JusticeZero

Good to hear from you! Hope to read more from you soon.

Evil people are horrible. This sort of thing is really hard on friends and family, too. When the whole family is unitedly saying "Get rid of that abusive lunatic please!" and the answer is always to defend the abuser, then saddle them all with the fallout of the latest bit of abuse, eventually doors start closing and bridges are torched.

No, because the standard headbutt is in my list of "things that only sound good to people who haven't thought it through". Impact head butts on hard targets - like a skull - have the disadvantage that they clobber two people for the price of one.

I hear this a lot.. My understanding of the translation of the term is that the word being translated into "ultimate" is not so much "maximum; decisive; conclusive: the ultimate authority; the ultimate weapon", but rather either "basic; fundamental; representing a limit beyond which further progress, as in investigation or analysis, is impossible: the ultimate particle; ultimate principles" or "last; furthest or farthest; ending a process or series: the ultimate point in a journey; the ultimate style in hats." (from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ultimate) - either "The most fundamental i've been able to break it down to" or "the tips of a pole" instead of "best".

Don't know. Some people in my art have had a similar issue. It doesn't show up in the kicks as we use the shin, but the ability to have the toes bend back is a necessity for some of our stances where we sit on our heel with our weight on the ball of our foot. Squat down until you can unload your legs with a structural connection to the floor, knees more or less together. Slowly push your hips forward, which will bring your knees toward the floor. You don't need to get your knees all the way to the floor, but you want to get your lap to slope away from you at the least. Don't try to do anything in particular with your toes, just keep your weight over the ball of your feet. If you can do this without mucking up your toes, you have enough flexibility; if it's problematic, then do that as a stretch. (Negativa works better, but that would be harder to communicate, and probably require me to physically show you the stance and application.)

If it is self-DEFENSE, do not start with the idea that the best response is to ATTACK. It may be, but that is by no means a foregone conclusion.

There are some different tactics to the art as played for enjoyment and the art as delivered for combat. While the first should be generally useful for the second, some things from the second are not useful for the first, and this necessitates special tagging of some techniques.

Probably; i've always commented that ranges make no sense. For instance, to see if we are in range to kick someone, we can shake hands casually. That indicates a rather close conversational range, one which can be closed by the structure of a technique itself. Some techniques have different ranges than other techniques. Two kicks may not have the same range, and some punches might have longer ranges than some kicks.

We mostly think of it as a possibility to get knifed in the back.

Because relative to me, very few arts do NOT feature a vertical spinal position.

Right, it seems like they would be standard movement drills.. but I don't know that they are, or that the 'standard drills' are pulled out in enough quantity to be very useful. My commentary on the "boxing shuffle" persists because it has what I, coming from a mobility based art, consider "mediocre mobility", yet is regularly considered the ultimate in martial mobility. Sure, boxers can move, but so can everybody, right? The main thing that's remarkable about the boxing shuffle is that they move while remaining in a single rigid static stance that isn't even the one that other martial artists use. Most of the things that we do for mobility actually have unassembled analogues in other arts, so the rationale for that amazement confuses me a bit. It seems as though boxing shuffle mobility should be reasonably unremarkable, if other artists were more accustomed to moving around. How hard can it be to step? In any case. If tai sabaki is "body", not "foot", which seems like an odd dichotomy for an art that asks for the spine to remain vertical to contain, then I have to admit to being somewhat hazy on what it is supposed to be. When I google "tai sabaki", I get footwork charts. That's stepping through stance transitions.

I do find it frustrating, because it's not just men doing it. It's also women doing this to themselves. It's very difficult to try to push a feminist point over the objections of women against it. I never know what the rules are going to be. If I try to be equal and push, I could be getting in trouble for it. It's confusing, it's unfair, it's crazy-making for the men, and serious women like you are suffering for it.

If someone tries doing it, if they could reflect on how it went, i'd be curious to know. While this material is standard stuff for us, we aren't even ALLOWED to stand in a static posture, and our stances are different. Still, I saw some taiji stuff on a video once where people were absolutely blown away by the idea that they could just use their stance transitions to take a step, instead of changing into some boxing shuffle. I suspect that people just don't.. DO that for some reason, which is probably some variant of "It just never occurred to me". I end up giving the advice that I gave in that longer post all the time, and i've yet to hear any feedback on it from the Asian martial artists, that I can remember seeing. I don't know if it's an existing training method, or if there are some things to pay attention to that I don't have the language or knowledge to express, or what.

Dynamic stretches to gain flexibility, and static stretches during cooldown to set it; however, doing "warmup stretches" before training actually increases the risk of injury during training. Save stretching for the end of class, if it's part of class. Warmups aren't stretching, and are important to prevent injury from cold joints and tissue. The reason I say 'dynamic stretches to warm up' is because this advice is separate from martial arts technique training. I'm talking about getting up, doing things like soft stretch kicking until your range of motion increases to its limits, then cooling down with some static stretches, then getting on with the rest of your day. If you have other exercizes, do them first.

Daily dynamic flexibility exercizes as a warmup, followed by gentle static stretches as a cooldown, none to the point of pain.

Ball of the foot. The heel is high in the air a substantial portion of the time anyways. Plus it isn't a very functional part of the foot to begin with. Heel-toe walking is an un-natural adaptation to people wearing half an inch of high impact foam rubber under their heels all the time. Learn to jog or hike barefoot - you need a different technique than with heavy shoes, which most people have trained away, and heel-striking will put you in the hospital with knee problems rather quickly. Barefoot movement is natural by definition.

