be a fun and interesting event for martial artists to be involved in because you get to demonstrate what you know, see what other styles are out there and see how you stack up and what you might want to work on. If your friend's kids are making fun of TKD you should have a talk with your friend or their Sensei--TKD does have a reputation for being watered down more often than other styles, but that doesn't mean that the TKD your kids are learning is bad and regardless it doesn't give those kids the right to make fun of another art.

I believe it is quite a common practice to have belt ranks for MMA in Brazil. I don't really have an opinion on it one way or the other, but I thought I would throw that out there.

Oops, sorry I missed this--they were in Pekin at the Dragon Dome, but it was marketed as "HIVE MMA", I believe. The guys from Granite City were decent, but everyone else was pathetic. I'm from a little town roughly between Morton and Pekin, by the way. You have to remember that "fat" does not necessarily equal "out of shape". I have known a lot of guys with plenty of fat on them that have better cardio and strength than me, and I do believe that constitutes being "in shape" despite outward appearances.

I'll admit right away that I haven't read this entire thread, but I am seeing the "competition vs. self-defense" argument and so I thought I would jump in here. Can arts that actively compete be useful for self-defense? Yes. Can arts that do not compete and focus on self-defense be useful for competition? Yes. Does competing prove that your art will work for self-defense? Not necessarily. What matters isn't so much the content (it does need to be effective content, but most martial arts do contain similar content that has been proven effective over time) but the method of training. At my old dojo we also had Haganah classes (very similar to Krav, but more controversial) and they were actively resisting each other in practice. If they were practicing on someone who stops as soon as you start to defend then it wouldn't be very useful for self-defense, now would it? Those guys didn't compete, either, but having trained with them I can pretty safely say that they could fend off an attack pretty well. That said, I have trained Judo in two different dojos with different points of view on the art. My first dojo taught 50% tachiwaza (standing techniques) and 50% newaza (groundwork), although really it probably ended up being more like 35% tachiwaza and 65% newaza. That is because the instructor wanted us to know what to do in a grappling situation whether we were standing or on the ground and how to transition between the two. That is a self defense concept more than a competition concept--we very rarely ever competed outside of our own dojo tournaments (we had three affiliated dojos and twice a year they would hold a tournament together). My second dojo taught tachiwaza almost exclusively (we worked two classes of groundwork in the two years I was there) because that's what wins competitions, and we did the throws with a lot more commitment than I ever did at the first dojo because that would make sure we threw a resisting opponent. That all works fine on tatami mats in a competition but do you know how many times the person throwing would end up hitting their head on the floor? That doesn't work out very well for you in a self defense situation. Sure, fighting with the adrenaline rush and stress you experience in a Judo competition is definitely going to give you an advantage in self defense, but it still doesn't do you a whole lot of good if you smash your own head on the ground when you throw the guy who grabs you. tl;dr - Competition can be helpful and teach you to fight under stress, but it isn't the be-all-end-all method of determining effectiveness--how you train is more important than what you train and whether you compete. At least, that's my take on it.

Thanks for the input, Jim. I'm not completely untrained on the ground, so I am familiar with leglocks (straight leglocks are allowed, but twisting leglocks are only allowed in "absolute" matches) and I know not to go belly-down, in general (I've never been a staller in my Judo competitions when it comes to groundwork). I appreciate the advanced warning that choking against the face and grinding crossfacing is allowed--I've tapped out more in practice from chokes crushing my jaw than from chokes on my neck.

Hello everyone, I am planning on competing in a no-gi grappling competition this Saturday to see how well I can adapt my Judo to use without the gi. The tournament will mostly consist of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioners, so I'm just curious to hear if there is anything I should expect aside from them shooting for single- and double-leg takedowns and doing that irritating guard-pull from standing. I'm still not sure whether I should enter in the Beginner division or Intermediate division (I'm assuming they have these, but all that's listed on the website is weight divisions so it may be a non-issue) because I've had about 4 years of Judo training and 2 of those years had a heavier focus on groundwork, but none of that necessarily equates to BJJ experience. Any tips, tricks, or advice on what I can expect? Thanks!

I doubt growing domestically would bring hemp prices down. Like many things, I'd bet it would be cheaper to produce overseas, despite transportation costs, but I definitely agree that increased volume would bring down costs. One advantage to hemp, as I understand it, is that hemp is more "green" than cotton, and importing is less "green" than buying locally, so I'm sure "green" customers would prefer domestic crops. I didn't know that growing hemp commercially was prohibited in the US. As I understand it, you cannot get high off the hemp plants used for textiles. The funny thing is that I'm in California and medical marijuana here is quasi-legal. The state says it is; the federal government says it's not. Thanks for the info! You are correct--you can't get high off of textile hemp because it has less than .01% THC content. Apparently that's enough for Congress to say that people can't grow it, and in fact you can't even buy the seeds (which are edible and highly nutritious) unless they are sterilized first. As for domestically grown hemp not bringing down costs, I suppose that is true in the sense that it would cost more to harvest because employees get paid better here, but I still think the lack of shipping and the increase in stock would at least make a small dent in it. You're definitely right about it being more "green" than cotton because it doesn't need much in the way of chemical assistance to grow (herbicides and pesticides), and if you don't bleach it white like they tend to do with cotton you are keeping that chemical out of the equation as well. Besides, bleach weakens natural fibers (including hemp) so I'm not all that big on bleaching stuff that I want to last

Unfortunately, the attitude is part of school wrestling. Then again, intimidation is part of the game, and confidence in hard earned ability is better than low self esteem due to lack of effort. Since I only wrestled for about a month and a half in school (the coach always made me practice with guys two years older and 20+ pounds heavier than me, so I got hurt a lot and never got to learn anything) I missed out on that, beyond seeing the attitudes of the overwhelming majority of the male population of my school. Personally, I stick with the "emotionless" look for intimidation purposes--the strutting and showboating just seem stupid to me.

