JusticeZero

https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/12/parkour-class-50-plus-aging-fall-prevention-exercise/577900/ Can Parkour Teach Older People to ‘Fall Better’? LINDA POON DEC 19, 2018 Interesting idea. Breakfalling, balance, and the like seem particularly important, more so than proper punching form, in terms "How likely will I need this?" Thoughts?

The thing about Capoeira's martelo do chao (and mea lua de compasso, which also gets the exact same commentary) is that the style uses snapshot positions within that movement for other techniques and footwork. You see a large telegraphic kick with a long setup, I see a common stance change in an art that makes very frequent stance changes, a bit of footwork, then one of the several kicks or movements that comes out of that position.

Well, the issue is that one, probably about half the clothes I am acquiring are restrictive enough that kicking to the abdomen is iffy. We don't usually kick above the floating ribs, but we don't do leg kicks either, and kicking to the abdomen can behave oddly in a skirt. Even if it is not too restrictive, it creates a tether connecting the ankles that takes space which has to be cleared. There's probably some neat ways to take advantage of that, but I cannot think of any. Plus, it changes how the base feels. We have throws, but not a lot of work with them. Mostly just a couple that are unusually obvious based on tactics.

I have years invested into an art that is very heavily based on the use of midline kicks at the abdomen and rib level. At the time, for various reasons, my normal clothing and such worked well for that, and the climate and such was suited for the other techniques and such in the art. Now, because of somewhat different reasons related to changes in my life and the like, I spend the vast majority of my time wearing long skirts that, while being pretty comfortable and nonrestrictive for footwork and deep stances and the like, are a little bit too restrictive to do midline kicks in. We use very nonstandard breakfalls and the like, so there is no easy way to switch to a closely related art for more work on throws/takedowns. Suggestions?

Agreed. That said, 10 is pretty low T. I mean, so far I only have mine down to 24, which is lower than most of the women around me. Regional lower stakes competition can probably use a more lenient standard. By means of comparison, my husband's T is at the upper end of normal, not uncommon for an athlete, and is slightly above 800.

http://www.outsports.com/2017/2/20/14670616/transgender-wrestler-mack-beggs-texas This article is about high school wrestling in Texas, clearly martial arts related in this regard. One of the wrestlers is a transgender boy on hormone replacement therapy, and as such receiving testosterone supplements to bring him up to the normal levels for a boy of his age. According to Texas's rules on wrestling, he has to wrestle in the division associated with his assigned sex at birth. He would rather wrestle boys, but that is not allowed. He is very good at wrestling - what portion is testosterone related and what portion is skill I leave for the grapplers, but I assume it is a mixture. He wins. This creates a controversy that is a bit silly. Probably something to look out for proactively in your own organizations. The Olympics etc. already made inclusive policies to cover situations like this. I don't know how much of an issue this might be for other groups, but with gender identity being an issue for 0.6% of people these days and median transition age dropping, it is likely to become one eventually.

Chest strikes are effective when you are delivering heavy, acceleration type compression strikes to the lungs. Not all strikes have to be soft tissue peak impact soft tissue injuries. My win conditions for self defense are completely agnostic about damaging the attacker. A strike that temporarily diminishes their threat or moves them out of position is an effective one.

Has this changed by the time you joined at his club or was it the standard when you started? Thank you for your reply, in regard to your first question, yes the emphasis on body dynamics has been in place since I started at this dojo. Sometimes it appears excessive, as I wondered if the constant break down of techniques would hinder our performance of the techniques at full speed/power due to too much thinking. I teach the same way your teacher does. I expect students to internalize the form as they learn, and have proper form in their mind slowly etching its way into their movements. Applications need applied practice. Forms are for form. What other aspects are you expecting to find? Also, I see no reason to shy away from training in a heat wave. You should be able to recognize dehydration and stay hydrated and ration your exertion for the heat. If you can't, you need to learn, and this is how.

