JusticeZero

You are a shodan and a BJJ black belt. You have already been taught all of the things you should avoid, what correct form is, and such. Because you have a solid background already, self train to your heart's content; it will not be as useful as training with other people, as you have noted, but the "bad habits" a shodan will develop are going to more properly be described as 'adjusting things to your own style' and deviation away from standard Shotokan practices in favor of individualistic development, rather than the dangers of bad form which we warn new students of. Find people to trade notes with and train beside on occasion as best you can, at the least.

How are you defining "hard"? There are two mostly different kinds of force determining how "hard" a strike is, and board breaking is only affected by one of them. If you kick "hard - I push the bag all over the room, and I launch people out of the ring", then you aren't doing anything to help the one that breaks boards.

Yeah, must have been trying to get a smile out of the women viewers.. By the way, I was on the Hiyaa podcast quite some time back, but I don't know how many people here noticed.. I had some background there that might be an interesting topic of discussion. (I had to dig up the url for someone else the other day.)

Understandable. That said, you will want to find that out - being able to learn about the history of what you are doing and the situations that the founders were concerned by can help you to understand the technique you are learning, as you will be able to, even if only a little bit, understand why they might have emphasized the particular things they did.

Grain of salt - my art isn't Karate, but... - The "bunkai" in my material tends to take the form of me showing how some of the basic transitional movements that they might be in the middle of anyways can be applied in various mayhemmish ways. For instance, "This is how you might defend against an attack, and your hand comes up to guard your face.. oh, and if their wrist happens to be here when you do it, here's how you can do a quick little off-balance, and your next movement could chop them in the nose and take them down. If not, hey, you still defended the attack, and you're in position for the usual stuff." I always note that they shouldn't do any of these things if it is going to make things worse, but that all their movements should be transitioning between defended positions anyways, so go ahead and throw a few transitions through stuff to see if anything useful comes out of it. If nothing else, the act of transition will 'reshuffle the deck' so to speak and open up different opportunities than the ones that you had before while forcing the other person to adjust.

They had a discussion on Capoeira kicking on Fight Science at on point - unfortunately the narrators didn't really understand the issues very well, and the methodology wasn't much better than a demonstration of basic physics. (And all martial artists should understand basic physics.) First piece, here, from about 2 minutes on. Lateef's martelo do chao (they call it martelo do negativa, but it's the same basic kick) is more jumpy, almost chapeu de couro, and uses the falling of the lead foot more than our version, but he uses less wringing than I do. The piece cites him as a contra-mestre; that's a mid-upper level instructor rank, second to last. There are a lot of full mestres around, and I am hesitant to try to give an exact rank equivalency to any of it.

Bread and butter for me.. Spinning shin kick with both hands on the floor. Footwork drift. Back fall to macaco (aack walkover-ish) or au (caotwheel walkover-ish) in compasso (hook-ish kick) or chibata (...fall on them-ish)

Honestly, I don't know much of anything about your martial art. I know some of the features of successful new arts, and some features of martial arts that do not succeed in doing anything but making the founder feel important while communicating the opposite to the rest of the martial arts world. Since the latter tends to be a dead end in more ways than one, we don't want anyone to go stumbling down that path without understanding just what they are going to be dealing with. I'd say that the questions that have been asked are on the gentle side of the questions that an art founder will be getting asked for the rest of their life.

Hey! If the bordello madame kicks people in the face, its all good..

