JusticeZero

Then you have more than one goal. That's fine; there is nothing wrong with having several goals. Just so long as you are able to be clear on what those goals are, how those goals interact, and what actions are intended to work toward what goals. This is related to technique. If your goal is to arrest someone, that is to put them in some sort of control position without doing lasting harm, then you will need to do several things; you need to close on them for one. There are a few ways to do that; maybe you can capitalize on them overextending or doing something spinny. But you know "I need to watch for an opportunity to close on them." You will also need to not randomly smash their nose in with kicks, so you need to take that into mind too. Maybe you can make an opening and get them to move in a way that you can crash in on them. If you do these things, it might be hard but you have a good chance of being able to get the guy taken down. If however you say "Oh, I want to grab this guy and not hurt him" but then you wade in on auto pilot throwing punches and side kicks at their face and maintaining your long range, it just isn't going to happen that way. If you are grappling, but you are just enjoying the interplay of positions and dynamics and don't work toward a goal, you will eventually find yourself tapping to someone who wants the lock. However, if you want to put the guy in an armbar, and your strategy to do it is to start throwing crescent kicks from range, (followed by "???", then "victory"), you're not going to get your armbar. You need to say "I want -this-, and -that-, and so I need to work toward those." Then examine the actions available and chose the ones that work toward your goals and avoid the ones that run counter to your goals. Whenever you are about, keep your ears open, just in case some odd opportunity sparks that, hey, might be worked to work toward your goals.

Means some teacher was having to say "Quit messing around with trying to learn how to hit softly for five minutes to "wear down" your opponent and practice to get it done before you get stabbed or arrested!"

Which part was particularly solid in your view?

Sigh, lovely. I have to deal with peoples' flaky morals already all to often. At this point, I probably have to run things whenever they're out anyways.. Oh heck yes. I worked hard for that, and having the highest rank I can is my armor against this sort of thing. The higher up I am, the more freedom I have to operate on my own merits and not be judged by my instructors'. At this point, the question is academic. Nah, but I have other names in the same river to shuffle.

Sounds like groupthink, which is how most mistakes happen. People have reservations, but nobody wants to say anything. This is the point where people need to say "I'm willing to go with whatever your final decision is, but - if it was my decision, I wouldn't do this."

Power and speed are related, not in opposition; much of power comes from proper form, speed can conceal poor form, and speed without form is just an ineffective movement. Nobody can "tank" a knife. "Endurance" is meaningless against a razor blade. You want your movements to be effective the first time you use them, not just the fiftieth.

These are all completely reasonable goals, and nothing in it is contrary to being honorable. It seems that you want other high ranking martial artists to recognise your art, which in turn would help your students in the wider Karate/martial arts culture. it is perhaps not enough to incubate your students well without preparing the outside world a bit for their arrival into it. My thoughts on the matter stand; I feel that the best ways to achieve your goal is to 1: show up and represent where other Okinawan styles are represented, and 2: get published. Your student retention policies are not going to help with the goals you listed.

Right, but the issue here is that you are being less than clear about what you want; this is likely because you have not yourself distilled it down yet. A lot of these things seem to appear together in a whole package, but really they come from and work toward different things. The goal you stated and the methods you listed do not necessarily move in the same direction. Be careful with what you wish for, because you might get it and you want to get what you WANT, not something that you just ASSOCIATED WITH what you want. If you want to be rich like the guys you see driving around in fancy cars, say "I want to be rich", not "I want to own a sports car". Lots of people own sports cars who aren't rich, lots of people who are rich don't own sports cars, and you might come to a point where you have to chose between the sports car or becoming rich. You want the actual goal, not just a trapping of it without having the goal. So: What group is it exactly that you want recognition by? Why? If you achieve your goal, what exactly will be different? How will you know you've arrived?

That said, if you're being threatened by a whole bunch of people and one of them doesn't survive your panicked wildcat response while you're trying to not get killed by said gang, it's not likely that anyone could actually convince a jury to convict you for it. once again on my point that I do not strategize how to do damage in a self defense situation. I strategize how to get away from a self defense situation, bringing any relevant family and friends with me. It's possible that an attacker might not survive the damage done while in the process of clearing a path and time for said escape, but my intent has nothing to do with how much damage to do or not to do.

Because we want the kick to actually work. For one thing, you used the term "front snap/thrust kick". Don't do that. That's a bit like saying "that one kick, the front/side kick". They are two very different kicks. Second, me and Chumonchek already answered the question in regards to a front thrust kick. I can't really speak to the front snap kick, as my style doesn't teach it. (I think the entire body of knowledge i've encountered on the subject is "Go play soccer with someone once, you'll know all you ever need")

It's particularly hard when there is an inherent cultural clash. My art, for instance, was created by and for people who would have had serious problems justifying $40 a month in the budget. In a way, we feel out of place if we're not offering classes next to the boxing studio with the peeling paint. Just being in a yoga studio is faintly surreal in its own way.

Those are all ways of getting out into the eyes of the general, non-MA public, but you want to get out into the martial arts world. I don't know that the "martial arts world" cares all that much about whether you are listed in the phone book or if you have testing fees, because that is stuff that is seen by people who aren't a martial artist yet. Why not try getting out in the martial arts world specifically? publish or perish, maybe? Magazine articles, books.. Seminars.. The people in the "martial arts world" don't look in the phone book for the new school to check out their pricing structure. They see articles, hear about the guys who turned up at one event and hosted another, and talk about the people who showed their police friends that interesting new principle they hadn't seen before.

