JusticeZero

Well, you can always ask. Some things are approaching TMI status, I suppose, but most things are pretty innocent. Admittedly, I haven't hit the fun bit where my guy costume stops being believable without trickery yet. That part should be... Interesting to deal with.

I've been around for quite awhile, but then everybody noticed that I disappeared from here without any real notice. I never explained the absence. Now I have a whole new set of reasons to be here, and I have to re-introduce myself pretty much from scratch. I have trained in Capoeira Angola since before the turn of the century, with about three years of other training in Capoeira before then. There have been a couple of gaps in that time, the most recent being how I stopped being able to practice for about two years, leaving me extremely rusty. I had been dealing with a lot of issues all my life. I had felt a constant feeling of confusion and danger in common social situations that lead me to look at the martial arts as important. Isolation disheartened me, but socializing with people exhausted me and left me feeling fake and defensive. My moods were always off. I always felt like people weren’t actually talking to ME, just my puppet. Like I was actually locked in a closet somewhere and operating my body by remote control. I wasn’t comfortable being ME, because it was just.. not quite right. I was constantly dealing with depression. I considered these to be normal, because I hadn’t ever had anything to compare it against. Martial arts helped with a lot of these things. It brought me more awareness of my body, confidence, and poise. But the symptoms were slowly spreading. At the time, I was living in Louisiana, a hot place where heavy concealing clothes are not the best choice. I had been urged to work more on my shoulder strength, but I just… couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand to look at the mirror at all. So many excuses. I decided I needed to push for it. And I could not do it. I would fall out of stances instead of use my shoulders. My shoulders would start feeling uncomfortable whenever I tried exercising them. I was bicycling a lot and training in deep stances. One day I noticed my calves had developed a lot. And suddenly, my bicycle speed dropped, and I couldn’t even do basic stance work. Because Capoeira is entirely out of moving deep stances, that essentially killed my ability to do the martial arts at all. Martial arts had been my release from my discomfort, and now my discomfort had devoured my escape. That posed a problem! I had to do a lot of soul searching and investigating just to figure out what the problem was. Fortunately, I am good at research, and was relatively well timed with my crisis. Honestly, I could have figured it out decades ago with the right information, or I probably could have dragged on a couple more years, so it’s not ALL fortunate timing. The end result of all of this digging and was this: I am a girl, of the transgender variety, to the surprise and confusion of most of the people in my life. Also I have a husband, because me and my spouse bonded on having basically the exact same set of symptoms in the first place, so every red flag applied to both of us. “Oh, they do that… wait, I do that too...” My family and place of work is okay with this, but I am having to explain it to more and more people. It is almost getting routine at this point. Gender dysphoria, according to all current science, is a permanent structural quirk in the brain that happens during fetal development. For various reasons, the body chemistry in the mother sometimes changes between the first and third trimester in certain ways. This scrambles the chemical signals that control fetal development in such a way that the brain develops differently than expected; certain switches and settings become wired permanently in place to expect a different body configuration, and to intuitively mimic behavior of the people that have that body configuration instead of who their parents and society might have expected. This seems to happen in about one out of every two hundred births. Given that it is neurological and structural in much the same as as left-handedness or dyslexia, and cannot be changed later in life; the only known treatment is to change the body and social position of the person dealing with it to match the architecture of the brain. The specifics vary a bit from person to person. As a result, I get to go through puberty again. I’m sure I am going to have to write up a whole article about the implications of THAT at some point. Most instructors do not actually get to see what is and is not an actual biological difference between their male and female students; I on the other hand get a ringside seat to TWO side to side comparisons, and learn more about endocrinology than I ever wanted. This was neither convenient or desired, but viewing my issues through my life through that lens suddenly explained a LOT of things, to the point that it seems ridiculous to see it any other way. It was like a critical mistake in one’s basic stance that causes all of your techniques to be ineffective, but that you hadn’t noticed for a long time. You bang around and feel like you are doing what you are supposed to be doing, but you just can’t make anything work as well as it is supposed to. Suddenly the small detail is pointed out and everything WORKS. Of course, I lost a lot of training time, because I just COULDN’T. Now, I don’t actually have any substantial amounts of testosterone in my blood, so I am rapidly losing strength and would be even if I was lifting weights consistently. I cannot maintain the muscle mass that triggered a dysphoria attack, so I can train again. And I should, because the number of hate crimes against transgender women last year was absolutely horrifying; the death toll in 2016 was roughly DOUBLE that of 2015, and murders have spiked even higher in the past month. I am in a rural area now. There IS a gym available to me, a tiny one attached to the health clinic, but the locker rooms are horrible. There is no dry place to keep clothes in the shower, unlike all other locker rooms I remember – which means that one has to walk naked through the locker room briefly to the lockers to get dressed and towels. This isn’t a big deal for most people, but I am rapidly approaching a point where I do not look like I belong in either of the rooms available. UGH. There is at least one thread in just that issue alone. Anyways, if anybody has questions, get them out of your system now. Sorry for just disappearing, but I didn’t really have any good idea how to explain anything.