I realized that I needed to define some stuff, but I didn't have time. In a "killer ninja" situation, you are in an uncontrolled, probably hostile location, when you are attacked by people for some reason undefined. Your goal will be to do damage to possibly multiple attackers while retaining freedom of movement in order to leave. This is sort've the mode most martial artists think in, although a lot of them are less than clear about the idea of disengaging or leaving. The origin of the term is all the times that people come up with these hypothetical self defense situations that have armies of trained fighters jumping out from nowhere to ambush the hypothetical person. These can be ridiculous and sound like bits out of an action movie at times, but are somewhat similar to ambush situations that one might find themselves in if they are being particularly oblivious and throwing around way too much money, skin, foolish ego, or whatever other things that might make one a target in places that they probably should have known not to walk into to begin with. In a "drunk uncle" situation, you are in a generally controlled, friendly location, and need to control one singular hostile and chaotic individual without causing them undue damage. Everyone around you is friendly to you, and they will be friendly toward the person you are having to fight as soon as they are controlled and have had a chance to get over whatever is causing them to go rogue. As such, it isn't about disengaging, it's about arresting. It comes from scenarios where "you're at a party with a bunch of elderly aunts and uncles who wouldn't hurt a fly, uncle Joe drinks a bunch of the wacky punch and goes rampaging around having a Vietnam flashback or something" and you happen to be the person on hand who has training in putting people lovingly and calmly into an arm bar until someone else can come take care of the problem. Kyokushin is great at dealing with killer ninjas, and passable at dealing with drunk uncles; Aikido is great at dealing with drunk uncles, and passable at dealing with killer ninjas.

I can't speak to that specific school, only in general. Some Aikidokas are more effective than others. If you already have some training in a more combative style, it will be easier to keep yourself from getting lost in fluffy clouds. The response *mode* of aikido is more generally useful; you encounter "drunk uncle" scenarios more often than "killer ninja" scenarios. (If you encounter a lot of "killer ninja" situations, the fault is almost certainly with your choices leading in.) Aikido contains no kicking, and only a few strikes, rarely taught and really mostly only there for the purposes of baiting people into a defense that offers a response. Your Kyokushin has no doubt already taught you everything you need to know there. It is based on Japanese sword technique, which never had much use for a lot of kicking. I don't know what they do about kicks. I'm not an Aikidoka. Martial arts aren't religion. If the people who founded the school were religious, then a few of the trappings get stuck to the habits, but that's not much different from the fact that you might buy people presents and enjoy a nice dinner with your friends on Christmas, or say "Bless you" after someone sneezes. They aren't religious acts so much as they are cultural acts that have some antecedent back in the dim and misty that was religious. A lot of aikido schools have small amounts of meditation involved. "Spiritual Enlightenment" is both poorly defined and overrated. Enjoy your life, just work on refining it if you want that. Might help to define what it is that you want to see yourself as being more like.

I'd be interested in tracking some sort of academic martial arts work, but right now, my dissertation work is not directed at a topic that can be applied to the field without excessive twisting and shoehorning.

Right, martial arts is one of the things that has to be learned intensively rather than extensively. You can spend years refining the use of a single movement, and still not have everything in it.

Well, say your art is based around punching people in the dangly impolite parts. You may have problems actually getting your art to be effective in practice just because you don't really get to clobber people there in the training hall, you have to deal with a bunch of abstractions to simulate it. That's not to mention the reality that you might actually clobber someone there and have them proceed to beat you senseless because they've got enough adrenaline in their system that they don't feel it until after they've left the scene when it does you no good.

The delivery system to strike those places is likely to have some problems, though. Then too is the assumption that those places will end the fight quickly, not always a good one.

Tricky to know what you're looking at with that approach, it's far too easy to just project what you're used to seeing into the techniques. Especially true when working from such a low quality information source as stills, which have poor body positioning data (because of the 2d snapshot nature) and minimal information on flow and directions of force.

Right. A lot of the AmeriTeDo snark comes from when people make a fork but don't show a need for the fork. I've heard of a jujutsu style created for reason of training with the assumption that one is wearing heavy mittens, for instance; this creates a number of different assumptions that goes back to the core techniques and the whole root tactics of the style, and is a good example of a fork that I doubt anyone will object to. The addition of a few pieces of material are not going to have that effect on the core, unless it is material that you absolutely need to use all the time for some specific reason.

Do you have any evidence for that assertion, though, that counters what i've posted up? As noted, I am in the position of having to hear people assert that it is physically impossible for anyone to do something I and my low level students do every day. The other day on a lark, I substituted in L-shaped long bow and arrow stances and then did some of my footwork exercises. My mobility failed to vanish. I'm not completely clear where it is that i'm getting results that are completely opposite to yours. Is it because you are mistaking steps for distance? If you are taking two steps for every one of mine, then saying "But i'm taking almost twice as many steps - clearly i'm covering more distance!" then that would be a glitch in measurement. It would not be the first time; it is hard to measure speed when sizes of objects differ, this is why people think that very large ships are moving slowly when in fact they are actually very fast - they are measuring by the distance from bow to stern, which is very large.