I can't see the video because I'm at work, but I'm going to assume it's the mohawk-headed wrestling kid? He has great technique, and I saw some good Judo-style throws, but he has one heck of an attitude. I saw some other videos on YouTube and it kind of seems like his parents are grooming him to have that cocky tough-guy attitude already and he's only 8.

Interesting. If you don't mind my asking, can I find info on your gi on the web somewhere? I'm not familiar with hemp gis. My karate gi is custom made by an independent clothier (no website--he works off of Etsy, and he doesn't have any images up of the few gi's he has done in the past) but my grappling gi (I use it for judo and jujutsu) is hemp and made by Datsusara MMA (https://www.dsmma.com). Hemp fiber is four times stronger than cotton fiber, it is antimicrobial (especially beneficial for grapplers), it wicks moisture better than cotton, and it's more comfortable than cotton (in my opinion). Right now it is still illegal to grow textile hemp commercially in the United States, so it costs more than cotton right now because it has to be imported, but once cotton prices start going up I feel that things will even out. If we can get people who don't smoke marijuana or talk like the guys from "Dude, Where's My Car?" to lobby for commercial hemp farming in America then we could cut out the import costs, as well. I know I sound like an advertisement, but I swear I'm not--it just bothered me a lot when I found out about the benefits of hemp from someone who wasn't a "pothead" and looked up the history to find that it is a superior product that even some of the founding fathers of our country grew, but we threw it by the wayside.

I've known about this whole thing since summer of last year, but my new gi is made from hemp so I don't have a problem with the cotton shortage. Cotton was artificially bolstered as a cash crop to push out hemp, anyway, since hemp is a much better textile source but cotton was "the next big thing" back in the 1700's and somehow it stuck.

Datsusara MMA (DSMMA) makes some pretty awesome gear bags, so you may want to check them out.

Those are fairly close to the WTSDA rules. Except they don't permit sweeps or hand techniques to the head or groin kicks. Stop-point sparring is really absurd to me, which is why I doubt I'll bother competing. Striking area is extremely limited, and contact is barely there, so what can you learn? In fact, I heard one of our younger "adult" guys tapped an opponent at his last tournament, and the opponent dropped and forfeited the match. Here I thought over-acting was just for soccer What you learn from point fighting, largely, is timing, distance and control and the ability to counter-attack. Remember, too, that if you develop the ability to stop a punch right as it touches someone then you also have the ability to stop it 6 inches into them--control works both to help you keep from hurting yourself and others and it also helps you apply techniques full power later.

In my dojo we have two types of sparring--regular sparring and tournament sparring. In tournaments sparring we are working with USKA point fighting rules, but our tournament sparring classes are generally all kids and young teenagers except for those of us who help by sparring them. Our regular sparring allows you to target the whole body and we go about 50% but sometimes ramp up as we fight, and sweeping, throwing, submissions and groundwork are all allowed so if the fight goes to the ground you just keep going. We don't really throw elbows because we would rather not gash each other up or rupture an eye by accident during sparring, but it isn't prohibited, and kicks to the groin are generally done lighter just to be nice. Overall, I think what we have is a good mix and when we ramp up to full-contact things get pretty interesting. I think that as long as each partner can agree on the level of contact then you have the chance to learn a lot, and there is a place for light, medium and full contact sparring if you know what to look for from them.

Well, I suppose we could try. Point Sparring (Karate, Shuri-Ryu): 2 minute duration 3 points to win Time/fighting is stopped to announce each point No striking below the belt except for groin-kicks In order for a technique to be counted as a point it must touch the body and be capable of extending far enough to deliver a full-force strike, though full-force striking is not permitted Strikes with the lead hand must be circular (backfist, ridgehand, etc.) Striking to the face is allowed, but no contact with the face may be made Sweeps are allowed but must be controlled Wild swinging and turning your back on your opponent will result in warnings, followed by point deductions I can't really give you an overview of my Shorin-Ryu sparring because the rules during my sparring classes consist pretty much of "don't injure your opponent" and that's about it.

Most often they are used by competitors for tournaments because they make your stances look lower and they flop around more so you look like you are torquing your hips more than you are. I stick with a medium length belt, myself--on the long-side of Judo-legal length--just as a personal preference. I don't like how the super-short Judo, Jujutsu and BJJ belts look and I don't need to use a belt to make me look better in competition. Some people do just like a longer belt, though, so there is that. ETA: This does not apply to children--they are likely using either hand-me-down belts or belts for them to grow into

There is also a style called "Tsunami-Ryu" that was created by a guy with credentials from a style I haven't heard of and it looks like a miserable excuse for a "martial art" but this at least appears to have some legitimacy to it. That said, that kid in the first video looks like he is trying to run part of Bassai Dai without any power, focus or control. Unless he is a special needs student then someone should have told him not to compete, and if his instructor taught him to do it that way then there is a serious problem.

Congratulations! I actually worked grappling with a couple guys after class last night and was able to submit a blackbelt a couple times, but the brown belt I rolled with is a lot heavier than me and with his wrestling background he kept all of his weight on me and I just couldn't do anything with it--it'll take more practice . To be fair, though, that was all groundwork last night.