JusticeZero

And of course there's always the issue that after you have spent 500 years working on boxing, you will have to defend the art from all the people who complain that it's all flowery and show, impractical for practical or competition use, useless for fighting, and clearly outdated because it doesn't use Venusian Sandworm Style footwork techniques, which look suspiciously similar to the stance work that your instructor five hundred years ago was deriding as impractical. but that's a topic for elsewhere.

If you are working off of the seed principles of your core martial art, it is your core martial art. That said, if your art focuses on closing and infighting as a tactical doctrine, and you find yourself kiting and sniping with kicks one day, you are not doing your core art.

There is several hundred years worth of material to learn in every martial art in existance, even humble Boxing could keep you learning well into the 26th century. "Complete" is a challenged term, given that every martial art is constructed to be complete within the bounds of what its practitioners are expected to deal with and expected to know. If it lacks anything it is generally because the people doing it had no need to study that for some reason. What you need might be different from what the creators of the art needed, which is hardly the fault of the art.

No, you cant. To this day I occasionally have knee twinges from a very subtle form mistake I picked up during a dry spell between teachers that my main instructor spotted almost immediately when I studied wih him back in 1999. Go to the boxing gym and box with coaching.

Looks like there might be a baguazhuang teacher in East Providence, but I cant speak to anything about them. Had the list open for some random reason. Look forward to hearing from you.

Saying what answer you want to hear does not make that answer more correct. The best thing to train "on your own" is the art that you can get someone to work with you regularly on. If you have no instruction then you need to find someone to teach you.

As a scientist who actually studies this, among related topics, I have to note this: If you drive or are driven past a school in your own town, you have already exposed yourself to enough risk of crippling injury and death that visiting the "20 most dangerous cities in the country", all of which are far safer than most anywhere else on the planet, is not going to move the needle, safetywise. Especially if you are just stopping in to go to a class, which means that you aren't doing the high risk activities that expose you to danger like buying/selling drugs or wandering around visibly intoxicated. A wrestling background or a bit of boxing like you can find in all kinds of low cost gyms is far more than enough to deal with any of those situations. Mostly because you won't look like the sort of person who is an easy fight.

I found that weighted ankle stuff was expensive for a reason - your feet endure a lot of force, and it takes a heroic amount of doing to keep the things on just -walking-. I don't know that much of anything would keep them on while running, but maybe there's some gear out there that would do it. Also, that's fairly specific and unusual lines of resistance that might not match whatever you're trying to build up. For what you described, honestly you can achieve a similar effect by buying a good frame backpack, loading it up, and carrying it. Might be cheaper, plus the backpack is useful to have. I spent some time wearing wrist weights. I could feel the minor extra work, but I can't say that they were all that important in the end. They seemed to me to be a lot like those toy weights that some women (of the type that many of the ladies on this board gnash their teeth at) like to get so that they can do so many reps! without running the risk of actually developing any strength. My thoughts are that the weight (carried on the body) might be good for making a walk or jog that you are going beyond into one that is still a challenge, so that would be useful. The ankle and wrist weight is probably useful for specific exercises, but i'd suggest using weights or advanced bodyweight training using high intensity strength building exercises instead.

Right, I have to agree here that if you don't have a background, self-training is hardly recognizably better than not training at all. I've tried self-training before, because I was trying to track down a teacher. I learned more in one hour with a student of the art than I did in six months of working by myself. Join the wrestling team, which is a martial art that will give you a solid and important foundation for anything else you might train. 1: No 2: See above 3: The one that you can find a good teacher for

It is, however, a lot easier to "control" oneself if you don't feel hunger pangs running a calorie NEUTRAL diet, let alone a deficit, because all of your food is stuffed with sugar-as-filler and assorted other craziness on top of being full of meat and carbs to begin with.

The other issue in this is that a lot of the "food" that is available to us these days is ludicrously calorie dense. in the current agricultural climate, it makes sense to increase the use of high-fructose corn syrup (sugar) as a cost-saving filler, resulting in lots of empty calories that fail to bring satiety.

Yeah, I know, though it gets back to the question of what defines "tradition", which I think needs a lot more unpacking. It was stated as 'martial arts (as a whole) should be practiced barefoot', though. I'm not convinced, particularly as most of the toughening that your feet need to build up from spinning and such on a floor is really only useful for resisting the effects of spinning and such on a floor. I suppose that the lack of shoes can be seen as a protective measure to reduce the damage or injury to the person being kicked? In which case, it's not so much 'tradition' as 'common sense for the people setting the rules'.

Pbbt. Seriously, it isn't the fact that "there are MYSTERIOUS CHEMICALS in our food zomg!" that is the problem, so much as it is the fact that what we think of as "food" has raced so far afield into the realms of "lots of chemicals" and foods produced under disturbing conditions that the composition of our diet as a whole has changed substantially into a form that makes the American diet the least healthy diet in the world as a whole, measured in a variety of different ways. We have worse outcomes from our food than people in the third world, or in exotic places with oddly limited food selections.