People act like they should use the head as an impact tool like a fist. The head can't take that much abuse! Don't just ram it into things like a moose. There are a few protruding targets on the face that are very vulnerable, like the nose, the underside of the jaw, and the ear. The head can be used against those to great effect with little danger to yourself.

Away. Don't ever look at any specific part of the body of the person you are matched with. Only look at their silhouette. Look around them. You don't care about their body details, you care about the shape of their defenses and their movements, and those are best seen in peripheral vision. Best not to focus and tune that out.

This post was originally published as an article in a dedicated KarateForums.com Articles section, which is no longer online. After the section was closed, this article was most to the most appropriate forum in our community. As martial artists, we strive to perfect our use of our bodies as weapons, attempting to master the techniques needed to deliver powerful, destructive blows and unbalancing, graceful throws. It is amazing, then, how so many martial artists have little understanding of the physics of force, velocity and balance which their techniques rely on. Many people fear the mathematics they see associated with it, and while mathematics are a vital life skill, the important thing is to understand what the mathematics are trying to say. As every person and every situation is a little bit different, each technique a martial artist does will have countless tiny fudge factors, so there is no point to trying to calculate each movement down to some spurious level of so-called accuracy when it is the principles that matter. Force, Power and Energy What is force? Force is the power to move you. Or anything else. It is the power to make things happen. Push, pull, break, whatever. And we want to make things move or break. Force, power and energy are all concepts that are close together and only slightly different. Power is how quickly something, such as your muscles, can put useful energy, in this case kinetic energy, out along a direction (or vector) which, when it actually connects, will be measured as a force of impact. There are two kinds of force that we care about: acceleration and peak impulse. Acceleration is how much force is applied over the entire movement, and peak impulse is the fastest and strongest instant of force over the entire movement, usually the moment the hand or foot first makes contact. A technique that applies a lot of acceleration will move or control the target. This includes push-kicks, throws and the like; if the technique is supposed to shove a bag or a partner into the wall, it uses acceleration. This acceleration is measured by how much force is delivered, times how long the force is maintained. They will all have some prolonged contact and be designed to deliver that force and that contact over a long area of space in order to keep speeding them up as long as possible. Techniques that use peak impulse attempt to break the target. These include punches, hard kicks and the part of a throw that is done by the floor. The intention here is to focus force over the smallest possible measure of time and/or space in order to damage the material struck. Imagine a roll of produce bags at the grocery. If you take one and pull, you can unreel the entire roll. But by taking one and yanking at it swiftly, you can tear one bag off of the roll without disturbing the rest. This is the power of peak impulse. Matter – a plastic bag, a piece of wood, a bone or whatever else – is made up of molecules and atoms. In a solid, they all are bound together; if you try to pull it apart, it tries to pull together, and if you push it, it pushes back. You can imagine it being made of little pieces hooked together with springs or rubber, like a net. Push or pull gently on it, and the whole thing moves. But if you quickly yank on a little bit of that structure hard, the bonds next to it might come apart before the rest of it can be made to move. Muscle, bone, wood, and everything else will have slightly different properties of how well it is bound together and how much force is needed to break it apart, but it's all matter. The "springs" connecting the molecules in a piece of glass might be short, stiff and brittle, where the "springs" in a piece of foam are long, soft and forgiving. The problem we face is how to deliver the force we need to create the effects we want. For every action, there is a reaction; if you push something, your hand is pushed back. There is no delay here. It makes no more sense to talk about "snapping back before the force rebounds" than it does to talk about wanting to leave home before your car – which you are the owner and driver and sole passenger for – leaves without you. There is no "force moving into the target" followed by a separate "force reflected back from the target," there is just one force, one impact. Likewise, there is no connoisseur distinction between different kinds of kinetic energy; a unit of force is a unit of force is a unit of force. Because of this, a major measure of how much energy your technique can deliver is also a measure of how hard it will be to move you backward by pushing on your punch or kick. There are several strategies of how to push back against your technique to make these work. You can use raw inertia, of course; just the fact that your body has mass can be used to resist the force of your technique. However, many techniques also take advantage of movement, gravity or structure. It takes force and time to accelerate any mass, like yourself. You could just push something away from your center of mass. Effective techniques, though, involve more forces than just that. Either the amount of power needed to push you away from the target needs to be increased or the property of the impact – usually the speed, or the surface area through which the force is transmitted – needs to be changed so that you can focus more force into the target where you want it to go. Concentration Over Space A knife is an extreme example of focusing an impact in terms of space. The actual force applied by the blade is low. However, that force is applied to a very small amount of matter. Say you are cutting into a turkey. The knife is pressed against the meat and might only have a small amount of pressure, but each of the molecules directly under the blade is being pushed with a large share of this force. The blade slices, pulling each of the molecules of turkey under the blade and ripping them away from their neighbors; as they do, a gap is made into which the pressure behind the knife guides the blade. At the bottom of each gap, the blade lands upon more molecules of turkey, and the process continues until a sheet of cooked bird has been cut away. Or you might stab with the knife, focusing that energy onto a vastly tinier point. The structure of that one tiny piece of turkey into which the knife was jabbed has no hope of stopping a tiny number of blade molecules from crashing through them and severing the binds between the molecules of meat. The force behind the knife didn't need to be great, and the knife didn't need any great speed. The solidity of the knife point and the huge concentration of force did the work. In many arts, the structure of the fist is examined; the knuckle is used in hopes of concentrating the speed and power of the punch over the surface area of two or possibly three of the joints of the hand. This, of course, means that the structure of