Maybe, but it seems as though every story that ends in "and I started punching and kicking and.." starts with "We were hanging out at a bar on a shady side of town.." Furthermore, the majority of "hypothetical self defense cases" that people that we suspected of having shaky morals who were on the verge of being uninvited from training always used to ask always started out with "Well, what if i'm in a bar, and..". That and seeing where police cars tended to be tends to leave me to the conclusion that "to get in a fight" is a not uncommon motive of going to a bar.

If you could just say "Yeah, my bad. Bye." and leave, it isn't self defense. If your story starts with "I was hanging out at a bar.." it isn't self defense. If you at any point think you will "teach him a lesson", it isn't self defense.

What does your teacher think?

Police learn some basics and addons that they need to do their job in the way that they are required to. The rest is more or less up to them. Judo would probably be good. Easy to find, lots of practice against resisting opponents, and lots of tools to use other than "hulk smash", which would be good for police work if that's the direction you're looking at going. It's competitive, all the way up to the Olympics if you so chose. Plus, if you wanted to work on striking, it is a very easy art to meld with boxing, which is also easy to find and involves lots of stress testing.

First - have you had someone who knows that form come watch you in person to make sure you aren't doing something that looks right but is so, so wrong? I got really irritated with a PE teacher once for having kids do a cardio kickboxing routine once, leaving their feet straight forward while doing reps of shin kicks. Someone who hasn't been taught sees those, they see kicks. Someone who has trained with supervision and guidance sees those, they see painful knee surgery. Other things make me see other forms of surgery or orthotics. Most of these things are things that I would never expect anyone to ever do, until they do them in front of me and I have to jump up and say "Please stop that before I have to call an ambulance." Second - there is usually a lot of subtleties in every technique. Do you really expect people to write a small book on each movement? particularly when it will likely be misunderstood or misplaced.. You should really ask someone in person for that stuff. Even if you can only get to visit with someone with a kyu rank once every month or two or even three, you will still be far safer and more effective in your training. Alternately, do a different line of Karate that you actually have access to, and just plan to later re-tune to the Shotokan standards when instruction appears.

I've trained with people who wore glasses. It's never been an issue that i've seen, beyond the occasional need to reach up and adjust, and the occasional need to pick them up off the floor in case of accident. That said, we don't whack each other in the face. I don't actually think that people should be hitting each other in the face in training in general, because it's no good to learn to defend yourself from an unlikely threat by doing things that will inflict permanent brain trauma on yourself, but this is a different topic entirely.

The "belt" by your name is just your post count; it would be a bit silly to use belt colors in a world where the belt systems are not coherent. For instance, in my art, the highest belt color in the system is white, after going through combinations of greens, yellows, blues, etc in more or less that order. What good is it to anyone to know if i'm going for a yellow belt if they don't know that that's more or less a dan ranking? Plus, even within belt systems, there's no consistancy. One school's brown belt might barely rank orange in another school in the same lineage. I believe it just uses PHPBB codes, not HTML codes, for security reasons.

Coming from someone whose entire art is built around body dropping movements like that and a lot of sweeps, that technique looks more than a bit lolworthy to me. We use a huge variety of sweeps, and we don't do that because that technique breaks up his power structure for doing it, puts him in a position which i'm sure he does not have a lot of alternatives in, then relies on impact force to do a leverage job, taking too much time and too much space to do it. It's not going to sweep anyone in a halfway solid stance. So I wouldn't worry about justifying your stance size based on the possibility of dealing with techniques that look like that.

It's not like they're going to drill it or practice it, or any of the rest of the delivery system behind it. They may recognize the word, but without the rest of the book behind it it does them no good.

yeah; there are a lot of jobs I was able to get when I got out of high school some years back that i would have had no chance to get nowadays without a four year degree. Then, my high school classes on the subject were enough. now, no college diploma puts my application in the trash unread.

This is again part of why I tell my students to completely remove the idea of "damaging the attacker" or "not damaging the attacker" from their game plan. instead, I demand that the goal be set on getting everyone out of the situation. I feel that this also provides some protection; should a technique cause a lot of damage - say, knocking them down so their head hits a rock - I can honestly respond that my goal was to create space or move the guy away from me so that I could escape and get any other people with me away safely, rather than to kick behind to some prescribed level.

I would advise that you would be better off by working in a different line of Karate for which training is available than you can achieve by training alone. Within karate specifically, the differences are not so huge from ryu to ryu that you cannot later adjust and retune them back to Shotokan standards should you later find a teacher in that form, if you are determined to be a Shotokan stylist.

Which stance(s) specifically? Unless the difference in size is absolutely colossal, I don't know that a change in width will have that much effect on how easily one can be swept. Someone who has a well constructed stance and control of their weight is hard to sweep even if their stance has their feet together. What makes you vulnerable to sweeping is unweighted feet that you are still reliant upon, or energy that you don't have completely controlled. It is most likely not "resistance to sweeping" but a number of other tactical synergies that have dictated the stance height in the different lines. Find the differences, find what techniques you are opening up or foreclosing on by switching stance to the newer material, then as your own personal tactics evolve you can find the stance structure that works best for your purposes. That said, you should try to lean more on whatever the teacher you are training with is teaching while you are training with them, for obvious reasons. if someone comes into my class insisting on doing L-negativa or Joao Grande negativa instead of the one we use, there's not a lot I can teach them because because they aren't willing to meet me with common structural ground that I can critique or tune effectively; in fact, I can't even coordinate class drills with people trying to use excessively foreign stance work mixed into the class.