JusticeZero

I've tried; it's a complete failure. I throw a kick at 10% force - it goes slllooooowwww as molasses and I have to hold it up, which worsens my form, they go flickflick!flickflickflick! and then tell me how ineffective my style is because i'm so slow. I throw a kick at 30% force - it goes whoosh through the air at a moderate clip. I try to slow it down at the end, but really that's not much more effective than saying "We're going to spar with pistols using live ammunition, you should have enough control to pull the bullets before they hit". I get "OMG, you have no skill at all! You have no control! You're just trying to muscle through and make cheap shots, i'm much more skilled than you are." I try to restrict myself to techniques I can "control" - it comes out about as well as you would expect from say, sparring an Aikido guy and telling them "No throws, only punches and kicks." I don't even bother to try anymore. It can do nothing but make them feel that what I do is inferior, no matter how I attempt it.

Addiction programs have a "vaguely defined higher power" because of the way habit change works. Under pressure, more survival-oriented parts of the brain have a bit of a "crisis of faith" and try to do it the way it learned before, because the old way wasn't getting it killed. If your new habit is built on an assertion that "This just works better", then when put under heavy stress, the survival based bits are going to revert to the old way, instead of the new-fangled way. Faith is essentially a goal orientation that can be fed to those bits of the brain - "We aren't just doing this because it works, we're doing this because doing it the new way is a goal that will help us.". It changes the directive from "Do what works (and we think the new way works, but you're dubious mr. lizard-brain)" to "Do it this way because that's who we are now and what we do." There's a lot of primitive bits of our brains that need to be convinced of things in different particular ways, or which work best when given input in ways that might not be immediately apparent. That particular bit responds to that sort've input.

Mea lua de compasso is focused on the body drop and placing the hands down to channel the body tension through the long muscles of the back. Rabo de arraia is focused on rotating the torso along the axis of the spine with the arms tight, channeling body tension through the twist of the spine.. I want to say this is the obliques, but i don't have any anatomy texts in front of me right now. Needless to say, if you are using a different power generation method and a different muscle group, it's pretty safe to say that it isn't the same kick. Edit: It also occurs to me that rabo de arraia involves the leg muscles as well, glutes in this case. That makes it a bit of an odd duck.

None really. Curious how much training she had with gun handling. If there's a gun in the house, everyone should be somewhat knowledgeable about it. She'll need some counselor time, i'm sure. You'd probably know more about that than I do on what a use of force incident is going to entail in that regard. A lot of people say that "this will affect her for the rest of her life". While technically true, there's not very many things out there that WON'T affect you for the rest of your life. She'll be OK.

Sure, but that has nothing to do with your internal monologue. People tend to think that they are the monologue, but the monologue is actually about as involved in controlling our actions at any given moment as a radio sportscaster is controlling the teams on the field. Sure, it's a great idea, but is it a transcendently profound idea? that tends to be where the split is.

We have a wheel kick too, we call it a Rabo de Arraia. Main difference is that it works differently, has less power, and is a LOT! more vulnerable to counters or to random things turning it around. It's easier to hide in some techniques, and it might come up, so we teach it on occasion. Mea lua de compasso isn't a wheel kick.

Seems similar to the idea of watching how someone behaves toward the help to discern their "true" self. There seems a presumption in it that an act is inherently superior if it is done too fast to deliberate upon the action. Since the internal monologue is being inserted quite late in the mental process, maybe even so late as "while it is being encoded into the memory archives", i'm not sure that this holds as really being all that impressive these days. We've learned a whole lot about how our minds work in the past few years, and we don't actually use Freud's old model anymore any more than chemists use the four elements. Part of that is the discovery of how little the voice in our head actually has to do with anything. Feelings are tricky; there's a lot of interesting things going on. If someone flips a rude finger at you, the cause and effect is interesting. The flip-er is communicating something to you, but you have to actually know what the finger in question is supposed to mean - and care - in order to feel anything from it. And it might vary based on the circumstances. So where did the feelings come from exactly? It's circumstantial and tied into peoples' cultural reflexes.

Mea lua de compasso is powered by gravity, spring tension in the torso, and rotation, rather than by any "hook". Start by going to the side-facing stance, with feet and hips perpendicular to the target and the side facing the target. From a center or backweighted position, drop your torso and allow it to fall, swinging your head forward and between the legs, and put the hands on the ground as you have seen. (you should be looking between them or fully between them, rather than crossed.) Move the hips forward as you do this to move your center of weight between the lead foot and hands (which should be close to the lead foot). The back leg will straighten as you do this. Your path will interfere with your back foot remaining on the floor; your torso will want to move through the space occupied by your upper leg, and the body position will cause a stretch in your torso. Release the rear leg and allow the tension in your torso to release and swing your hip around; this part might feel more like a particularly twisted axe kick than a hook. The resultant path of the kick will be related to the path your head took; the energy from the fall as stored in the body tension will sling the heel through the target as the hips turn over from rotating around the hip joint over your base foot. After the kick passes the target, it will return to the place it originated from, and in doing so will pull your hips around and pull your torso back upright. At the end, sink the pelvis to park the kick in a forward ginga position in order to correctly return the energy into storage and retain balance.

