JusticeZero

Unfortunately, criminals do not honor what the world SHOULD be like. You are not entitled to a fair world; the world doesn't operate on fairness. You are not entitled to a just world. The world is not just. You have to live with the consequences of your actions. Some of those "actions" include things like "I was born as a small female." You didn't ask for that you had no choice in that action, but it still has consequences. Many people will try to make things more fair, but that isn't because the world is fair, it's because they are being charitable. Not everyone is charitable like that. Another action is "I put girly froofy stuff on my car to advertise the fact that i'm a small female who is a great target". That has consequences; someone who does not care about how "fair" the world is can see it and decide that you would be a great target. They could take actions like tracking you down based on your car, cornering you somewhere, and attacking you with their severe size advantage. While that might (might!) have consequences for them, those consequences will not heal whatever damage they do to you first. "It's easier to protest women in fur coats than bikers in leather jackets". Criminals don't want a fair fight. They want an easy victim. They just want to punch a clock and get their abuse fix without making it a big fight that they could be days recovering from. Women are typically shorter, less muscular, lighter than men, so if you have to chose an easy target, you go after the one in the dress. Women often are psychologically unable to even attempt to fight back, so they're a very juicy target. Men are conditioned to see fighting as a positive thing, in various ways. Not an easy target. So, dragonwarrior_keltyr, I propose this as homework: Go out and wander around your daily routine for the next week, maybe altering it a bit, and for each day, plot how to beat someone into a bloody pulp in some fashion without any likely immediate consequences and without getting hurt yourself. Not hypothetical people, I mean actual real people that you see on your daily routine. Remember, you'll need time to do the deed, and you'll need to get away, and you need to actually be able to accomplish it without the tables being turned, so take that into account. Then come back here and describe the people you saw, why you chose them, exactly how you would set the encounter up, how you would victimize them, and how you'll get clear. Don't use your family. Not because that's unfair or anything, but because if I started writing up homework on this, everyone in my house would be first to go. (Why do you think that's where the highest risk is?) Then you can start thinking of ways to not be caught in those situations.

No, it sounds good to me.. The attitude that worries me is when these questions come up and people immediately plan to go on the attack, and start thinking only of how much damage they can do instead of how to, you know, protect and defend themself.

I would like to read this book, too. There are also some words in the book by Marc "Animal" MacYoung that leads me to believe his works would be worth looking into as well. I've read both of his books. Highly recommend both; i'd increase the recommendation a bit for an LEO, also, as he is in that field and some of the material seems to be more on topic for LEOs than say, MacYoung's vicious thug angle. Some of MacYoung's ideas are possibly not the best response for police to have to explain in a report later.

Because you might need your hands working later in that encounter. The damage might weaken your strikes. I might want to post off of my hands, and it's hard to do that with a broken 'foot'. If my finger isnt responsive, I can't keep it from being in the way for later strikes. Plus, if my hand hurts and is telling me it's broken, I just am not going to want to use it as an impact tool. Why should I use tactics that will make that happen more often?

The setup for a rount kick (martelo) for me is just walking, so fast or not it isn't that big a deal. It's useful for some things. I don't do a sidekick, so I can't comment on it. I don't train to fight. I train to break things that are stopping me from leaving. Big difference. The world isn't Tekken.

If you are worried about "how much can/should I hurt these guys", you are not thinking in terms of defending yourself and getting out of danger and to safety. You are thinking about offence, ie "How much can I hurt them before they put me down?" The goal is not to hurt them, the goal is to do what is needed to best prevent yourself from being hurt. There is a difference.

It sounds like the BB girl is the next teacher for the area, honestly. I can't tell whether or not Zaine is onto something. I have no problem doing drills with 4'5" women. 5'9" intentionally-helpless prissy gigglegirls, however, annoy the heck out of me to work with; they also annoy the heck out of the serious women in the classes. I believe I remember seeing several posts from some of the ladies here to that same effect. About the matter of disliking things because it isn't what you had imagined, this is also a problem that can go either way. You may have a legitimate grievance. Alternately, you might just be wrong. Have you spoken to that instructor about your goals? Do you HAVE goals? What ARE your goals?

What is your favorite blocking defensive technique? Just basic stance work. We don't block, but we keep guarded. What is your favorite attacking technique? Martelo do chao, a semi-inverted spinning shin kick from the floor. What is your favorite kicking technique? See above. What is your favorite "hand" technique (Tiger Claw, fist, back knuckle...) Palm heel push to the jaw. I am presuming 'favorite' as in 'preferred' rather than 'most often used'. I have other 'pawn' kicks that I am happy with. I also note you did not ask this: What is your favorite takedown? Cruz, as a response to a kick.