the hand must be strengthened through training and structure so that those joints, and the bones and fingers surrounding them, can withstand the force of the impact. Kicks, too, can concentrate force in space. The shin, ball of the foot and heel all provide relatively small surface areas backed by rigid bony structure; shoes add heels and possibly toes. Elbows and knees serve a similar function. The palm, too, can concentrate force at the heel of the palm. Additionally, force can be concentrated in the body of the target. If a limb is forcefully moved beyond its normal range of motion, this can cause the joint to be hyperextended and damaged. Concentration in Time A movement can focus an acceleration over a short period of time, resulting in a higher peak impulse force. One example of this can be found in the hammer. A carpentry hammer is lifted, then allowed to fall with a small assist from the muscles of the carpenter. It accelerates for a distance, then makes contact with the nail. The hammerhead is flat, has no give and covers the surface of the nail all at the same moment, accelerating the nail with a sharp peak impulse of power to drive it into the wood. Meanwhile, a martial artist turns their body around, twisting and unloading by whipping their foot through the air in a long circle to blast a small pad out of the hands of their training partner. The key here is speed, and a focused, singular impact. To achieve this speed, you need room to accelerate, and ways of focusing that speed. Spinning techniques are one way of achieving this; if you spin your body around a central point – over your base foot, maybe – and extend your foot, the foot covers a long distance very quickly. If you throw a 360 spin kick in a complete circle, through the magic of grade school mathematics your shoe will travel a little more than six times the length of your leg in that short period of time. If your foot was in the air for half a second, and your leg is three feet/a meter long, that means that your foot averaged more than thirty six feet (or twelve meters) each second, or about twenty-eight miles an hour. That's an average, and it was stopped at the ends, so in the middle, where your target is, it is probably closer to fifty. A leg at that speed has a lot of momentum, and being hit with it will put a large peak impulse into the target at the point of impact. More linear styles will concentrate on packing a lot of acceleration into a short distance, using gravity, leg strength and the like to get as much mass moving into the target as fast as possible. The principles are still the same. Gravity On Earth, everything is trying to move downward, speeding up at just under 22 miles per hour (MPH) each second (9.8 m/s/s). Everything – people, flowerpots, birds, water or whatever – has to stop itself from accelerating downward by pushing against something under it. People usually use legs for this, which also let us move around by letting us fall in the direction we want to go then catch ourselves, over and over again. We do this with a practiced shift of our weight and lifting of one foot from the ground, stretching out with our heavy legs and unbalancing ourselves further from our center of gravity to plant our other foot on the ground where we plan to fall. Through lots of practice, this feels stable to us. But if we are prevented from putting a foot under oneself, if we are guided out to a position where our center of gravity is far from our only support, we are suddenly subject to this acceleration. Those who do not have techniques of how to fall will accelerate at this 22 mph/second until they meet the hard ground and experience a sharp peak impulse of deceleration as the ground suddenly pushes them away. Others know how to fall, using techniques to distribute this impact over time and distance to resisting the ground over a period of time and changing the velocity of the fall into lateral movement. Some techniques use this acceleration in other ways. If you step into a technique, you are using gravity to move yourself and help power a technique. If a kick has you drop your torso away from the target, it might be using that fall to rotate your hips and legs upward into the target. If our technique brings our striking limb above the target, then drops back down into it, our striking limb is being accelerated by gravity. Structure Another way of resisting the power of our own techniques is by bracing oneself against something, such as the ground. If a style uses a "deep" stance, then punches upward along the line of the stance, then they have braced the force with their leg. The striker is no longer limited by their own mass and inertia in terms of how much power they can in theory direct into the target, though they may still be limited by the practicality and speed of the techniques, and maybe by the traction their shoes can generate against the ground. Each joint must be aligned and used for this to work most effectively; anything not in line with the force being applied might end up being turned aside by the power of the technique. Targets and What That Means People are not Muppets, made from a block of sponge rubber. People have bones, blood and internal organs inside them, a wide variety of different materials and material properties. Force is not "projected into the target," nor is it delayed or anything else. A vector of force is a vector of force, of course, and no more. But just as how our body structure matters for our ability to apply this force, so too does the body structure of our target change what our techniques do. Bones are rigid; they can be broken, but even if they are not, their rigidity means that a technique which strikes a bone might cause parts of the body behind the bone to be struck by the now-moving bone, even targets not directly in line with the original technique. Blood vessels full of liquid are concentrated near the surface of the skin, and an impact with a large surface area and high peak impulse, despite not being concentrated enough to break bones, might still cause this non-compressible fluid to force itself against blood vessels and create large bruises or otherwise affect muscle and nerve tissue. Different points of impact and different properties of the impact can have very different effects, and many of our techniques take that into account. People are not point masses. Techniques cannot be meaningfully compared by any single raw measurement of kinetic energy. Nor, however, can they be relegated to the realm of the mysterious and inexplicable. It is important to understand how our techniques work and what factors might make them work better, without being tempted to measure them with some oversimplified tool or "scientific" measurement or retreating into vagueness. The universe is no longer mysterious, and the principles underlying everything we do are readily available for anyone to understand and use. It is no more acceptable to retreat into mysticism or to trust in pseudo-scientific gadgetry to understand how our basic techniques work than it is to sell quackery or pseudo-scientific fads to our students when they search for advice on diet and strength training. We should no more accept mystical explanations of force transfer than we should accept an old-style training regimen involving painful and injurious "partner bounce stretches" which we now know to be counterproductive at best. It is our duty to understand these basic principles of physics and to analyze our techniques in terms of the understandings we have of the real workings of the world.