Go to about 28-30 seconds in. Do you really want us to hit you with that kick, AT THAT SPEED AND LEVEL OF POWER, in a friendly sparring match? The guy in the clip targets at head level. My school tends to target the floating ribs with it, and I usually do them about that fast when i'm drilling form. As it leaves the ground, while I have a couple of options to transform it, they turn it into something that is not a kick and that you won't recognize as one. By the time it gets far enough to look like a kick, I can't slow it down or reduce the power in any meaningful way any more than you can "control" or "pull" a bullet after you've pulled the trigger. That kick is no more exotic, unpracticed, or uncommon than a boxer throwing a hook punch.

Sparring is.. always problematic. People who do linear styles love to spar, because to win at sparring, all you have to do is "use control", that is, use a faster strike with intentionally bad technique that puts no body mass behind it. They flick a jab out at super speed and tag the other person with a quick and harmless technique, and are confident that they have proven superior skill. Then we get in, and our techniques are all based around large spinning techniques that use a lot of body mass. You can't whip half of your body mass at someone at 40MPH from a large body drop and then suddenly stop it on a dime based on the friction you can generate on the ball of your foot. The engineering and physics just don't work that way. If we want to not break people who don't know how to evade attacks like we do, we have to slow the whole technique down - at which point they go "flickflickflickflickflick, see your style doesn't work", then get tapped by a kick that we're keeping throttled back while trying not to be totally slomo and go "And you have no -control-!"

I put an article up quite some time back that still gets comments sometimes, in the Articles section.. Did the new poster see or have any thoughts on it?

Sure, but how much Silat or Bando do you see in the media? The numbers of practitioners are probably similar. And i've put down a few threads, I just don't as often since it makes peoples' head tilt in confusion. Plus, if it's impractical, you're doing it wrong. Though that could also be a Regional thing, since that style had some changes made to its learning methodology specifically to distance it from "the street". There too, I also chat a lot with people who use taijiquan for MMA and security work, so I don't assume that a style is bad just because it has a lot of adherents doing something that looks vacuous.

.....Clearly I haven't been posting enough.

I don't object to a fighting skill/experience thing per se... I object to needing to get the experience in 1: a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MARTIAL ART 2: that gets hit in the head.

Isoceles is also more mobile. Weaver, you can only adjust your aim a small distance to one side; Isoceles gives you a much wider range of motion to cover and leaves you in a position that is easier to move out of. As far as i've been told and seen, mobility is probably more important than silhouette. Plus, Isoceles is closer to where you will probably be at the moment immediately before you realize you need to pull out your gun and fire. I don't usually interact with people side-on to them.

You call it "alive". My terms for it are less positive. The demands of duelling are not necessarily the same as the demands of someone who has to deal with random situational things. If you introduce things that are outside of the rules of MMA, some of those things may be less than optimal, and when you are trying to train people to fight people who can be expected to use a LOT of things that you can't use in MMA, then trying to make people conform to a completely different martial art with a restricted encounter profile is no longer a no-brainer.

It's a bit like telling someone that they can never become a proficient baseball player unless they have been in a competitive football game, or telling someone that they cannot become a passable Kendo player unless they have been in a saber fencing match. It holds the special pleading that MMA is a better ruleset; I don't agree. MMA has been evolving in its own direction. It isn't a bad direction, but it is a direction. It is no longer, and arguably never truely was, a perfect and unbiased test of skill for all takers. And it isn't the same direction as Karate. Furthermore, MMA people take head shots. I am not willing to do anything where people hammer me in the head; i'm an academic, I live and eat based on having a highly functional brain, if I have to get punched and kicked in the head to advance then I don't care how good your skills are, i'm not sticking around.

Yes, I practice and teach a martial art that is associated with ridiculous fitness, and I am in worse shape than you are. (Bad eating habits from childhood can do a number on you for a long time. The worst isn't "eating junk food", it is "Clean your plate, we can't afford to throw away food".) Furthermore, one doesn't wait to exercise until they are in shape. That's a bit like saying "I can't eat because i'm hungry". Anything worth doing is worth doing horribly with no coordination while looking silly. If you do things badly, you will improve. If you don't do things because you don't want to do them badly, you will never do anything worthwhile.

You can be, sure. Will you be? That remains to be seen. Sports are a poor career choice as a rule; lots of people want to be the champ, but only one walks away with the rent money.

On the other hand, a high kick is such a dramatically huge tech that they are sure to do something useful in response, which is a plus.

We were put on boil water alert earlier today. I go to teach and no drinking fountains, no showers... Then I figured I would do music, played a bit while waiting for people to a!rive and SNAP!!! the arame breaks. Sigh.

Usually just the obvious. On rare occasion that it isn't available but other stuff is, something like Juno Reactor, Glitch Mob, Infected Mushroom, or KMFDM is passable, but eeh.

It wouldnt surprise me to find that they have a whole library of 'standup' grappling techniques they use, that wouldn't allowed in a boxing match.

You shouldn't lose all that much power just by increasing the elevation. Your legs aren't *that* heavy, and in any case the power you use to elevate your legs into position usually won't be the same muscles that you use to fire the kick, for an asian styled kick. When I have people sling kicks at me, the height doesn't affect the power I feel through the pads all that much; i'm not asking them to go outside their comfort zone in flexibility on the kicks. If you are losing power, it is from poor form because you haven't built up the capacity to throw kicks within your casual flexibility at that height with strong form.. which takes a good amount of practice that lots of people just don't do.

yeah,whe already trained it a few times in class"A few times" isn't "many". By "many" i'm thinking "Oh yeah, a couple hundred every class". So you'll probably not use one unless a perfect freak opening happens anyways.