JusticeZero

Right; the difference is generally related to what the kick is meant to do. Bencao (front kick with heel) is a solid push, not a traumatizing technique; as such, it is a better technique for our general doctrinal goals of escape and control. Yes, the whole foot makes contact. No, this isn't a problem; as noted, we aren't worrying about how many PSI of traumatizing force we can inflict, we're focusing on how far we can launch whatever we hit backwards. Snapping with the ball of the foot achieves far less effect in that regard. Go find something heavy and hard to move. Come up into your kick, chamber, lightly plant the foot, and push. The goal is to learn how to shove things around with this kick as a rule. If you're using it in sparring, use this light contact then thrust structure in ways that you would use a throw.

I had this conversation with my students on Thursdayyes, i've seen entirely too many instructors who were hamstrung by the need to hold back the best stuff in order to be able to continue to dominate any of their students. I want to give my students the good stuff so that if they put in the work, they will be able to stomp me flat at will, because I know that I do pretty well compared to others outside of my school. in the end, I will not achieve greatness because I can whoop it up like Jackie Chan, I will achieve greatness because everyone sees my students flattening all comers. I can't have it both ways; if I can beat all my students, it means there are a lot of others who can beat my students too; if I teach my students to be awesome, I must by definition teach them to be able to beat me in the process. Alas, too many teachers can't let go and accept that.

Honestly if you don't get into the navy as soon as you take care of the GED, you should go for a bachelors' degree, as that is the minimum level of education to get by these days.

The other thing is that fights are by their nature not very easy to prepare for specifically, but not generally all that difficult on the whole. IIRC it is Miller that comments on how he had trained martial arts some time, then actually got into a fight 'on the street' and the moment he actually got his hands on the attacker, realized that he needed to dial it way down because the attacker was not able to fight - a strung out guy with no training and the physique of overcooked linguini. It is not so much that you have to face a super tough, ruthless vicious ninja pirate as it is that you have to be able to deal well with a wide variety of possible scenarios, most of which start out with you losing before you can start to act. As such, overtraining and ability to do well when you're exhausted, overheated, bruised and sick are important.

I prefer to disentangle the level of damage from the goal when possible. "I wasn't thinking about whether or not that kick might kill him, I was thinking that that kick would work really well to make some space so that we could get out the door and into a crowd."

One who works to make their students able to become even better than they are.

Well I do know that it is possible to get a GED, which is basically a set of tests to demonstrate that you know what you were supposed to have learned in high school. This might require some study, and there are programs to help study for it. A GED is the same as a diploma for all intents and purposes, and if you do any sort of education after it, it's only the latest education that matters.

Each one of the techniques that we all do can also be thought of as a series of transitions. When I throw a bencao - a forward heel thrust kick - I start by stepping into a side, horselike stance - which I was going to do anyways - that's the first transition. Then I bring my knee up to chamber. but wait, that's a joelhada, a knee strike. Obviously if i'm firing a thrust kick, it's probably not going to start with hitting them with the knee, but it is still a similar transition. Then I fire the heel out. This position is reminiscent to negativa that has been raised off the ground, so were I inclined, I could drop into that position, or even just use a movement that originates there at this point. Then I retract the foot, and put it back down. But wait, there are any of a number of places that I can put that foot back down at. So by becoming aware of those breakpoints and finding commonalities between my other techniques which share them, I can construct much more intricate and mobile combinations and variant movements while simultaneously reducing my tells. I don't just say to myself, "I'm going to do X" and run through the whole chain of events, which I might have thoughtlessly put in distinctions between. I decide to do X, but it comes out as A(1), A(2), A(3), X(x), Q(3). The guy i'm in the circle with has seen A(1-2) before as part of other things and can't be totally sure that they know where i'm going with it, and Q(3) isn't where X usually ends up going.

