JusticeZero

And how do you know what works in a "real fight"? All sorts of strange things have lots of real application, and reality is not like a duelling match. Techniques made purely to play to a rule technicality irk me however. If I see it being done spontaneously, it's not a big deal, but if I see people drilling it a lot, it irritates the heck out of me. To me it feels a bit like "Well, the rules of basketball don't specifically say that the ball can't be caught by a remote control helicopter - so our school paid the engineering department to create an entire fleet of drones to deliver the ball to the hoop, and the drones are our core tactic. We spent the whole season training the intricacies of making passes to helicopter drones."

Absolutely. If I own a shotgun am I only allowed to shoot skeet olympic style?Considering that that is EXACTLY what happened to Judo when it was added? i would call it a valid worry.Though i'm still at a loss as to why i've never heard of a "classic" fork of Judo.

Honestly i'm okay with competition. Competition is a good thing. I am completely fine with being limited to a subset of valid techniques to fit in a competitive ruleset. What annoys me is when I see people devoting large amounts of training time in an attempt to master invalid techniques. Learning how to turn your back to an opponent faster as a main defense is an invalid technique. Learning how to flick a foil in order to tap someone on the back of the head is an invalid technique. Spending hours and hours on mastering invalid technique is a complete mockery of the art that is being trained.

Could part of the reason he is "dominant until winded" be because he isn't doing as much to conserve energy for the length of the match as the competitors? And dehydration will flatline your performance. If I see a student sagging and performing horribly, I send them out to drink water. Lots of water. Five minutes later they are up to full speed. Dehydration alone would explain his lack of wind.

What is it like so far?

Unfortunately, sport also encourages playing to the letter of the rule rather than the spirit. As I recall, Fencing has or had an issue wherein the sport, intended to teach sword technique, was being won by people whipping their foil at people so that the blade would bend at a sharp angle to touch people on the back of the head. Hours upon hours of training time was being dedicated to this, even though it has nothing to do with any skill related to actually fighting with a sword.

Broken hands weren't that much of a problem before gloves - people didn't punch to the face as much. The gloves make the sport appear less brutal, at the cost of making it actually much more dangerous to the competitors.

If it helps, I flip all over the place and do handstands and the like when I go down, and I would never somersault straight over like that either

Neither; au/au chibata works fine for that sort've energy recovery, and we usually train all our falling on swept concrete or cobble. Also not a fan of the way he put his hands down for roll #1. Wrists don't hold force in the ways that the calves do, and he's springing off of the fingers that way.

People like to gush over the metallurgy of the katana. The katana's metallurgy was pretty impressive, but it was focused on minimizing the need for metal and working with the poor metal available to them. Europe also had some very impressive metallurgy, and they had a much wider selection of metal sources to work with. They only recently discovered just how interesting and effective the design of the traditional sword really was - the pommel turned out to be very important, using the tang as a spring to add the pommel's mass to the power behind the blade. Also discovered only in the past couple of years was the metallurgy of the best old european swords - there was a lot of discussion of alloying with Vanadium, and with slow cooking processes with peculiar additives to get hydrogen atoms to bond to things and whatnot - it was pretty complex and to be honest, the chemistry of it went completely over my head.

It may need to go around things or accomplish other goals on the way.

There are no-contact, sport exercise places that aren't anywhere close to the definition of a McDojo, though. A health taiji studio isn't a McDojo - it is not trying to trap people in false expectations, and it isn't participating in belt inflation. People dont come out of 'taiji for exercise' class puffed up because they got a black belt after two years and are a lethal human weapon in spite of non-contact training with technical glitches.

Please dont get into fights in bars, they tend to have nothing to do with self defense, even if it is they have the reputation of being places where people go to get in fights and you get judged based on that. Every martial out there is effective. They have different models of what a fight looks like and how to cope with it, and different ways to train those skills. An MMA person can be hospitalized in a fight against multiple untrained attackers that a Tai chi stylist could handle (and i've encountered some scary taiji people). Maybe you could start by examining your life and figuring out what dangers you are likely to face? A police officer needs different skills than a petite woman who needs different skills from the guy who lives on the bad side of town and so on. What is your life situation like? What are some scenarios you fear?Kyokushin is similar to Shotokan in a lot of ways (differs in technical things that wouldn't mean much to you at the moment) but is known for having a very combative, full contact philosophy to it. There's a woman who posts here a lot who does Kyokushin. She has a lot of posts like "I got kicked in the face and now I have two black eyes. it was awesome!"

When we are not teaching a regular student, we often do not have the luxury of infinite repetition. These people trust you to impart useful information into their brain as efficiently as possible so that they can get back to doing their job. People do not spend weeks transforming CPR classes into a ritualistic form like a tea ceremony; they ask a doll if it's alright, then hammer clumsily away and do the best we can to give people the lifesaving skills in a single vivid session. Do movements slowly, to encourage a much more dense learning of the technique. Do the technique with as much specificity as possible, to encourage recall when it is needed. Relate the movement to skills that they already have, even if those skills are very mundane and not ones that you would normally relate together. Connect the skills to a plausible model scenario, connecting it to the beginning and the epilogue.

