JusticeZero

I did a quick google maps search "martial arts baronne new jersey". I see a lot of BJJ schools near the NJ turnpike and south of the Baronne Bridge, but north of the bridge, along Broadway (everything is on Broadway, apparently) near City Park were some isshinryu and okinawan Karate schools and aikijujutsu. There is probably also other people doing stuff that doesn't show up on a map. Martial arts schools often have a hard time paying for their own space that they have freely enough to advertise in. Check the schedules at the bigger schools for odd things stuffed into the margins, check coffee shop bulliten boards, ask around. Expect that you probably are going to have to settle for something that wasn't exactly what you wanted, but if you try to find a good school that meshes with you, you can probably find something good. I don't know how far your travel range extends, so I didn't put much effort into expanding the search past that. With 'kid' in your name, I presume that you aren't going to be able to jump in a car for a 50 mile journey on a whim; you refer to NYC as being "far away" and it was pretty close in relatively speaking. If your range is small, you are generally advised to find the best teacher you can get to rather than being able to shop through the whole world of arts available.

So we've discussed new students.. You've got, say, a 4th dan or some such in "whatever-ryu", and you're setting up to teach your class. Someone respectfully wanders in and greets you. They are a 6th dan in "different-ryu" and want to see your class. What's going to happen?

As one of the physical training exercises, having people move parts of the body in isolation - dancerish pelvis rotation and swaying, then with the abdomen, then the chest seperate from the shoulders. Just teaching people that there are a variety of moving parts between their hip joints and their shoulders, and making them practice with purposely moving those parts, is important and has good results.

Not only visit your doctor; practice doing your kick at sub-taiji speed and microanalyzing it. Get an anatomy text from the library and find the muscles in question. Pull your teacher aside and have them go over your kicking form in minute and exacting detail. Once you've done all that if it's still an issue ask again armed with all the technical details. Sometimes serious form problems go unnoticed for a long time, and some form problems can hurt.

A number of arts work in similar ranges. Maybe if you can do some research on what is available in your range, some of us might know a bit about the teachers/schools/arts in question. Not all arts are available in all places, alas. Another consideration is that in recent years, wing chun the art had a severe political splintering. So you might try looking for variant spellings of the name, things like that.

The only other thing I thought of was elbowstands or au off of an elbow, and those would be primarily something other than conditioning.

Can't quite visualize what the situation was from that description. Seems like you should be able to do your standard release, though, turning out through the mouth of the hand away from the palm.

Dunno. speaking as a Capoeira guy, bouncing looks ridiculous and vulnerable. I have to wonder if those people like being swept off their feet. We generally are too busy doing things to ginga. If we are in some sort of lull we will ginga and move around because standing like a statue creates no new opportunities and hides nothing. I dont know that jumping up and down does either of these well.

Well, what effects has it had on your range of motion, and ability to use the muscles in that region? I'm not familiar with that exact condition, but a lot of things like that have some variance from one person to another in any case. Has your doctor given you any input on the subject? Some martial arts are very picky about keeping the elbows in tight, which also has the side effect of reducing the R.O.M. requirements. You may want to start on the usual report that we need to be able to answer "what art" questions effectively - that is, what sort of options do you have, exactly? Are you in a major city or what, what sort of schools and teachers are within the range you are willing to travel, and suchlike. Is there anything in particular you want from your art? It does nobody any good to discover "I would do best in a school studying insertnamehere style!" when the nearest school in that art is five hundred miles away from you. it also does no good to go to a school that is awesomely good at something you are totally uninterested in, and which does not do something you want to learn.

I wouldn't generally recommend doing other martial arts training, particularly martial arts training with very different principles, intermixed with a skill he is trying to learn. i've done it before, and it was counterproductive.

Color blindness only typically takes the form of green/red or blue/violet, due to the anatomy of the eye. It looks yellow to me, with shading around the edges that might be making it look orange. I wouldn't worry about it. The belt color will change when it changes.

If it wasn't able to be used effectively, it would not have been carried on because nobody would want to be taught by the guy who always loses. I don't know anything about it, so i couldn't say much more than that. Furthermore, I don't know if it may have been sponged up in the general devastation done to the state of CMA caused by the Maoist revolution. I have heard that there are arts which were once effective which now only exist in the form of wushu exhibition forms.

Are you looking for any particular BPM rate or feel?

Well the original question was the role of the shoulder in "a strike", but what type of strike was unclear. What the shoulder is doing depends on what is being used to strike with.

Yes, and I teach the 'unbendable arm' to my own students. It is a way to get them to enact a certain relaxed, non-oppositional aliveness which is difficult to explain how to do in any other way. What it is not is a literal wizardly effect involving mystical power.