Hmmmm. Well, Jow is a CMA thing, more than a JMA thing, so maybe someone in the CMA forum would know? I've heard that there are some things you can use that are actually simple to the point of being silly, but it's been years and I don't remember what they are.

People often think emotions have a lot more subtlety than they do. It's the narrative that people create, often after the fact, that contains the subtlety. Emotions are often very simple states that you are places into in order to tell a bunch of organic bits of your body what sort of mode to go into. "adrenalized" is often interpreted as fear or anger or any number of other things. But really, at it's core it's just how you describe and narrativize the biological condition of an adrenaline dump from your brain's primitive bits going "This is a potential threat - adrenaline now!" to which you have the physical symptoms of adrenaline. The adrenaline was there for good reason - if things went sour, you want to be on alert, blood flow tuned for combat, et cetera. Sooo.. disentangle the symptoms of adrenaline from your narrative and all you are left with is "I walked out a door. A potentially threatening person did something that was potentially threatening. I walked away. Nothing else came of it." Sounds like everything went well for you.

I can appreciate 'to heck with tradition, this stuff just works better for what we need' on the uniforms. The form contained some core movements which seemed somewhat reminiscent, to my relatively CMA-untrained eye, to Chen taiji specifically as opposed to, for instance, Yang; does that sound at all accurate? The pragmatic section looked interesting, lots of use of large* swinging and pushing movements using coordinated hands. How is it going for you? *I was uncertain how large the movements were until I recalled that the movements I am used to using are better described as "ginormous"

OK, you do TSD. You have forms. Go through your forms. In your forms, you step a few times. Drill those stepping techniques, the ones that move from one stance to another. Chain them together in all sorts of different ways. Experiment with making them smaller, bigger, shifting your feet in the middle. Now put a folding chair down in the middle of a flat space. That chair is your opponent; don't take your eyes off of it, don't give it your back, always stay in position to throw an attack at it. Go wandering around the chair with your footwork. Don't use any patterns, no repeating, and move around it in both directions. Now put a second chair down, a bodylength at most from the first. move around the first chair. Now switch to the second. Move around. Switch back. Now, start drilling techniques, again using the chair to orient yourself. Not 'kick-kick-kick-kick'; each attack or block will be alternated with a step that would be relevant to the technique you are using. Block-and-step-with. Side kick to step. Just keep chaining them together until they flow together. Then start stitching three or four techniques intermixed with steps together. The point here is to make you confident that you are able to move in any of a number of ways at any given point. Next, start finding the spots where your techniques can be sliced at the joint, the breakpoints. How are your techniques entering and exiting in common ways? Start stitching together the common breakpoints, instead of just limiting yourself to the ends of the full script of the techniques. Now get a partner. They don't even need to be a martial artist of any skill. Have them "spar" with you, but don't throw any attacks. Just move around. Both of you are trying to invade each other's space without touching each other. Designate a spot on the floor that you both want to inhabit, but you can't stay still. When one moves, the other should take some space back; don't just circle each other but try to dialogue with each other competitively to keep in that center space. Now, after you have gotten good at doing all the drills above and can do them with good form while holding a conversation with someone, look at your sparring space. You'll notice that the space has a center, and it has edges beyond which going is not advisable. In your case this is probably "other students", since most schools really don't care about space. On the next sparring match, don't worry about "winning" and getting points. Just focus on making the other guy go out of bounds, back into a wall, or trip over other people in the room as many times as you can in the time allowed, without just rushing the guy and just by stepping using your transitions in order to adjust your ranges. You want to think about controlling where you drive them into.

There were civilized and intelligent humans of the modern type wandering around for thousands of years inventing things and codifying things before Sumeria. Two thousand years from now, when all our digital and paper media have decayed into uselessness and all our buildings have crumbled into piles of dust, our civilization is going to look awfully ignorant, and people will probably assume we were all uneducated cavemen who clearly didn't have the mental capacity to do anything so complex as codify a martial arts system.