This comes up a lot.. came up recently in fact. The consensus seems to be that it's not the right question to ask, and that the very question makes you less able to defend yourself. "They're doing X and Y so therefore I need to put them in the hospital now" and you look for how to get that devastating attack in.. but you could have defended yourself with a gentle push and a short jog, if you hadn't been fixated on some esoteric "appropriate level of response".

It's not a matter of how difficult it is for the martial artist to do. It's a matter of how much the guy the martial artist is fighting messes up to make the flashy move feasible.

(reformatted for clarity, apologies)Karate doesn't make one stupid. Saying and believing stupid things makes one stupid. Especially when they are stupid things that the majority of karateka worldwide agree are ridiculous claims. Mind you, boxers, gung fu stylists, fencers, kendoka, aikidoka, judoka, wrestlers, etc. also say and believe a long list of silly things, varying from one person to the next. These things generally are just goofy things that one person got in their head and told to the small handful of other people who didn't know any better and were excessively credulous and thus don't realize that most everybody else thinks that they are completely off their rocker for not looking into these things more carefully before repeating it to everyone.

If you are not seeing your goals as an outcome that can come out of your training, and it sounds like what you feel a need for differs from what the school you have found teaches, then you need to find something that suits you better. Where in general are you? Some tiny town? If you are in high school, after high school you can go to college. Most of those are in places with a lot more to offer. You mentioned the people in your current judo class. You said that one of the students is a 10 year black belt. Probably she's going to take up the mantle of teaching once the senior teacher lets go of the reins. Talk to the teacher and the BB and express your concerns, tell them that you want to get better and have more challenge, and where you are now you want to get tossed around like a rag doll and push the envelope. They might have some ideas.

Yeah, i've heard of a few scraps which are ended with some wacky kicks. But the openings for which those techniques are the best safe response are a lot less common than more conservative techniques.

Let's look at this. For one thing, why is it going to end? If it's "the teacher is losing the space", but not "the teacher is moving/quitting" then what you are really saying is "There is a judo instructor, who is probably going to be setting up teaching in some other way soon". If you talk to the instructor you'll probably find that they still intend to teach, they just are trying to find a different building to teach out of. (I have a lot of respect for Judo, particularly when I hear complaints like you gave earlier; it's not kata-intensive, it's solidly effective, and they get a lot of hard contact against resisting opponents.) Second, you will note that I did not ask what you had found. I asked: How large, geographically and in terms of population density, of an area are you searching in and able to travel to? How did you do your search? Internet? Phone book? Asking people? Going door to door? How long and exhaustive of a search did you do? The reason I say this is because depending on what method I use to look for martial arts schools in my area, I get a completely different set of results depending on what method I use to look. And even then, when I go to a coffee shop, I usually discover classes being offered in something I was unaware of. If you search in lots of ways, you will probably find that there are a lot more people looking for students in your area than you thought. The town I was born in, population of less than 10,000, contained or neighbored last time I was there, BJJ, at least two different taiji, two other gungfu styles, a judo club, two different karate schools, a TKD school, and a boxing club. The phone book only showed karate and TKD. Internet showed the -other- karate school, the tkd, and one of the taiji classes. Everything else I stumbled across. It's very possible that I could have missed stuff. Start asking around and checking bulletin boards and looking up random arts' practitioner lists.

You say there are three schools in your area. How large an area is it, and how did you search, and for how long? I am always stumbling across martial art schools that I didn't see on previous searches. Always have. A big part of it is just a matter of taking varied routes to everywhere, keeping your eyes on the scenery, looking at every bulletin board you come across. Which are all things you should get in the habit of doing anyways, because it will help you be safer and richer.

I hesitate to put a number or anything like that on it.. Related question: Someone trains for a year, how strong will they be at the end of the year? And I can't tell you if they started their training as a 90 pound, 4 foot tall woman, a football linebacker looking to crosstrain, or a 400 pound couch potato trying to lose weight. Obviously you can't put a good answer on it, because the people involved are so very different. Plus, "confidence" is not exactly an easily quantifiable trait. Finally, it isn't entirely a meaningful trait. Either you have it, or you don't, or you have too much of it and will probably annoy people until you finally are brought down in a spectacular, hubris-driven epic fail. And all three are still able to perform just fine. They still come in and watch their performance and see lots of things they need to work on. The only change is that the peers that are at their level are much more rarified.

Oh, and here's some . Doesn't get much more European than this. These folks don't even need a lot of impact conditioning, since they had the sense to realize that they could let their clothing take the impact conditioning for them, and so they don't burn out fast like the Thai.

If you compare savate and boxing, they will move very differently, too. So will a wrestler. A TKD stylist moves very much differently than a TJQ stylist or a XYQ stylist. The TKD person probably moves more like the Savateuse than they do a baguazhuang practitioner. And they all look nothing like how a judoka moves. Here, have a . No footwork, since "make them move" is the point, but how very foreign and Eastern they look in their T-shirts.