A lot of taiji teachers are just bad, because they believe the wrong parts of what they are taught. Taiji has problems, but it works as advertised because.. Well.. Back in the 1800s, there was a geologist who was studying geography and found evidence that the continents move over time. He collected all sorts of evidence and put together a book detailing how continents move over time, what to look for, how it affects geology, and so on. But the question was, "But how do the continents move?" "Well, maybe ?" As a result, he was sneered at and his results discounted. But continents DO move, just not for the silly reason he suggested. Taiji form and methodology demands relaxed movement, highly developed structure and balance, and uses a lot of nervous system hacking to develop those aspects quickly. The nervous system hacks involve a lot of visualization exercises and the like to make people more aware of their balance, core body function, structure, etc. as well as how to move with minimal adversarial muscle tension. People look at the way that the exercises are described, and start believing that they are Doctor Strange, and completely lose the actual point because it is not well explained on account of there not having been a good language to describe it way back when.

Well, where did the stance for Western boxing originate? The way boxers position their bodies does not reflect how most anybody not exposed to European martial arts would throw a punch.

The forms competitions? They mostly demonstrate athleticism and balance. I don't care how many times I can throw my foot out. I am not trying to rack up the high score. It's not like I can throw a video game juggle combo at some thug and do a victory dance. If I am making percussive attacks, I am probably going to be the one going to jail. Rapid fire kicks are to train peak impact percussive strikes, and I simply don't have the privilege to be able to use those freely anymore. I just cheered up a friend of mine who is still recovering from the trauma of an extensive stint in solitary confinement after defending herself from three attackers at once, one armed, using nonlethal techniques. Techniques should always work towards escape and repositioning for better tactical positioning to flee a situation. I really can't trust in the usefulness of drunk uncle techniques in many situations anymore.

Yep! Looking forward to hearing more. Same as far as being open to questions. My husband probably would have a lot more, but he doesn't have a martial arts background at all, alas, and cannot do mine because of a badly healed foot.

If I had to guess at the low number, it would be to correct for people taking antiandrogens right before their test. I remember in high school when we would game with one of the guys on the wrestling team, and he would be annoyed before every match at having to both fast and dehydrate himself before every weigh in. Some days he would visit and grump a lot at being hungry and thirsty but not being allowed to eat or drink until after weigh in for a match. This seems no different.

Transgender men are starting at the level of cisgender women, and there is no category where cisgender women are more muscular than cisgender men.

http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/12/13/no-female-trans-athletes-do-not-have-unfair-advantages/ This hits a lot of points, most of which apply to the cis population that you see in class more. Lots of links. It covers the basic issues seen in competitions recently where transgender athletes are competing.. Including the fact that that they actually have a disadvantage because the best rulesets so far restrict testosterone levels tightly (completely reasonably), but those restrictions aren't present on cisgender athletes who often have natural testosterone levels that are above "normal". This was most highlighted by Caster Semenya during the Olympics; there is no good way known to equalize competition to be a pure test of skill when people with wildly outlier biology come into play. And then there's always the potential nightmare of a nonbinary intersex person with ambiguous biology trying to enter athletics. I'm not sure that a solution will appear if we simply wait for such cases to come about to think about them.

The ground isn't where you want to be trapped, but that's exactly why it's important to learn. Also, a lot of situations are "drunk uncle" scenarios where harmless control and submission are more useful than escape. Ground stuff is good for that, even if it's just knowing how to properly pin somebody down as a restraint.

Which is why you focus on a few ideas that are useful and easy to do. Don't work on complex techniques, just do the very low hanging fruit like wrist releases, breakfalls, and principles of awareness. Show a little bit about how your art might deal with such issues, but really you just want to get a couple of basic ideas across.

BJJ is a filter of Judo at an earlier stage. Judo is focused on throwing techniques from a clinch; BJJ is a fork off of Judo that focuses entirely on submission and wrestling.

Very. I haven't needed to shop schools lately, but I imagine that a lot of them would be particularly dismissive of pronouns and the like, which is a similar issue. It's hard to stay focused on respecting and learning from a teacher who goes out of their way to disregard who you are as a student, and it doesn't make the space feel safe to be in. When the class is full of cisgender heterosexual white male physically fit neurotypical middle class people who are in the safest and least at risk demographic, how valuable is what you are teaching really? All of the people you are teaching are people who had little fear of being attacked in the first place. Who IS in fear of being attacked in a way that might require martial arts skills? The person who has trouble paying dues, the one who will never be able to look like "one of the guys", who stands out as a bit odd or gender nonconforming, who is in life situations that are less than respected, and so on. There are ways to make a class more welcoming to those people. Most of them aren't going to be instantly apparent without actually trying to learn more. So what are some of the ideas that you have found to be more welcoming? What have you done to look for ways that your school is unintentionally unwelcoming?

