JusticeZero

Well, beyond the fact that i'm not so sure that barefooted is very traditional? Beyond the fact that in some places, people were usually barefooted, back in the day. Widespread use of shoes is relatively recent; they used to be an upper class thing. For us, taking shoes off was one of the things that was used to break with tradition and make the art sanitized, 'modern', and harmless.

If you can't practice your kicks in shoes on rough asphalt, your ability to kick is dubious at best. I normally practice all my kicks on bare concrete while wearing boots.

I'm trying to picture that, but alas i'm still hazy on what position you are going down into to figure out where you are coming up from or to.. Might be because different people define flexibility a bit differently, depending on their needs, which vary. What types and directions of flexibility are you looking for, and what exercises are you using so far? Maybe we can offer you some tips or stretches you haven't tried yet.

What do you mean by "stiff"?

They're just a way to do the stretches. Do gentle kick-stretching in the mornings and before class. Don't do static stretches before class. Do static stretches after class/exercise. Stretch every day and the flexibility will come fast.

Well, try them all out. You might be surprised.

As a practitioner of an art that has nearly as much of a focus on kicking as TKD, and which teaches not to retreat, I disagree. There are much better directions to go, yes, for someone who uses range, and lots of bad, bad things that can happen to you in that direction. That said, that discussion is being shifted to http://www.karateforums.com/going-backwards-vt42578.html, which starts by quoting my response above.

Yes, and that is one of the reasons I mentioned wrestling; most schools in the U.S. from years 6-12 have wrestling as one of their competitive sports programs; wrestling is a respectable martial arts background and one of the foundational skills highly regarded by many MMA types. I don't know what they do in Portugal in that regard.

Get some of the white belts from your class. Go outside into some unprepared area with obstacles and curbs and rocks and things. Make a circle of people, preferably two or three layers thick and crowded together, about five meters across, in a reasonably clear patch. Now get in the middle of it and spar for several minutes without stopping without crashing into anyone or tripping over a trash can or rock or curb. See if you can pull it off while running backwards all the time, in particular. The world does not consist of big flat featureless dance floors everywhere. Much like you can't just go blindly throwing attacks without any concept of targets or intervening defenses, if you want to move you need to be able to plan that movement out. Unless you look away, you can't get any information about that space, and it's no different from blindly flinging a telegraphic attack with no idea of what might be at the other end. If you would agree that closing your eyes, looking away, and throwing a haymaker at an aikidoka might not be the height of tactical genius, you can see how blindly running backward might be a bad idea.

Keep us up to date on what resources you find. Boxing or competitive wrestling are usually pretty easy to find, build good base skills, and have a lot of live training that you crave by definition, so if the selection is sparse in your area start with that.

I dunno, I figure that if I can't beat it, I can either make it socially expensive to attack me, or I can act to gain favor with its enemies.

I have no problem with creating distance. I have a problem with doing it by retreating backwards. Going forwards at an angle that places you in a different place that is further from your opponent is a tactic I use all the time, as is adjusting my base foot/post slightly backwards in order to use an attack at the correct range. There are several techniques that start by shifting the torso onto the back foot to outrange an attack; these lead into attacks and do not involve a retreat of the feet.

er.... why would you ever jump backward after an attack?!? Last time I had a class I was making students do pushups every time I saw them go backward to defend. That's the one direction that's always going to make things worse for you on the whole. Jump? Makes you vulnerable to footing and offbalancing, backwards? is the direction you were trying not to go in the first place, you can't see that way, and you're ceding good space for bad doing it. So jumping backwards means you're going to get dropped on your face, or you're going to get stuck in a corner and mercilessly clobbered, or walked off the side of a curb or something. Which will probably continue with you being mercilessly pummeled, if the environmental hazard doesn't pwn you first. A counter attack, especially if you can discern or manipulate what kind of counter it will be, is a gift. Stay close and dismantle it. If you must move after attacking, do it with a step, and go somewhere in your front 180 degree arc, perpendicular at most.

Scream like a little girl and whimper helplessly while cringing, so to make the overwhelming force look like a dangerous bully? Do some awesome looking movements to make it look like you actually could almost stand up to it and were oh so brave to try?

Bruce also tended to have trouble with the idea that "no style" can often mean "no foundation". By most accounts, he was the sort of student that I wouldn't want to have in a class.

I'm not seeing it either. Given that you are going to have to spend time in bunkai for each link in the kata, if you just worked bunkai of random linked movements outside of kata, you would get a similar effect - you would lose the time spent memorizing the ritual, but lose the ritual itself. That said, I don't think people in America have their life or psyche structured in a way that possessing the ritual is actually useful. So it's just a block of memorization to restrict your linking movements study to a certain serial chain.

I use the Portuguese names of our kicks so we can isolate the mechanics of them linguistically as distinct from whatever people might have learned in TKD/Karate/Kungfu/Soccer/Taebo/Whatever.

I dunno, getting beat up and not actually stopping for it is pretty darned useful to be practiced at.

Familiar with the concept but there are a few variants and so it's difficult to operationalize. I'm going to guess - based on thread location - that the reference is to some variant of people in costume running around a battle scenario tagging people out with weaponized pool noodles made to look like melee weapons. I don't, i've tried it but it was severely unrealistic. The SCA stuff with rattan bludgeoning weapons looked to be a bit better (though still very style-specific) until people apparently started ignoring hits and making the style have to focus on causing injuries through armor.

Basic flexibility, lower body strength, enough conditioning to do breakfalls on rough concrete, hand and wrist strength such as knuckle pushups and crumpling strength - make a fist and open your hand fully, 200x, as quickly as possible for that one.

Theory. Discuss theory, positioning, and tactics for the entire hour.

Yeah, that looks like an excessive number of reps to me. That means that you will have to pace yourself more, which means less effort on individual exercises, which is counterproductive. Also you will be doing a lot of those exercises tired, which means you might be more likely to make mistakes that might be hard on your injuries.

So keep studying Karate. Study the history of your art and lineage, study the history of the country in which it originated, study anatomy, study first aid, study disaster response, but study something.

(accidental double post)

Looking at statistics seems like it is potentially a very bad start. One can imagine a 6'4" male football jock seeking to enter a military career researching common self defense scenarios and concluding that he needs to learn how to fend off a date rape attack by a larger assailant, as that is a statistically common scenario. Best to first start by modeling your life and your area and trying to find what threats might be drawn to attack you and why, then minimizing the attractiveness of your home as a target. Only after you have minimized your home as a good target for crime, AND worked out whether there are any threats that might specifically target YOUR home in particular, should you start worrying about how to fight to protect it. I would also urge that self defense often starts by taking the "self" assumption out. Most people live in a neighborhood. As much as people say they want that whole neighborhood feel, people seem to have forgotten how to DO it. It starts by walking around near your home and saying hello to your neighbors and asking them about themself and their interests. In the examples I see of these things, people gloss over the fact the good endings tend to start with the attention of the neighbors being drawn somehow.