JusticeZero

An "elbow punch"?

Which definition of "proof" are you using here, and in which journal are you cited in? As a scientist, that sentence parses in exactly the same manner that the phrase "no-touch KO" might to a boxer.

Walls can only help structure insofar as you slowly extend the punch into the wall and try to push the wall down to see where your structure is weakest. A makiwara is better suited for it. Punching bags are a more appropriate target to practice throwing punches into at speed. There are a lot of fiddly details about legs and hips and spine involved in punching, these vary from one art to another for various intercompatibility reasons and so your teacher is best to explain them. Then, you get better at punching by practicing the form of the punch until it all becomes internalized and natural, while strengthening your structure of your hand and wrist to be able to support the forces of the punch.

Which doesn't really matter THAT much in the end.. the only thing soldiers really need to train well with these days is the one-finger pull anyways, and we live in one of the safest places on earth in the safest time period in human history.

This is "not making a big deal" how?

We aren't because we can't do things with the light intensity that is appropriate for standard sparring. The mechanics of wringing circular kicks mean that they take a long distance to accelerate or decelerate. Acceleration can happen before the foot starts to move, but slowing down is hard. You can pop them out very quickly without too much trouble and they will have very large amounts of force in them, that you are going to keep thanks to conservation of momentum. But if you need to hit someone at say 30% power, it will slow it down to a painful crawl. So if we toss a kick at a lower level of power, it moves very slowly. If we don't, if we hit something like a floating rib (a common target), we could break it. We might even be tiring ourself out more than usual because we have to hold our leg up while it moves, and we aren't getting back as much energy either. Then, the other guy uses techniques with a decayed structure and linear techniques that can be done just as fast powerlessly as with power. He flicks his hand at us three or four times in that extra window of time while the kick drifts. Then he sneers at us, and says "See, your style doesn't work." If we try limiting ourself to techniques we can spar with, we lose most of our breakpoints and ability to flow, and we end up looking like we aren't even using our art, so we're still way behind and still get "Pff, you aren't using your style, your style doesnt work." It's really just a waste of our time to even try. We welcome people in the roda who are within the same overarching art of capoeira, of course. The whole art is open source like that. but our format works for and is built mutually around the structural quirks of the art.

Yeah... have you ever been hit by a noob without a glove? "risk of injury" was something that I couldn't really associate with the experience. It doesn't seem kosher to me. That said, for one, the location given by the OP is outside of the U.S. - different sort of cultural norms in this regard are probable. Second, all of the things that seem to make it a really bad idea seem like they tend to cancel out to me. I'm not sure if it was idiocy or brilliance or somewhere in between, so i'm just going to say "..I wouldn't have done it that way, I don't know anyone else who would do it like that, and I don't know what the guy was thinking having you do that, but here's some ideas on how to help with your question."

I give people the benefit of the doubt a lot. Not only do I go o.O at a lot of things that I see in schools that are considered "normal", but I also do things that make people go o.O or O.o from other schools. Usually not the same things from person to person. I have no idea what that teacher was thinking, but I won't instantly conclude that the teacher wasn't thinking. I don't even know that I have an accurate account using accepted terminology.

Realizing that this was posted quite some time ago, has anyone been doing anything with it since? Are there any thoughts on what is needed? Any not-immediately-obvious issues with camera coverage, microphones, speakers, and suchlike? In a few days, i'm moving to a new apartment, which includes a secluded stone pad out front big enough to train on.

Last time I was sent a summons, I was excused on account of the fact that I lived eight thousand miles from the courthouse.

Honestly, I try to get people to classify everything as "footwork", since you preferably shouldn't have much of anything that isn't welded together in some way. It's a goal to get people to shortcut to where they don't blink at thinking of an advancing spin kick as a defense, or crouching into an x-block then stepping to the side as an attack.

Each hit degrades your ability to act. If you have the ability to harden your chest in some way so that the strikes aren't particularly effective, then it can be thought of as a "block". Still, you shouldn't get into the mindset of thinking that you are going to intentionally "tank" like a computer game warrior. "I'll let him stab me with his knife a few times until he's worn out, then.." First priority is probably to keep a solid defense and stay calm under fire, try to slip a few clean attacks through without losing form if you can. Teaching your brain that having someone swinging at you isn't the end of the world, and that you can relax into it, is important. Then you can start building up ways of responding. Can't speak to how early the sparring is, because schools and styles vary. I'm pretty sure Evergrey's school's idea of what a new student should be experiencing is a lot different than someone from a forms-centric school for instance.

It's not -always- great. It really dampened my progress when I was doing it to, for example, spend an hour of a ninety minute training session having a teacher try to get my back foot to turn out, then go to another class and have the teacher spend an hour of a ninety minute class trying to get my foot to turn in three times a week for two years.