Tai sabaki is, essentially, using footwork, yes? I'm not a karateka, but the art I do is based primarily on movement/footwork. Go through all your kata and find all of the transitional stance changes that involve stepping. Now start chaining them together so that you can move across the training hall using only those transitions. Go through all of them, mirroring and adjusting to move around the space with each one. Go forwards, yes. Then go sideways to cover the whole distance staying directed at the side of the room. Both left and right. Get to the point where you're able to race across the distance naturally. Maybe from one end of a football field to the other for each, say; you want chaining transitional steps to cover ground to be natural and second nature. Don't do anything that isn't starting and ending in a stance and staying at the same level, guarded, all the way through. Now take a folding chair and circle completely around it in transitions, staying guarded against the chair as if it were an attacker. Reverse and circle the opposite direction. Work through all your transitional steps, even attempting the ones that don't immediately seem useful - sometimes an easy adjustment can cover space. Don't show your back or the space behind your lead leg. Now do the same exercize, but use a VARIETY of steps. Don't repeat yourself or let yourself use a pattern. Use every movement you've got all at once in a chaotic riot of stance transitions and variations. Pay attention to your distance from the chair. Now start chaining them together to wander around a space filled with obstacles. Take some folding chairs or traffic cones and put them in a very ragged line or large circle. Weave around them; as you pass one, the next becomes your enemy. Don't show your enemy your back! Don't step on the other 'defeated' 'enemies'. But use the transitions that you pulled from kata and training to weave and shuffle your way around the space. Cover the space quickly, but with solid form. Make sure you have a solid defense aimed directly at each one of your 'opponents' at all times. Are some of your techniques linked to, or usable as part of, a step? Drill, but this time, if you do a kick, don't put your foot down in the same place as you started. Mix every movement with a step. Now shadowbox circling around the chairs like this. Now do the same thing, but with your blocks. Even changes that don't seem to move much can be useful if your weight shift can be used to slide your foot into a new position. Once you don't have to think too hard to do these, go back to class. Spar. Instead of just focusing on beating your opponent, you'll be scoring differently. Focus on not being beat too badly, yes. Block out a small, possibly irregular 'ring' in which the spar will happen. If you go outside of the space you're working in, you will lose a point. When you start, look at the space directly under and behind your opponent. That space is worth a point. Once you're standing over it, wherever they're at now or directly behind it is worth a point. You may not simply push them out of the way; you have to make them retreat or just move past them. Now see how high a score you can rack up. Once it is second nature to be able to move wherever you want, whenever you want, your ability to simply move in response to events such as an attack is just a minor detail of seeing an application of it.

Some people don't give a rats' tail about crazy fictions that don't make sense under investigation. Strange and implausible tales passed on from teacher to student unchallenged are in the same category as the Tooth Fairy, which I don't believe in and see no merit in. The main difference is that most people realize that the Tooth Fairy isn't a real thing early on.

Yes, but that seems like it would be an adaptation to the existing "belt colors" story, rather than a weird quirk that evolved into a ranking system. That is, I doubt that anyone started not-washing belts until after they heard it claimed that the color belt system was meant to signify accumulated dirt from experience. Otherwise, why would they stop at only wearing a BELT that was moldy and grimy and stained and smelly? Wouldn't they more likely wear an entire UNIFORM that smelled bad and was covered in grime and yuck? Then you would have rather than a belt system, a system of buying different colored full uniforms at each level, and a tradition of never washing the uniform, and a training hall scented heavily with deodorant. The claim that it was created so that the founders of Judo would not accidentally hospitalize beginning students at their students' and grandstudents' classes seems to be much more plausible from a pragmatic point of view.

I would think that if your belt got dirty, you would, out of respect and the desire not to look like a hobo, WASH it. Or maybe get a new one if it got too ratty.

I don't know that it has *outlived it's usefulness* per se - but I do think that people focus on them far too much. It's a training methodology that works best in certain contexts that no longer exist. Furthermore people have too many forms these days to make sense in the way they were being used in ANYWAYS. Once upon a time, you could drill people on a form and use the unity of movement to pick out things to correct quickly in students, then leave them to self-train with the form for awhile to keep honing their skills. They could work through the form while the instructor was unavailable, delve deeply into the structure of the form, and use focused teaching time to adjust the form. Nowadays, people have more access to instruction, and don't put in the time on any given form to keep it useful as a self-training method - they have a few gazillion forms to spread their time around, instead, and so the form becomes trivia. Similar to how I don't recommend intense fist hardening; once upon a time fights were more common and it might be useful to turn your hand into a weapon. Today, everyone aspires to desk jobs. Turning your hand into a numbed, somewhat deformed block of bone might not be a big deal to a laborer, but it is not a benefit to an accountant or author. You should keep the information, certainly, but some of these things have more business being in the 'archives' category than the 'major training technique' category. Someday you might find a student whose life is odd enough that those old methods actually DO make sense for them. I did see a form I liked once, that seemed a bit more useful than most; it was a moderately complex Taiji form where the footwork was arranged to fit on a square one step across in each direction, with attacks and extensions directed inward, for purposes of being able to drill the form in a small space like a tiny apartment. In this case, the form was designed specifically so that it could be drilled in a confined area in private, to facilitate easier home training. This to me seems like the BEST use for a form in modern society. I suspect that most Karate forms are quite a bit more expansive than that, however.

What I recall hearing was that it was started from judo so that a visiting instructor would know who they could throw hard and who was new and had to be treated gently. There are some explanations for colors, but they really just seem like they were come up with arbitrarily to me.

Plus, it's not clear that an attempt is being made to *become* a Goju stylist so much as to get some new material and ideas to build on their existing base of skill.

Leg and foot is the last thing to move, and it's dragged by tension and structure.