JusticeZero

They might come back and fill it again once whatever is going on in their head runs through. Also, they may not care about betterment and the like - but they might be REALLY GOOD at what they do, and a good teacher. We had dealt with someone like that at one point. We eventually parted ways with them over their flakiness, but even today we acknowledge that the guy is really good at what he does and that he taught good skills. And i'm told that he's grown into the shirt anyways, so it might not matter.

I would go further and state that you should evaluate while the followup is being executed, rather than pausing to evaluate.

What element in particular are you considering to make up the 'hips'? How do you know what is or is not "using" them? is a technique where the hips are deadened because you are using the spine to move everything using "the hips"? Is it the integrated mobility of the legs that you are thinking of, or the mobility of the spine, or the act of positioning and controlling the pelvis? And obviously that can be different but where are you thinking this comes from when you compose the question?

We focus on push, because we care more about controlling where they are at and able to go more than we care about how much bruising they will have when they arrive.

Say "Oh, cool" and never think about it again simply because it isn't actually important.

Mostly it's a culture thing. not Asian culture; American culture. American culture has a particular peculiar form of xenophilia; it is a marker of high status to experience and enjoy the foreign. But not just the foreign, it must be associated with an entire package of experiences and rituals that transform it into an experience of 'authenticity', with the most 'authentic' being reserved for those things that were supposedly created with the minimum of interference from the all-pervasive American influence. It is a way of counting social status coup to reveal that one has eaten in a restaurant in a faraway place. but not just any restaurant for the fueling of the body, no, it must be peppered with regional-looking art, the food must be prepared and served in some foreign and exotic way, it must be eaten in some specific bizarre ritualistic fashion in order to accentuate the differences, and the waitstaff must wear traditional looking costumes even in spite of matters of practicality or rationality. All of these things are presented to heighten the "authentic" nature of the cultural artifact thus experienced, and each level builds further status upon the others. It is the same with the martial arts. While some may say that "crystallizing" an art is a bad thing, it is in itself a change.. to lock an art down so that it never changes - or at least to give it the APPEARANCE of never changing - can add authenticity to the art, and hence value. The ability to trace a long pedigree of sameness offers that authenticity. This can be seen in many arts where "traditions" have been constructed RECENTLY and sold as "the ancient tradition". Colored belts, for instance, are "traditional" only because "modern innovators" sold it as a tradition. "Fighting barefoot" is one that confuses me; the art i do had a style split, but the side that used the distinguishing feature of barefootedness was the modern style. They did it knowingly and explicitly to cripple the art and make its practitioners less able to fight in real world situations, and to make them dependent on a paid training hall. An art created and formulated recently by a white person, therefore, has the absolute minimum of social status possible. Quality regardless, it has almost zero "authenticity" to inflate its students' smug. Its only appeal to quality would be to claim the use of vast amounts of technology and science, but it is rare to see an art able to convincingly make that claim. (regardless of whether or not it is true)

I do know that whenever I get two students in at the same time, the one who has not done martial arts or self-training is always the one who grasps the movements the most quickly.

You may think so now, but when you train with an instructor, I think you'll find that you hadn't taught yourself anything at all. yes. From experience, you will walk out of the very first class realizing that you learned more in the first thirty minutes than you did for the past year of self training - and a few weeks later you will discover that it will take you months just to train the bad habits from that period out so that you can start to be as good as the people who had never trained who just started in the class.

It's actually rather the opposite. Guns are RANGED WEAPONS. Imagine that you are going to shoot someone with a bow and arrow. If you're standing close enough that you have to adjust how you nock and draw the bow because your target is in the way, you're doing it wrong. The brain is not a fast instrument. It's been said that there is a lag of about a third of a second between the eyes and everything else. Further, tests have indicated that at relatively close ranges of (as I recall) seven meters or closer, you would have to be a fool to bring a gun to a knife fight. Guns only threaten space in very specific ways, unlike for instance a knife which can threaten all sorts of space near the hand. If you have the unenviable need to chose a weapon to defend against, and you will be at close enough range to use unarmed techniques, a gun is one of your best choices.

When the quality of food that I eat is lower, and I find that quality generally means "less processing", my energy level is significantly lower, less steady, and I am more hungry. My strength can fluctuate a bit. Some foods can cause my joints to be an issue. The body is not a "simple math" thing.

1: Depends on what the belt consists of, but any less than, oh, 10,000 hours of class time is probably a bit dodgy. 3: Depends on your goals, resources, and the school in question.

Well.. ask your teacher how to do the hand strikes that are there, then spend extra time working them on a heavy bag. A heavy bag will give you -some- feedback. Your teacher can help with the rest.

Yeah, i'm always mystified why people who claim to be training "traditional self defense" are so dead-set against wearing shoes because that's a "modern sport" thing, when so far as I have seen, training barefoot is a modern adaptation to make sparring safer for sport purposes. Training barefoot was, in my art as a whole, introduced in the 20th century by "modern" schools as an adaptation to make the art less street-practical and restrict students from practicing their art outside of a training hall. It was done knowingly and intentionally for that purpose. I can't imagine how the reasoning and effects of shoes would be REVERSED in a different art. That said, there are lots of people who practice various styles of Capoeira in Brazil who practice it barefoot outdoors on concrete, on asphalt, and on cobblestones. I'm not sure why, other than "My lineage was connected to Regional and we have to train barefoot (so that we'll only do our stuff indoors, as part of the style fork), but I want to do stuff outdoors (like the traditionalists), and so i'll just build up more foot calluses so that I can do it anyways." That option remains available for you, and if you insist on training barefoot is probably the next most 'authentic' option.