Yep. I had a jogo that was several minutes long last seminar, for which I had people coming to admire how amazingly both I and the other fellow I was in the circle with were moving. I can't remember more than one or two highlights of the whole match. Just keep self-evaluating and building up the tools that best work into the tactics and doctrine that works best for you. And read my sig for goshsakes. It's really important to understand here, and I have to tell it to students all the time.

in your katas you'll note that as you do stance transitions you move around. Practicing moving in those transitions until you can move pretty much at will, then try shifting to the side in a transition and simultaneously loading a strike at the place you left. That's probably not the perfect technique, but you want to internalize the idea of sidestepping or stepping around the attacker, while attacking back the way you came without losing form and structure.

Well yeah, hence "as part of an attack".. If EVERYONE is bigger than you and has longer reach, then you may want to focus a lot more of your training time on techniques that operate close in, or alternately on limb destruction, or something else specifically to counter "everyone has longer arms than me".

No, but it's just a Linux distribution with a lot of browser integration, as I recall.

Then don't waste your time on them. Obsessing over and making a big production about some deluded fool who will never darken your doorstep again in any case because anyone deluded like that is allergic to the effort that is obvious in the class seems to me to be making time for them.

Forgiveness isn't for THEM. It's for you because you are stuck in an egoistic hatefest that's just hurting you more.

Better form (someone who can actually see how you move would be of more help), whatever helps you carry out your tactics best, there is no such thing as "fully guarded", by sparring more.

Don't "shift back" as a defense. Ever. Full stop. The only reason to move backward is as part of an attack, or in some freakish situation where you are standing on top of an environmental hazard. (The attack can be an extension of a momentary shift back that has a side effect of defense.) Treat the edges of the mat as if there were rusty spinning saw blades outside of it or something. Every time I see people run out of mat in sparring or competition, I feel embarrassed for them, since the mats are generally so big. If they're in a space that's only ten to fifteen feet from edge to edge, I can see being driven to the edge. I've jogoed in a space 9 feet in diameter, and it's hard to stay off the edges while lining up for kicks in that size of space. However, if they're in a space twenty-something, thirtysomething or even more feet across it's just sad; it's a bit like seeing people bouncing around with their hands dangling at their side get popped in the face, over and over and over again. A lot of those competition mats are unfathomably large areas. You have to work pretty hard to get all the way out to the edge on those. Anyone moving forward like that is counting on the person they're in the space with moving backward like a raw white belt. You have about a hundred eighty degrees of good directions to move in, and backward isn't one of them. Shift and tag them on their off angles until they have to start dialoguing with you instead of just acting like a bogeyman and chasing you around.

Honestly, I think you might be taking it too personally. Lots of people have a variety of dumb issues, internal or external. Either the guy has 9 years of wasting their time at a very bad school under a fraud, or they're basically a stupid teenager babbling stupid drama stories even if they've got white hair and wrinkles. I've dealt with the guys who my teenager hung out around. Probably one in three of them had skills and lives straight out of bad fanfiction, according to their ridiculous and incoherent stories. Honestly, probably one in three people I dealt with in high school claimed fantastical martial or magical powers. As far as I know, all of them grew out of it eventually, though I have had to listen to a couple of middle aged people randomly explaining the depths of their telekinetic powers or their background as a Secret Service superspy before. If the former they might be a good student, and the situation will probably work itself quickly out as they realize on their own that "wow, my 9 year black belt isn't worth the cloth it's dyed in.." and shut up about the former school. If the latter, they will most likely never come to a second class anyways, after discovering that there is actual work involved and that nobody cares who they are. They'll probably come up with some ridiculous personal narrative that makes them the hero and which makes less sense than a fever dream regardless of anything you do, and again the situation works itself out on it's own. If they come to a second class while spouting about their awesome Tibetan Jujutsu Skills then every other student in the class is going to raise an eyebrow having seen how foolish they look anyways. taking the guy aside at this point is pretty much a mercy - "dude, nobody cares about whatever you did before, and it just makes you look ridiculous. Here's a white belt. Work hard, be honest with people and get some skills and we'll put some colors on it the old fashioned way."

About the only thing i've had issues with in Linux is running popular windows games (usually) and getting specific proprietary programs to work. I can almost always locate a free program to do the same thing, but the directions for how to use it are different and so the other people i'm working with don't know how to get it to do things I know it is able to do that I am trying to learn how to perform. Plus, nowadays it's as user-friendly as Windows is. (sometimes less, sometimes more.) So it's perfect for resurrecting an old computer that someone else has trashed and moved on from for free.

Right. And when you need to instruct you have to realize that one of your students might use a different three or four techniques.

Exactly. There is one technique that my previous main instructor rarely does. To them, it's a difficult "flashy" technique that has little application; they teach it as a show-off movement and aren't comfortable with using it. For me, it's one of my bread and butter movement techniques; it just works a lot better for my body structure, and i'm much more comfortable with using it. I was on the phone just the other day giving him tips on how the movement worked so that he could teach it better to one of his students who seems to use similar movements to me.