So basically, some random person who you will never see again in your life, who has zero influence with you or anyone you deal with, made some nasty comment toward you to impress some mouth breather who is too pathetic to realize that people who walk on two legs instead of all four aren't impressed by that ...and you're upset because you didn't take the bait? Seriously, that's almost like the guys who are so low on the totem pole that they try to push around and intimidate smaller women in glasses just out of the hope that somewhere in the big wide world, they can find one person weaker and inferior to them? Seriously. What on earth could you possibly hope to gain from fighting that guy that you didn't already have before you decided to go for lunch?

First organized system was, again, probably something in Africa. Remember that having half a brain did not originate only very recently; the only thing that did originate was the knowledge of how to write down how clever they were combined with the tendency to try to write it in excessively permanent forms that thousands of years later, a bunch of now-dead racists from the bad old days when that was the norm would see and think was close enough to their culture to qualify as being a human development. Just because a culture didn't build everything out of rocks while simultaneously living in places with very low-erosion climates doesn't mean they weren't intelligent people inventing, theorizing, and teaching advanced skills.

Well beyond that the issue is that you're talking about "documented" history when discussing two cultures out of many others that preceeded them and preceeded their predecessors that cared about documenting things. This is made worse by the fact that certain time periods of those cultures tended to react to any hint of seeing another culture documenting things in violent and destructive ways.

Probably did originate in Africa, but only for the reason that *people* originated in Africa. True but completely meaningless statement. Also - you do realize that Egypt is part of Africa, yes?

Not only is it possible to train "incorrect" form, it is possible to train DANGEROUS form - that is, form mistakes that will tear your body down and damage your joints and cripple you if not corrected.

This is basic physics. F=MV, V=F/M. More F in means more V out. Anyone who thinks that strength makes you slower is deluding themself trying to justify their lack of strength.

Training on your own is something you only do if you have no other choice; two weeks of training on your own is generally only worth an hour in class if you are below the blackbelt level. Try to find a school that fits you better; it shouldn't be a problem to find something assuming you don't live in say, Antarctica or Cold Bay. As an aside... don't stretch before class, it makes it easier to injure yourself. Do warmups before class. Stretch AFTER class.

Well, my skype id is justicezer0 - I tried adding s-8 a couple times, but it was never accepted. Dunno if it was ever even received, I had issues adding a professor a few months ago too. Not moved yet, plan to start hauling over the weekend.

Dare we ask if the guy passed his test after that?

I suppose that would depend on whether the broken board was disposed of in say a landfill where it would not decompose - and thus would continue to sequester its stored carbon reserves away. Plants take CO2 out of the atmosphere by growing, but once they grow, a lot of it is released again as they decay. It is only through growing plants and turning them into forms that fix the carbon away that the CO2 can be removed.

That's an elbow strike.. a "punch" is pretty much defined as striking with a closed hand, and an elbow does not use the hand.. All those are cutevelhada in my art, and anyone but me will look at you blankly if you say it. JKD is anything but standard and so saying something is "from JKD" is little better than "That one THING, you know, the one that goes pow!" in any case, to answer the question. It.. could be useful, yes.. but not so much because the technique is inherently super effective. Rather, it's because it is at a very close in range, which means that you are moving in close, probably closer than the rusher likes, and using techniques on them from there; this is completely unlike the response that the blitz is effective against, which is backing up fearfully to be pummeled by the aggressive blitzer at will. in short, it's a good technique to use if only for the fact that you are forcing the blitzer off book into a topic that they did not intend to cover. Of course, if you think "I'll do an elbow strike and win", you are sadly mistaken. Once you bring the topic into close range where elbows are meaningful, you're going to need to be able to hold up your end of the interaction. You'll need a whole selection of techniques.

I'm not familiar with it. Would it be similar to chopping, rising, or piercing cutevelhada forms, or is it a closed hand technique involving the receivers' elbow, or what?