I'm an Angoleiro - Capoeira Angola Palmares (which is like saying "Gongfu Southern Hung Gar"); listed under my name. I tend not to just take things I see "on the internet" at face value, since that could do bad things to my career (in the 'gross incompetence' category) but I have some general historical perspective on things. But yes, Yoga originates out of India, not China, which is a very different place. There is a fallacy that a lot of people who haven't ever been to any of these places or studied much about them have, where they sort've let them blend together. Different parts of Asia aren't different in the way that California and Washington State are different, it's more like confusing Mexican food as coming from Quebec. One of the last times I was in fear for my life was when a woman in a taiji class noted that she was from Georgia (the country, not the southeastern state of the U.S.A.) and the only thing I could remember about it was that it was in the area formerly held by the USSR. I'm pretty sure that I would have considered myself fortunate to only get a bloody nose had there not been some other people around. Just because it's close doesn't mean it's similar. Learning something Chinese to get close to Indian culture is like trying to learn more about the culture of Greece by wearing a kilt and drinking tea.

Yoga is quite new, though, and a lot of martial arts either predate it or come from places that were never exposed to it. The oldest things we know of typically come from Egypt; that isn't because Egypt was an amazing civilization though, it comes from the fact that Egypt liked to write things down on pieces of rock and bury them in big sealed structures in a very arid climate. Civiizations had been rising, flourishing, and falling for a long time before Egypt.

The issue there is that "chi" is not tangible, but instead refers to a quality of physical movement and methodology which can vary from one school to another. "Belief" won't deliver kinetic energy, you need to apply action/reaction, gravity, structure, and muscle to the problem. Visualization of energy flows can help to teach a student how to develop those attributes, but the visualization itself is not hitting anything. Unfortunately, some people get hung up on the visualization method and start thinking that it really is the visualization that is hitting. They are "looking at the finger rather than at the moon". I've held off on answering before, because I am not sure what you are talking about powering. A kick? A linear punch? A circular punch?

That is exactly what I am saying. The fact that I have a 'game plan' means that i am far more able to achieve what I need to do than if I were to just start doing random things without any sort of coherent goal or strategy. "oh gee, maybe i'm gonna punch them, no wait now I am going to do a grapple, but I have to do something to change to the right position to do the armbar no wait forget it i'm gonna kick him, but first I have to adjust again because my hips are all closed up and all and oh well wait this is my kid brother maybe I shouldn't have kicked him in the face.."Successful militaries and sports teams all build around tactical doctrines and plans rather than "okay guys, let's just, uhm, go in there and do some stuff. Blue squad is gonna charge into the thick of things, okay cool. Yellow squad is going to call in an air strike on them. That's cool. You'll hit Blue squad but hey, we're all about the flexibility and freedom here." I don't know about you, but the "natural" reaction to being attacked for all humans, apes, and honestly most mammals is to flail, curl up in a ball, scream, defecate, and urinate. I don't think that's a very useful reaction for most modern situations.

What, to flail around inefficiently with no coherent strategy, tactics, or plan? Doesn't sound very efficient to me. I'd think it's methodology, rather than practitioner or style, that is important.

That is how i'd been taught it originally (in a different school) as well. You are not turning your back on your opponent when doing this, only dealing with the exotic position your hips must be in to perform the technique correctly. The 180 degree turn is important to prevent knee damage and to allow you to carry out the full technique properly. It is a kick radiating from the side of the body. You have to commit to using a sideways facing stance in order to do it correctly.

No trouble! I hadn't seen anyone and was somewhat concerned. Apparently my concern in this case was accurate. Hope things work out soon.

I don't think it is "hit them once then turn your back and do a victory cheer" but rather "hit them with intent to deliver enough power to take them out. If that doesn't work, do it again. Don't just bop at them hoping to 'wear them down'."

I think that it is an expression of mistrust in the authority of the jury to discover unbiased truth. Which, IF ones instructor is in a particularly awful portion of the kyriarchial totem pole, is not necessarily a bad doubt to have. If ones instructor was a white, male, well-to-do, married, upstanding member of society, then there is little if any doubt that they were in fact guilty. If ones instructor has a few layers of "minority" associated with them, and you are in an area that is known to have a fair amount of corruption in the system? That trust might not be as firm. In my area for instance, I have friends who are LEOs who advise me to be wary of other LEO's, and comment about how they have too many people wearing badges who should have been behind bars. We've had a whole string of serious police corruption scandals in the newspaper lately where i'm living now. Some of the handling of the Danziger 7 left bad tastes in peoples' mouths, then there were some other sketchy shootings, scandals with traffic cameras, et cetera. If someone around here is poor and black and gets convicted, the public opinion is going to be a lot closer to "We're not sure if he was guilty or if he was just the closest person to pin something to". If the circumstances were sufficiently shaky, and the right people take offense at the details, my reputation might even INCREASE were that to happen. Situational of course, but something some people have to consider.

Chatted with Ev the other day, which was fun. (As would be expected from her art, she's a very vicious and violent sort in all the good ways, alas I just don't have the background to be able to contribute to discussion of the best ways to hit someone to make them cry other than the ones everyone already know about, heh) tried talking to S-8, but there were network problems. Given the connection quality of the other call, i'm guessing those were a fluke that wasn't on my end, hope that got worked out. Alas I start to suspect that was a quirk. I haven't seen anyone else online since.