Hmm. You say that Muay Thai - an art that is from the middle of Asia, full of Asian flavor and ideas, and dripping with mystic ritual things that mostly make sense only in Thailand (and probably mostly only in Thailand when it originally became popular, too) - is a WESTERN martial art. That's probably because most people, when they think of Muay Thai, think of where they've seen it - "Oh hey, that's that art that UFC guys cross-train in to learn how to kick people in the shins." You are thinking "Oh, HERE if we want to get good, we have to work out a lot and practice, and then when we get old we just can't fight as well. But if I were to go visit this faraway place, they just keep getting better and better and they do all these magic things.."(1) If you go there, and talk to the people who do those foreign arts long enough, they would confide in you that the weakness of their art is something that is suspiciously close to "HERE if we want to get good, we have to work out a lot and practice, and then when we get old we just can't fight as well. But if I were to go visit somewhere like where you're from, they just keep getting better and better and they do all these magic things.." NOBODY just 'keeps getting better and better', NOBODY is doing crazy magic things, it's all tall tales that people believe because 'those insert_signifier_here people are just different from you and me' and they're far enough away that most people can't easily check to see if it's true. The whole idea was wrong from the beginning. We're all just people. We're all coming up with stuff. It's more or less the same stuff; there's local and stylistic differences that changes up the tactics, but it uses all the same principles and ideas and physics and limitations. 1: That's what Trouillot referred to as the idea of "the Savage Slot", by the way. "Othering" a group, and trying to accentuate the foreign-ness at the cost of the sameness. This is the same basic principle that brought us things like "Gulliver's Travels", or in a more tragic sense, "The Trail of Tears". "Those foreigners are alien, and awesome, and not bound by human limits the way we are." I assure you, it's not true.

I wasn't being at all philosophical, I thought. It was a rather direct question. While I understand the basic point, the fact of the matter is that the division is an illusion. The fact that you are considering an art from the heart of Asia to be "western" essentially because of what context you typically see it in should raise red flags about the classification system itself. In point of fact though, once you push past the pop mysticism that people ascribe to the foreign, we invariably find that the same principles apply universally everywhere. We also find that the way people think of their art tends to be the same from one place to another as well. There are a lot of fantastic traits that people in one place ascribe to arts from another place, and if you talk to people in that other place, those fantastic traits are ascribed to arts from the place you just came from. And the thing that you end up realizing is that those fantastic things aren't anywhere, it's like chasing a rainbow, it always looks like it's somewhere else, but it actually isn't anywhere at all, it is an illusion.

OK, look. Here's the thing. You want to know the difference between Eastern martial arts and Western martial arts. Here's the only difference. Eastern martial arts were created by Asians, with the training arranged around the lifestyle and culture of Asia (or at least the parts that the creators were from). Western martial arts were created by Caucasians, with the training arranged around the lifestyle and culture of Europe and formerly-British-empire regions (or at least the parts that the creators were from). That really is the only difference. If you go to Asia, it is the foreign arts such as Boxing, Wrestling, and the like which are surrounded by mystique and mysticism and oohs and ahhs. If you can find a third vantage point, this is even more apparent. What are your thoughts on ancient African martial artists? Or ancient South American indigenous martial skills? How about martial arts from the Pacific Islands? What about traditional stuff from the Middle East?

You can ALWAYS do weight lifting. There are 90 year olds who do weight lifting. It's one of the best exercizes they can do. But that doesn't mean that they can go toe to toe with a 20 year old with skill and physique. The 20 year old heals a lot faster, and can as a result maintain a much higher level of fitness. Three parts of skill might be able to beat one part of fitness and one part of skill. But three parts of skill is not going to fare well against two parts of skill and three parts of fitness. Even four parts of skill aren't going to do well against that.

Also: While elder eastern GM's skill may be legendary, in open competition with their juniors they start getting trounced after a certain point, no matter how foreign they might be. The same is true of western MA. Western MA tend to focus on hard competition as a measure of skill; eastern tends to emphasize pure skill and knowledge more. In both cases, the 80 year old master, be it of baguazhang, taekwondo, or golden gloves boxing, has the skill and knowledge to flatten the unskilled in any case.

http://www.karateforums.com/tkd-rant-vt41431.html

Teach them to think like a criminal and how they will size things up, then have them wander around the neighborhood casing people and places up for rapes and burglaries and muggings and crimes of opportunity. Teach them a few cheap and easy ways to alarm their house and person. Teach them to run TOWARD people instead of just running away from threats. Teach them the advantages and disadvantages of various self defense equipment people carry. Teach them to savagely kill anyone who tries to move them to a secondary location. (You don't need to teach how to actually kill, just that that is the most gentle and meek level of response that they can have to such a situation, and that if they had access to WMDs, that would be an appropriate time to use them.)