When you do a circular technique, your body rotates to generate power. After finishing, the opposite side is now turned away, and has a longer amount of arc to turn through before hitting, thus feels "strong", but the original limb faces the target and has nowhere to rotate to move closer and feels "weak". In comparison, a linear technique requires you to not only rotate toward the target to launch the strike, but also to rotate away to pull the limb back in at the end of its extension. Therefore, when it returns, it returns to a body position that is already ready to advance again. This is a major reason why arts that use a lot of circular techniques are said to be so much more "defensive" - they are adding parries, redirects, takedowns and the like into their flow during the reciprocal stage of the movement, rather than simply reeling the attack back in.

Good European swords have as good or better edges than the katana, using folding, alloying, and good metallurgy. Europe was not so much constrained by a lack of metals, and had some very good alloyed materials. Some of this was by experimentation; the famous Toledo blades, as I recall, were in modern times discovered to contain traces of vanadium which they did not at the time have the ability to manipulate. Nonetheless, the alloying of non-metal materials into the steel which were chemically ingenious were in common use. The pommel and tang has been discovered to be key to the design of swords in Europe; the rebound shock of impact is caught and reflected back down into the blade and target by the springiness of the tang and the mass of the pommel.I can only theorize that the xenophilia for the japanese sword comes from lack of knowledge of local equivalents and the standard romanticization of the exotic.

But a bounce seems like the worst possible movement you can hide that in. Very vulnerable.

One: yes, a heavy bag will have you throwing punches with a lot of force after awhile, since you NEED to have force in your punches. It's still F=MV and your need to transfer a large peak impulse into the target. You can have light punches or you can have punches that will actually have some stopping power, but you can't have both. Two, you are wanting precision. For this, you need to be practicing form of the punches. Very slowly. Practice your punches for awhile and do not allow yourself to spend any less than twenty seconds on a single punch. Not "jab for twenty seconds", but throw ONE jab, and slow it down to last half a minute". Concentrate on getting the form and structure perfect. Then speed it up somewhat and use things like bags as part of your practice, but keep it slow. Fast movements tend to hide a lot of slop and vagueness in them, and slow movements force your brain to store how to do the punch well.

...Right, and "new sport type" = barefoot, "Self Defense" = shoes. Unless you normally go about your daily business barefoot?

Distinguish your product and chase the people that he's ignoring. Make a name for yourself as the go-to guy for hardcore. Invite his class to check out your classes, and don't be afraid to let some of your yellow belts dribble their black belts around the room a few times. get face time with people that might be put off by his lack of matside manners. Also recognize that you're going to lose a bunch of people to him. I know one of the schools here started by having their students show up to everyone else's classes and giving every student fliers and a free coupon, several times, and by all but hospitalizing anyone from another school who wanders in. That school has a quite large class size now.

...Maybe it's because where i'm from, it's the traditionalists who wear shoes.. but I honestly think that the best thing you can put on concrete to protect your feet are a pair of crosstrainers. If you're wanting self defense applicability, you need to learn how to wear shoes anyways.

Im frankly nkt completely sold on the division of the two. It seems more likeba statement about focus in techniques, and it has further been noted that BJJ types tend to be better at relaxed power than taiji types Even the IMA experts have been known to have ambiguity about how to define "Internal", so confusion and sarcasm are to be expected.

I have a friend in Cali who is a professional actor. he started because he had a certain look that directors wanted, and says "If it wasnt for typecasting, I wouldnt be able to eat!" Lateef Crowder, while not a big name in movies or martial arts, succeeded in cultivating a certain "Eddy Gordo" Brazilian machismo and look with some flowery and acrobatic skill. In his fight scenes he seems to push the flow and the stylism over the pure martial. The others in whose films he got his start by playing n im not as sure about; they werent as easily grasped as an archetypal role.

Right. I have always held that home study is a dead end in training. Too many things are like that. That said, a dedicated student could do fine as long as they can get that feedback sometimes. If you can only see a teacher every couple weeks, you're still doing okay, because your teacher can critique what you are doing and help you put together your curriculum to work on until next time. For those who want to self-train for various constraints, I feel that this would be a much better alternative. You may need a couple weeks of more intensive training time in order to build up your very basic library - it takes me 10-20 hours or training time to communicate the root curriculum of my art well enough that I can name a basic technique and have the students do something that looks like it. But it's a lot easier to sell "I'm going to take a week or two of classes, then get back with them every couple weeks" than to commit to a permanent schedule change, if there really is that heavy of an activity schedule that you can't get to classes.

So, today i was working with a student on basic kicks. They were slop, she was having a hard time just getting them around. I walked around and noted that her hip was turned just a little bit when she kicked, putting the heel at the wrong angle, then I had her adjust her hips with an adjustment that I had a difficult time describing other than vague gesturing and requests to "put the bowl down", "sink" in certain places, and the like. Took less than five minutes to find the changes and the kicks went from slop to crisp. How many months would it take a self study person?

Ninjutsu had the wacky high grades because they put concrete requirements for all of the belts up to 10th dan, then had the problem of how to organize all the people who got to the top. I don't know why they did that, and tend to agree with their stance of pointing out that the whole thing is an arbitrary modern construction.