I'll say this. You can't learn online, because when you are starting out, you will make a lot of mistakes that you don't have enough experience to notice or correct. But there are things you can learn without learning how to throw a single punch. What you can do? Start studying people. Start thinking "If I was a criminal/rapist/whatever, who would I hunt here? How would I do it?" When you are seeing people, start planning in your mind how you can do something terrible and evil. Imagine that for some reason, you have to hurt someone, or steal from them, or something else that you fear. Probably not a specific person, unless you fear someone specially targeting you. Look around to decide who you would be evil to, and think of where you would stand and what you would need to do your evil thing. Do not do the evil thing of course. When you start teaching your mind how to see the world like a predator of people would, you will start seeing places that, if you were evil, you would hunt at. The little predator part of your mind you are teaching will say "Oh! There are people in my spot I would stand to rob someone." Then, you will know to not go there looking like prey. If you look like a predator, another predator will think you are too much trouble. Predators don't want good even fights, they want unaware prey that they can hunt easily, then go home without being tired or bruised. You will see what makes people look like prey, and you will learn how not to look like prey. This is the half that a lot of people don't spend enough time learning.

Neither. There's lots of sloped cover involved, but the only active intervention is modificative.

Someone tossed this video up where I could see it, and I thought it might be an interesting topic to look over. This is a video of a match of three expert fencers versus fifty newbies. Actually turns out to be a pretty fair match. http://io9.com/something-weird-happens-when-three-master-fencers-battl-1570551641/+rtgonzalez

It's an arbitrary color progression set up by their style to denote skill level for students so that an instructor in their style visiting from a different school can see at a glance what techniques they can safely demonstrate on a student.

They are a bunch of arbitrary colors made to denote arbitrary levels of skill for beginners so that teachers can know at a glance how advanced of material and how rough they can be with a given student that they might not know.