Exactly. We focus on mobility, and we do it all with low stances; some low stance using styles' forms have students moving a lot, but people seem to just accept that the low stances cannot move for some reason. The movement style isn't exactly the same as the high stances, yes. Furthermore, the lower stances have advantages that make it worthwhile to try to research this - lower c/g for grappling and countergrappling, and the ability to remove a large portion of the penalty of lower body mass thanks to the vectors of force being able to be kept inside of the base.

I hear this sort've thing a lot, and it is built on a complete fallacy. Botulin toxin, likely the most lethal poison known, is a natural, organic product. Arsenic is completely natural and pure. People imagine that if it is "natural", it is healthy, but this is not necessarily the case.One of the problems with soy, as has been described to me, is that it is very rich in isoflavones. Which are great! ...in moderation... but which you can overdose on. (It is also possible to overdose toxically on several other vitamins; I have known people who have suffered permanent damage from overuse of vitamin supplements.) Eating some tofu isn't going to be an issue. Eating a lot of soy in every meal, like a lot of soyitarians do, is. And there are a lot of soyitarians out there, even if that isn't what they would call themself. Additionally, "non-mutated" is a lost cause. Intentional genetic tampering with food in various forms dates back to before 4,000 BC. Today, we have people using genetic technology they don't completely understand to maximize yields of food seed. A hundred years ago, we had people using mutagenic chemicals and radiation they didn't completely understand to maximize yields of food. Six thousand years ago, you had mountaintop gardens trying to find mutant strains of food (though they didn't understand how it worked) to be bred for seed to maximize yields of food seed. And six million years ago, you had various plants and animals that were completely clueless about how genetics worked mutating on their own and breeding based on how effective they were. There is zero evidence that organic food is healthier for the people eating it. None. There is plenty of evidence that it is people for the people living close to the farms, so it is still a good thing to have, but you can't quarantine yourself from the world by buying fancier food. It just doesn't work.

Greetings! Feel free to jump in with whatever questions you might have.

I have never experienced a deep stance to be "rooted", and I use them exclusively. If your deep stances are "rooted", the blame lies in the practitioner and possibly their teacher, not in the stance itself. This gongfu clip might not be the best example out there (it just came up early in a search) but at around halfway and onward the form they are practicing starts wandering all over the place. And you can't tell me that are rooted to the ground. But these are both examples of deep stances that you claim are "rooted".They aren't "rooted", people just don't practice mobility for some reason. It shouldn't be revolutionary to be asked to move around the room with your stancework. Boxers do it, we do it, the forms do it, why can't anyone else practice it? As for this: As noted, I live in deep, low stances all the time. When I watch boxers shuffle around the ring, the first thing that comes to mind is how immobile they are. To be as mobile as a boxer really isn't setting the bar all that high. They move around, yes. They move skillfully, cutting angles and actually having a spatial game. But they don't move especially fast. They certainly aren't moving any faster than I do, and i'm in deep long stances. They get even deeper if I have to move faster, as a rule. It does not wash to just say "But you guys are weird" and think that that gives us a dispensation to interpret the laws of physics in ways that you cannot. If I can slink around a space rapidly with my feet far apart, so can anyone else.

Oh, they definitely are useful there as well, which only adds to the reason why I think it is time to take a second look at these arts and these structures for general use as the core engine of a fighter. I keep hearing general received wisdom about the faults of deep stances, punching from the hip, and the like - but a lot of those objections rang false with my own experience. When I started trying to work out how to help a student of mine who just doesn't have nearly as much mass as I have - though nowhere near as substantial of a difference as the hypothetical I was offered - it became obvious how much of my own personal style I have structured around using my mass. But when I looked specifically at the movements I do not do that are in the library, and examining the principles inside of them, I could also see how much could be done without having to rely on any mass at all by building upward from inside the wide foundation, and how similar it was to the wider library of techniques that I have seen dismissed as outdated. So it starts looking more and more like the big equalizer for a smaller fighter may just be highly mobile deep stances, punching from the hip, and the takedowns and throws that come naturally from such a position - and that is exactly the type of fighting that has been dismissed as ineffective by people who gauge effectiveness by watching muscular 240 pound men fight.