I dunno. It's a set of techniques for the floor, but i'd sooner send you to a Capoeira school to learn that skillset, much like i'd send someone wanting to grapple on the ground to a BJJ school. I think I saw those basic techniques (or something like them) in a book on Dog gongfu long ago, but there was more use of the upper two feet, more focus, more visible application beyond "filling the air with swishing feet", and cleaner lines of force described in those techniques.

We do have an issue in that our dynamics favors large circular techniques. Big circular techniques have two settings: unrealistically slow motion, or plan for large hospital bills. Platitudes about "control" simply don't stand up - it's too much mass slung too far outside of your center of mass with too little structure devoted to unkicking the kick to stop on a dime. With linear strikes, you can just break up your structure and the strike turns into a lightning-fast foam puff, but there's only so much you can do about "control" when whipping the entire mass of your limp leg in a 360 degree circle in half of a second. And you're going to stop this instantly with a momentary twitch with your quadriceps? Really? "Sparring" requires different construction to deal with this sort of thing. our "sparring" is not much like a regular "sparring" match as a result. honestly I can't make anything work in a standard "sparring" match. I lose too much of my toolbox. It feels like telling a carpenter to build a house, then suddenly informing them that they cannot use a hammer, screw driver, glue, or any kind of saw to do it. I get to jogo someone at my level maybe once a week, if it's a good week.

That's a rather broad statement.. I'm not a Tkd stylist, I practice a kicking art, and my usual foot covering in class is a pair of hiking boots, less commonly walking shoes. I used to make a point of training kicks on an ice-covered parking lot a few times a year. I didnt last year because my latitude changed dramatically for school but we still consider cobblestone or asphalt to be an optimal trai ing surface. Different priorities for different folks really.

Yes, until you hear enough stories about people shooting a thunderingly powerful technique at an attacker and pulling it an inch away.

There is a concern some have that classical sparring can create bad habits. I cannot fault this view. However, one needs to have something in the training methodology to train reaction to unscripted attacks, map control, et cetera. If they are doing footwork and range drills and responding to dynamic input, I wouldnt worry about it. Alternately, if they don't give a darn about combat and want to perfect form and fitness and so on, then he does not need to spar because he does not value that skill. Entirely legitemate.

Not just that, I also note that when people set out to move fast, their structure tends to fail on them and not be used properly. As a result, they throw a series of lightning-fast strikes, none of which would make a four year old cry on the receiving end let alone drop a resisting target.

I have had a lot of practice falling down, flinging myself down, or being pushed down for a number of years, in a certain method. I stopped into an Aikido class, because I want a bit more of a feel of throwing and being thrown. Worked a technique or two which involved a back roll. When being shown the back roll I could do it fine. When being an uke however, two things happened: First, I would immediately try to fall in queda de negativa-rins rather than back roll. I didn't feel like I had any trouble falling this way, but it wasn't the movement i'd intended to do. Second, because I was trying to do back roll, I would slop up my breakfall. Several times I would be dropping toward the floor, turn to tumble out, and freeze up with a worry that it might be disrespectful. this tended to result in my shoulder taking a bit more strain than it should have. (not a horrible amount, but enough to make me realize I was doing a lawn dart impression instead of a breakfall.) So what should I do for falling in this case? I don't want to be disrespectful or seem like a know-it-all, but i'm worried that if I try doing prescribed rolls that I might hurt myself from confusion alone. The rolls are, by the way, a bad habit in my classes; we usually start learning the techniques which are used as breakfalls during the first month on hardwood or concrete and transition them into other techniques that need us to have two or three feet on the ground. (Replacing 'control' with 'adaptivity' comes in time.) A roll wouldn't be optimal in the environment we focus on, so it's not the technique we use.

Well i'll remind you of the obvious and ask if you can take a notebook or a phone with a camera to class with you..

It isn't -entirely- calories in, calories out. If you're eating good food, it's calories in calories out for the most part. But we don't eat good food, we eat stuff out of a chemical warehouse that can throw things off in various ways. Get to where you are eating actual food that your great-grandparents could read the ingredients of and understand first.

Buy small plates, give up soda (even diet soda), avoid any food that has some form of sugar as one of the first two ingredients, and try not to eat things with ingredients that sound like it came from a chemical supply company. To get a "6 pack" you have to get your body fat percentage below a certain point; that's it.

If you are stretching regularly, that much time should have you kicking decently high.

'go for the groin' is a horrible response. First, it might do nothing useful. I've been hit there. It did nothing to me at the time. About a minute after I sat back down, THEN it knocked me on my backside. An attack that ensures that an attacker will be incapacitated shortly after they finish committing the crime and getting away is one that is not really advisable to use as a primary technique. Second, it's obvious. Everyone says 'go for the family jewels'. They will be defended, and the defense might have planned followthrough. Third, it is unpracticed. How often do you hit your training partner there in the training hall? Do you do live groin-hitting drills with a resisting opponent? No? Then you are not going to have a very effective delivery system to get the technique to land. So you are advising that in case of attack, students use techniques that are completely unexpected, that they have never trained, to hit their attacker in a way that has a good chance of doing absolutely nothing whatsoever during the window of time in which they need their attacker disabled. That sounds like horrible advice to me.