It depends on the art and practitioner. Martial arts are about the use of force. Everywhere that people are taught how to use force and violence and to gain power, there will be some form of ethical component attached, because after all, if you are handed a big club, your next question is probably going to be "Under what circumstances am I supposed to hit someone with this?" However, there is no one specific ethical component. It's going to vary quite a bit. Police training has shifted in the theories that back them over time, and differs also by city. Martial arts teachers are even more different from each other, and they aren't even from the same cultures. There is no reason to think that their ethics will have any common root beyond the thought that they will be taught some.

In a fight, you don't think "I am going to strike hard" or "I am going to strike fast". You just move, and hope that the skills you have been drilling are effective. There's a video game I played that seems to make for a good analogy. You program in all the strategies and gear on the spaceships, then you push a button and they get in a fight and you can do NOTHING but watch. Afterward you can describe what you did. In the moment, you just have to hope that you gave your spaceships the right tools. Every high stress time-crushed situation i've experienced has been like this to some degree. You can explain what you did and why, but every bit of theory is monday morning quarterbacking, and pointless. In all honesty, the exact location of that voice in your head that ponders these things seems not to be so much the core of your thinking and leader as it is the narrative written by the secretary who takes the minutes. It has characteristics not so much of executive function as of memory encoding; in other words, that internal dialog that you think of as "you" who makes all these theories and discussions is in actuality part of the the process of indexing and filing away the history that describes what you have already done for future reference. When your head is ringing because you've just been punched in the face is not the time to be calling up the historian to dig through the archives. It's the time to put drills into action and make lots of snap decisions and hope that the historian can make sense of what happened afterward.

Right - and we know nothing of the earliest civilizations. We only know of the earliest civilizations we know of because they liked to write things into rocks and put them in protected places in arid environments, and those cultures considered themselves to be cosmopolitan and springing from the ashes of other civilizations such as the ones they dealt with on a day to day basis that did not have such an inclination to write on rocks.

We know that the Egyptians knew of a variety of cultures that were much more ancient than they were. But by and large, those cultures didn't build huge monuments full of writing in the middle of a dry, arid waste.

The other issue is that our knowledge of history reaches back furthest in societies which lived in arid climates and had a thing for writing things down on pieces of rock and burying them in sealed containers. Even from that knowledge, the picture is clear that the earliest history known is somewhere in the late middle of an ongoing story.

Yeah, need more. There are some training methods for combat that are not in the standard curriculum, also; pressure and stress work to deal with adrenaline tend to make most students flee at high speed.

Well, if anyone thinks they could design a better test, you're welcome to put together an experiment and send it through peer review. I've seen journal articles authored by elementary school classes or high school dropouts before, after all. It's not restricted to some specific elite of scientists; it's just that scientists are trained in how to construct them better so they survive the review process.

Well, they built off of a study that did, so..

The source article being referenced is here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2004.tb02559.x/abstract Johnston, L., Hudson, S. M., Richardson, M. J., Gunns, R. E. and Garner, M. (2004), Changing Kinematics as a Means of Reducing Vulnerability to Physical Attack. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 34: 514–537. doi: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2004.tb02559.x Unfortunately, if I want to read it, i'm going to need to ILL it.

Stafford, Tom. (5 November 2013). "How the way we walk can increase risk of being mugged". BBC News, retrieved 11/5/2013, 13:20 CST http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131104-how-muggers-size-up-your-walk/all (Emphasis mine.)Thoughts?

As long as the movement is changing the situation, it is useful. Vibrating in place doesn't change the situation much.

Yes. I got some nice ideas. but not enough to build into anything I would call a style. The book just simply can't carry enough information.

No, but they can pick up a few ideas.

Sure, but that was a decision made from your specific case. In the general case, making it harder to take treatment options isn't a good thing.

Chemical assistance is great; it gets people up on their feet and able to move around, exercise, and talk to people in ways that will break them out of their death spiral of helplessness. It's up there with medication for things like schizophrenia, which people with mental illnesses have trouble staying on because "you shouldn't need medication", resulting in a destructive yoyo of getting on their feet, losing their meds, descending into madness and needing to be hospitalized after a lot of self destructive behavior, at which point they can get their meds again. There's no point in talking at the low point of depression. It can sound something like "What, it's Wednesday? I thought it was Saturday. I saw a crumpled up piece of paper in the garbage and I started crying. I've been working on this painting for a week, and I only have three lines on it - but I don't know what they're there for. My landlord called a few weeks ago to tell me I was being evicted. At least, I think it was a few weeks ago. I'm going to cry now. Everything is fine, nothing is wrong." You have to pull them up to functionality before anything else means anything.