Got beat up a lot at school when I was young, usually by more than one person at a time. Couldn't go anywhere to learn to do anything about it because we lived out in the country. Read a lot of books. When I got old enough to travel, took some ninjutsu classes. (it was very pragmatically written about, which was different from most of the books.) Travelled back home again. Had to recover from a car crash. Finished up and wanted to get back in practice. Knew that I needed to learn to be effective in the places I am normally at. Tried to do so. Fell on the ice. Realized there was nothing there for me to respond to that with. Hit the books to find what would work against multiple opponents on unstable surfaces. Found three arts, two of which were very rare and one that had a study group in the next town. I've moved a bit since then and found different teachers and such. I'm happy with what I do.

It may be a good thing in the sum of it, but the concern is that there is a gap between teaching them to be more effective with violence and having them stop committing violence in which you have accomplished 'teaching a violent criminal how to be even more effective'.

The main thing you will need is not repetition (though repetition helps) but specificity. Memories are stored relationally, so the more dissimilar the training environment and scenario is to the situation you want to train for, the more inaccessible the memory you need is. Velocity is stored poorly, so you might want to focus on technique speed as your safety valve to deal with it. Get an uke that looks like and is dressed like a criminal, and have him act like a criminal would for the moment leading up to the technique, show the opening, and fire the slomo attack to be responded to. Officer uses the technique at slomo and brings them all the way to the arrest position. Uke might tap, but the release is as ordered by another officer. Let them run through it a few times to reach comfort, but I don't think there is a specific number needed to understand a kinesthetic problem. This is because you want the memory to be as accessible as possible when it is needed, which means you need to stage things to create more links of similarity in training to the situation that you are training for.

Yeah, Eddie was interesting. Pity they lost some of the core mocaps and replaced it with ridiculous and meaningless horse gymnastics.

I do think that some self defense training would help. A lot of delinquents are ensnared in a web of aggression and violence; the issue is that they both receive and deliver violence to different people. It does not help if one helps teach a teenager to better cope with the parent who abuses them, only to help arm them to better injure an innocent victim later. There is a certain stage between the state of mutual abuse and the stage of maturity and confidence in being able to handle whatever the world can dish out where you are just arming someone with better tools to victimize people.

I find the need to try to create this term in order to challenge rampant misuse of the term "McDojo" to describe studios that are anything but. McDojos are a subclass of "Bad school" that entraps students in financial support. Some of the schools out there are anything but bad, and some of them chose to charge what the market can bear for their quality product rather than eschew "nice things". A "Doujeaux" (try saying "Dojo" with an exaggerated french-chef accent) is, therefore, a school with unusually high quality facilities, access to instructors, and instructor skill with a corresponding unusually high cost. I think we've seen a few; I hate seeing people use a derogatory term for a poor quality school to describe a good school. Can anyone think of any examples?

People want to overextend the concept of "McDojo". If they do so, the term will become completely pointless, and so I take issue with that tendency. A dojo that charges a lot is not per se a "McDojo". A McDojo is a specific constellation of behaviors used to entrap people in financial support to a bad school; the "bad school" is core, the methods are not. There are also some "Doujeaux" out there. That is, a fundamentally quite good school which is boutique and costs a lot. You get what you pay for at these schools, and they have a good product, but the training will strain most peoples' budgets.

They don't JUST do kata though. The kata may be the textbook, but they do the homework problems and whatnot too.

Wash and press your uniform. Bow to the judges. (Creates a good impression) As soon as the match starts, use your fastest clean technique to hammer the opponent. (makes people start off by interpreting you as the better fighter, and then they will be more focused on counting your hits than the other guy)

So basically "Minus the hard stuff that would drive them to achieve the positive results that i'm looking for, in order to avoid the consequences therein"? I can't see all that many people being greatly improved by kata practice alone. It's more than a bit too abstract.

Fights tend to resemble whatever the media has been showing. When the TV was showing cowboy shows where people would trade a few swings, then one guy was knocked down only to be picked up and dusted off by their friends, that tended to be how scuffles went. When everyone was watching boxing matches they looked like boxing matches. Now they look like MMA. Bare-knuckle boxers rarely attacked the head; they focused on body blows. Bare-knuckle boxing had a distinct lack of fatalities. The guard was by the ribs. Now boxers wear gloves, and hit each other in the head; boxers die or suffer permanent brain damage from repeated acceleration trauma, everyone adjusted their stances to raise their guards higher, and people break their hands on jaws and teeth. People think it's "obvious" that that is the way to do it. Well, no, it isn't obvious. The idea that it never occurred to anyone to hit people *gasp* in the head until recently fails the laugh test. People were smart then just as now. Headhunting seems like more of a fashion thing than anything, and the fashion seemed to start right after a gladiatorial style that was widely viewed started outfitting fighters with massive foam shields to protect their hands from harm. If our televised gladiatorial match of choice used open hand strikes and deep stances, you'd see people angrily lunge into deep stances with spinning palm strikes.