The question is 'how?' I made a school look slightly like that for a bit once, because I was using his space on the weekend when he had a day off. If several teachers are timesharing one space, it is totally understandable for a school to have many arts posted.

I'm going to have to spin this through my own experience. I know that other groups have some other issues about this. But because I don't experience them personally, I don't really SEE those issues... ...which is kind've the point, really. Once upon a time, women were almost unheard of in martial arts classes. There were a couple of oddballs, like the jujutsu class taught to suffragettes expecting to tangle with the police at protests. But by and large, women were not a thing in martial arts classes. It's not because women didn't need or want to learn how to defend themselves. Women experience a disproportionate share of violence, and bear some of the most serious consequences of that violence. Rather, it is because they were made unwelcome in the schools where martial arts were taught. The language, the facilities, and the structure used in class placed them in uncomfortable and compromising positions where they were belittled. Some schools require gi jackets. Men can have theirs flopping half open, but women must wear a T-shirt and a bra under theirs. Then training will be carried out in a hot and humid room. Of course the women overheat since they are wearing two extra layers of clothes, and then the men smugly flaunt their superior 'endurance'. My father was from an abusive home. He remarked that he took a Judo class once, but ended up not going back. To succeed at the assigned drills, he had to express aggression that had been meticulously beaten and crushed out of him for the first two decades of his life. He wanted some of that back, but it would be a long and hard road to get even close to where someone from a healthier home was at to begin with. But because he had to work at the level of the other beginners, mostly aggressive teenage boys, he was left behind and drifted away. I recently scouted a small gym space available to me to train in. The space itself looks fine, until I stepped into the locker rooms. In other locker rooms I have been in, showers have some kind of space between two layers of curtain entry where towels and clothes can be hung up. One can walk into the shower in uniform, close the curtain, undress, shower, dress in street clothes, then leave. This was not the case with this locker room. Instead, the shower has a single curtain, and is right next to the lockers. The design seems to suggest that people should undress and step into the shower, then step naked from the shower to a locker and dress. I am soon not going to look like I belong in either one of those locker rooms. Just looking at how the shower was designed made me feel unwelcome; I simply would not be able to use one. If a class was held there, I would have to arrive in uniform, then leave in uniform; I would look and feel out of place. One class I saw had an instructor line people up by gender, girls in one, boys in another. This has always been disconcerting to me, and there are actually people who feel that they cannot accurately identify as either. I know no less than five such people. If a class feels uncomfortable, we will not train there. I am on the edge of a statistical group that has a life expectancy in America of 35 years. A large part of that is because of the increased risk of violence - and I am crossing training spaces off my list because the locker room feels dangerous. The owner of the facility was completely blown away when I pointed this out; it had never once crossed their mind. What are some things that you do in your classes that might be driving away the people who need training the most? Do you have any procedures for finding these things out? What do you do about them if you see them?

Before class, walk barefoot through the dust where they swept the floor into and scuff your feet a bit to get the dust all over. No blisters.

My teacher, the other teachers in my lineage - by observation to see if they do things differently, and ALWAYS ASK 'WHY'.. books on the style, history of the region, history of the predecesssor arts, books and comments by practitioners of completely different arts when examined in the light of the structure of your own art, anthropology theory, psychology, stage magic, medicine, physics, critical analysis, more critical analysis, more critical analysis.

The actual source of the techniques won't matter, because all you can teach effectively in one day is a couple of the tricks to escape common opening situations - wrist grab release, and maybe one or two basics for stability and avoiding being tackled as easily. Very general things on easy concepts.

Well, as soon as I start being able to see myself in the mirror, that should be helpful advice. Mirror dysphoria is a common issue, where you look in a mirror and intuitively feel that it isn't you, leading to some aversion to and difficulty focusing on mirrors. It's actually one of the gotcha symptoms when it's there, since it's so distinctive. Which sends the whole analogy off in a different direction, really. Probably a more accurate one. I can't face the person in the mirror until I can actually find her, after all.