This came from a discussion with a woman who was writing a fictional character. The character had somewhat supernatural strength - but had the approximate size and build of say, Michele Krasnoo (5'0", 100 pounds). The question was exactly how would such an individual fight? Obviously, she couldn't get very far by leveraging her body mass against opponents more than twice her mass. Lately, it is in vogue to use high, narrow stances, and it is the rare voice who advocates for the maligned deep stances. Deep stances, it is said, are immobile, and designed to be structurally strong against sweeps and throws; since people in high stances don't seem to have that much trouble with those, it is reasoned that the low stance is an impractical relic. When applying force against a target, you have your base, your mass, and the vector of force to think about. A high stance has a narrow base, a high mass, and a flat vector of force far from the base. As a result, a substantial amount of the force in the strike must come from gravity being applied to the mass of the body in order to prevent the fact that the reaction from the strike is on a vector which falls completely outside of the base of the stance. In order to prevent the attacker from knocking themself off their feet, two aspects of force must be applied as a corrective. First, Gravity must be used as a second vector downward, and second, mass and a forward impulse must provide a buffer of inertia to be consumed; together, these allow a large person to deliver a powerful strike while in a high boxers stance without falling down. However, the woman described in the initial problem has very little mass to utilize. This is a double penalty for her; not only does she have much less inertial mass to resist her own force, but she also has much less mass to reduce the leverage being applied to take her off of her own feet. If she attempts to strike someone from a boxers' stance, she is limited by the amount of force it will take to knock herself down, and this force may not be sufficient. We will draw a triangle here. At the base of the triangle is the position of her feet. The apex of the triangle is the point of contact with the target. So long as she keeps her body mass and the origin point of the vector which she attacks outward from within this triangle, the entire load of returning force is being directed into the ground, and is limited only by the amount of force her structure can withstand and generate. The concern was raised that it might be overly predictable to do uppercuts all the time. However, in the act of creating a wide base of this type, one is also lowering their body relative to the target. This means that target points are elevated more, making it easier to keep the force in this triangle. Thus, the techniques we are looking at are ones that come from a greatly elongated forward stance, originating near the hip, and travel upward. I'm sure that people can think back to the critique from such people as Lee, dismissing punching from the hip as a poorly defended and bizarre practice, and yet here we see a good reasoning for just such a point of origin for purely physics reasons. This leaves the question of mobility. Certainly people are used to horse stances as being immobile. This seems more a problem of training methodology. Quite a few Karatekas are seemingly used to standing static in horse stance and launching attacks, where boxers drill shuffling and mobility. If one watches a Capoeira practitioner, the idea of them being immobile is almost laughable. capoeiristas face, dodge, circle and slip through combat zones rapidly. What people seemingly miss in this is the fact that they do all this by using transitions consisting entirely of stances deep enough to make a Hung Gar practitioner proud; my lineage is often noted as having an unusually high stance, and our base is the full length of the leg long. The issue, then, seems to be simply one of experience in mobility. If we look at the southern deep-stance using CMA forms, we see a large number of transitions into and between low deep stances. using these transitions, one should be quite mobile, as the form ranges all around the room... Yet somehow, these transitions are not applied so much outside of the forms. Curious.. perhaps this is a methodology issue? Maybe just an issue of the form not meshing with perceptions of the art? We have been defining practicality by what works in sportive events. Sport fighters tend to have a lot of mass, so they can use it effectively as a huge part of their engine. But martial arts isn't supposed to just be about how hard the 235 pound weightlifter can hit... I would be interested in seeing what other people take from this. The replacement of body mass with structural integrity should be useful for quite a few people who otherwise would limited by their body mass.

Saw this come up on a completely unrelated web search. I rather like Lateef Crowder's fight scenes; the stuff where he has two points of contact or more with the floor is often actually a halfway reasonable application. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDqVTHPGU2Y