JusticeZero

I remain baffled that nobody has forked the Olde Combat Judo off of the Olympic stuff yet. It's not like the knowledge is eternally lost, and Judo has plenty of adherents and prestige floating around to boost such a thing.

What i've seen said of soy is that it is bad for consumption, period, at least when too much of it is plugged into your diet. Tofu sometimes is OK. Soy protein burgers with soy cheese for lunch after soymilk and cereal breakfast, then a tofurkey dinner, and maybe a booster of a soy protein snack bar is going to cause some serious issues, fast.

If you put them on the floor with a fair amount of momentum, and your parking stance is a runners block position, it helps some as far as buying a couple seconds that they then have to make up.. Most situations, you're probably actually fairly close to other people. Also, engaging in a pass of combat and winning that pass by disengaging and disrupting should leave an attacker uncertain about the results if they continue the fight - running away then gives them a way to gain face and declare victory in spite of having lost the exchange.

One of these days we'll have to get together somewhere somehow for a few hours and work footwork and floor. Still, so many people want to mix in a little social spar it seems like.

Oh, okay. I wonder if his teacher pokes his head in at the other forum I frequent, since that's sort've the main thing of the guys there. I just assume it's because the guy wants a friendly match to get the experience of being in a match with that ruleset who won't put him in the hospital if he goofs up. (This probably isn't a real worry, but he might have some form of it.)

Most (not all but most) taijiquan schools don't do anything with resisting opponents, or often any opponents. Also, ninjutsu schools are leery of sparring because they like to attack the joints in various ways that they don't want new students tossing carelessly. If there were any ninjas around they could probably comment more on the thread on sparring problems. You aren't missing anything much. Watch your joints and knock them around lightly, since they probably can't find anyone else to do that for them in either school and likely feel the need for some idea of how force actually interacts in practice. Then tell them what they're doing right, since if you out-experience the heck out of them, they might feel disheartened by the lack of effectiveness.

They have a chair, and they may well have some interesting applications of it. In any case, I doubt they are at all worried about what people with four working limbs think.

Agreed, I don't think it is an appropriate goal to fail a safety measure.

The issue isn't so much 'how to fight X' as the fact that I, and various other styles, can't have a "friendly sparring match" with other styles. "Sparring" heavily favors certain techniques and discourages others, but not because they are or aren't effective; instead, it is because some techniques can be done as flicky play-jabs, but others only start to work at speeds that start to hit uncomfortably hard and cannot be "pulled". If your art primarily uses the latter sort've techniques, you end up looking like a fool in "sparring".

Criminals are not savory sorts by definition. Whether they use a weapon, their hours of weight lifting, or just their words is completely irrelevant, because the relevant fact is that they are trying to victimize people. A thug who lifts weights, practices on a heavy bag, and works out before mugging your grandmother is not any more "honorable" than one who takes the "easy way out" and holds her at gunpoint.

Bodyweight exercizes can be done without free weights; having free weights adds options and is both cheap and pretty space-efficient. (space can be a problem for some people.) If your school is sports-intensive, you might ask the PE teachers if they have any suggestions; maybe there are opportunities to train with some other group that you aren't yet aware of.

You could start by looking at the more advanced bodyweight routines, for one. I'm also told that used free weights are easy to find in garage sales, craigslist, etc. Also, how do you get to school? You might be able to trade a car trip for biking or jogging (which has been seen to boost grades as well as energy).

Well, yeah, what BM said. It's not legal to carry them, for reasons that are probably silly (but as a LEO in one of my classes noted "Why do we enforce it? It's on the books.") so why do you need a holster for it?

I sometimes bust out my cellphone's video camera so that I can show students their form and structure from different angles, when they know what they need to do but aren't aware that they aren't doing it.

Agree. That sort of "honor" is for young, strong, rich and powerful people at play. It's completely stupid for most people, and if any of my students advocated that sort've "honor" in a real world situation, I would correct them mercilessly until the "honor" was completely eradicated. If that is "honorable" then I am proud to say that all of the people I train or train with are a bunch of traitorous, honorless, craven, savage backstabbers.

What do you need the holster for, exactly?

How about the view (which I explain everything as) that all of your techniques are actually just a series of transitions between stances (or maybe 'positions'). You start in a position, you end in a position, and you might pass through two or three in the course of the technique as well.

I just hope they can keep it from turning into some sexist sideshow. I'm less worried about them "filling seats" as I am with how they fill them.

You likely won't be in a neutral position, either. It shouldn't take too much extra training; I do some responses from neutral, but they all immediately move to negaça or esquiva diagonal or resistencia or some other position as a consequence of the technique used to respond.

I've never agreed with Lee on this. Stances are transitional structures that connect all your movements together. Just because they start to look and feel more natural and less forced over time doesn't mean they are discarded in favor of random standing around. Certain geometric relationships exist in the structure for good reason, and to move away from their use would derange these structural connective elements and disrupt the movements attached to them.

...You mean you didn't know that?

Right, Ev, I could probably spar with *you* to some extent, because I could throw kicks hard enough to actually look like a valid kick and not worry that i'm going to break you or your ego into itty bitty pieces. But you would be left with a lot of bruises, i'd be left with a lot of big bruises that i'm not nearly as used to getting, and i'd probably end up jacking up your knee again somehow and worry that we'd end up breaking something because of how hard it can be to gauge force with those. You're used to taking hits from the *kids' class* that nth degree black belts in the usual schools consider a demonstration of poor skill.

Saw this piece today, and reflected that this is the type of violence a lot of us might have to face. Not a thug in the face, but an angry, bureaucratically adept psychopath dedicated to investing time into destroying your life remotely. What steps do you take to try to protect against this sort've attack?

Yeah, I also remember one of your blog posts being similar, where you were sparring with someone else and keeping the contact very light (for your school) only to have them go all snooty and superior on you about how "you have no control" when your rough and tumble style's idea of "light" wasn't the touch tag she was used to. As if attacking with zero force habitually was a good thing to begin with... if I want to hit someone who is trying to hurt me, I don't want to "control" it, I want to make them fall down.

Ravens not only will kill other ravens for interfering in their social order, but have been seen to ritually desecrate the body in very distinctive and non-random ways afterward. Dolphins have been seen raping and killing dolphin kids for no real apparent reason. We can't even claim uniqueness in our criminality.