JusticeZero

Yes, I have been and am saying that. I will also add that videos are all very surface level material, and almost never delve into the techniques in great depth. If you understand things well enough already, you can learn a lot. If you don't have that knowledge, it's just calisthenics.

I'm not saying that videos, internet, etc. aren't useful. They're good for giving you some breadth of knowledge. But there is no depth to them. It gives you more options to get your feet wet, but someone who is trying to learn and build their foundation is diving in, and a broad, shallow coating of water isn't going to serve them well at all.

A teacher can say "Wait, turn your foot or you'll tear up your knees". A video assumes you did it right. A teacher can say "You'll need to adjust your balance like so". A video can be played upside down. A teacher can help you work through the body dynamics to get maximum power out of your body frame. A video can't see what you're doing. A teacher can say "Well really the reason we keep our hand in this place that you're confused by is to deal with this counter here.." A video will never notice your confusion. A teacher can immerse you in the traditions and lore necessary to comport yourself among others in your art. A video, if you're lucky, will give you a misleading and vague travelogue that will make no sense to anyone who wasn't there. A teacher will tell you "That other teacher does it this other way because of reasons X and Y. We do THIS because of Z, which completely precludes us from X." A pile of videos will mongrelize your movement skills incoherently. None of the videos will explain the other videos. A video, even many videos, is not, and will never be, equivalent to one teacher. One hour with someone who understands the art decently well and can converse with you, ask questions, critique your movements, and physically make adjustments to your body position will do you more good than forty hours of instructional DVDs. And eighty hours of instructional DVD's is little better than forty hours. If all you have is videos, you do what you can. But if all you have is videos, maybe you should be asking someone else at the Antarctic base or in your remote third world village to work out with you. I spent time living in a somewhat rural part of Alaska, studying a pretty obscure art, and *I* was able to find someone who could teach me correctly. I had a small pile of instructional videos. Two hours with a guy who wasn't even an instructor - just a decently experienced student located in the nearest major city who I searched out and went looking for - and I ended up tossing most of them because I was beyond them. Those things are like saying that because you have someones' hastily scribbled shorthand outline notes that they use as a memory aid from a class, that you don't need to actually listen to the lecture.

The part I disagree with is the "no choice". There is almost always more options than the easy to see ones. If you can make a road trip to see a teacher on occasion, and make sure to get lots of feedback, you can drill on your own. You can get feedback from other teachers on body structure. You can find something locally available, even if it isn't the exact skill you dream of, and find that you actually get what you need. You can find that guy who doesn't have a shingle out, but is decently competent and has nobody to practice with. But just saying "I have YouTube, I don't need a teacher" is a recipe for disaster.

He was sent away Friday. The phrase "I told you so" was applied and universally agreed with.

Honestly, for what you've said, i'd check the Judo class. Everything MasterPain said above about checking out classes applies there, too. Kata isn't inherently good or bad. It's a training method. It was a great method for the context; in America it's probably only a pretty good one. You can get "pretty good" in a lot of ways.

Do you get people entering the field who have, until they are called to deal with their first patient, never laid hands on a human being outside of Grey's Anatomy or had any guidance from other doctors other than taped lectures? That's not the time to first discover the subtleties that need a teacher to be patiently looking over your shoulder to notice.

Things that I can think of that might make you nervous: Unconsciously seeing signs of behavior that you find threatening. This is generally good advice to follow from parts of your brain that aren't very good at verbalizing things. Just little things like "I can't actually come up with words because i'm the art part of my brain, but that guy is acting a bit like that 12 year old is his girlfriend and he's keeping it quiet, and it looked like he was flirting with our daughter.. we should get out of this creepshow now.." Listen to it. Subsonic vibration from some sort of mechanical muckup. This should be affecting everyone there. If it's just you, this isn't it. Some object or symbol found there resembles something you are highly afraid of. I would think you would have noticed this by now. You just happened to be sick in some miserable way the first time you were there. You'd probably notice this.

Which meant that you were tied up and unable to help keep your two mates out of trouble. Not an unreasonable response I know, but if your friend who got knocked down started getting punted like a football, what would you have done with the guy you were holding? It was a pretty good response, but if you came in throttling yourself back to only doing something gentle, that could have been easily used against you, and things could have gone very badly, very fast. An opening comes up to win the fight decisively, but you don't take it because you don't want to hurt him.. alas, you might not get another good opening for anything effective. Do people in the UK consider fighting to be a socially acceptable form of recreation or something? I regularly hear statements expressed from that part of the world which seem exceedingly bizarre; they conflict with the core fundamentals of what I train as regards the entire purpose and role of combat.

Plain and unadorned. I'd like a mirrored wall for purely utilitarian reasons, but beyond that, "clean with sufficient space" is fine.

Yes and this is true. But part of that is that you want to get better every time. A video doesn't give feedback. Especially if you don't have a solid foundational knowledge to work from, you can be training to do the techniques wrong and never know it until your doctor tells you that you're going to be using crutches for the next few weeks and whatever it was you were doing stop it, and even then not know how to fix it.

The last time I saw anyone trying to learn techniques from a video was a group of high schoolers and a PE teacher working through a cardio kickboxing tape. I'm honestly amazed that I didn't see anyone rubbing their knees afterward. If they'd have continued doing techniques like that for 30 minutes a day, they would all be confined to wheelchairs inside of two months. And the PE teacher blew me off when I said something. Without someone who knows the techniques well who can critique your technique and correct form mistakes, you can literally cripple yourself. Kicks especially can destroy your joints permanently if you use poor technique while you're training a lot of reps. And you can get horrific bad habits that then take more time to overcome later than if you just learned it right.

Big floor, stereo, instruments, high ceiling, hand targets, kicking shields, folding chairs, pool noodle (preferably wrapped around plastic pipe or similar to give it a little more stiffness), a couple of crash mats for certain exercises, tripod, video camera, push broom, dust mop, mirrored walls if possible, a mat to put up/hang against one section of wall.

Is it? Do you have a badge? Why is it your responsibility to hurl yourself toward danger that is directed somewhat ineptly at you when there's a door ten feet away?Seriously. Why is it your responsibility to attack a knife wielding threat who has already stated that their only target is you? Why can't you let the people with badges take care of this one? It just seems like fighting adds more chances for things to go wrong, with very little payoff, in a fair number of situations. This is the point that I think is important here. Just because we CAN bust out an action movie on an obvious threat doesn't make it spontaneously become a good idea by force of will if it wasn't already a good course of action.

Right. That said, the situation contains a lockable door less than 12 feet away for a reason. You have shoes. She has heels. She's stumbling at the edge of a pool of water. And yet, when I pose the situation, I note that more of the responses contain some variation of the words "I need to fight". than not. That's two out of three.

There are some really good gongfu people in the U.S. Some of them look chinese and some don't. There's no shortage of people who look more American than Bill Gates who have been to China and ended up concluding that they'd have a really hard time finding anyone there who knows more than they do in their particular field of expertise. One anecdote I heard once was about someone who went all the way overseas to train the "real Korean martial arts", and managed to find a McDojo in Korea. Came back with his arms hanging limply at his sides with a whole bunch of bad habits that they just couldnt get him to understand were bad habits because how could someone in the country it came from be wrong?

Right, I know. But the issue is that it seems like a lot of discussions pop up with this idea of "Well, she had a knife, therefore I get to use lethal force, and that's what my gun is for". Well really?

Okay, how about this piece of elaboration. You walk out of a house at night, in a residential neighborhood. You know that all the doors, save for the front, are locked and barred. You left the front door unlocked and slightly ajar, as you only stepped out to check the mail. For whatever reason, you have a handgun in a chest holster under your windbreaker, which is closed but not fastened. (If a gun nut must ask for details, we will claim it is a .45ACP M1911, but I doubt it really matters for practical purposes.) On your way back, from behind a parked car, someone steps out, steps into range more rapidly than you can react (not having seen, expected them there, or identified them as a threat until it was too late) and pushes you against a relatively impassable fence with a hedge growing against it. She produces a large cooking knife, held in the manner that one might use to cut food, and holds it to your neck. At this range, you can identify her as an individual that you had encountered earlier, who you saw distinct signs of being mentally unstable and narcissistic with a lack of ability to think of future consequences. You had encountered her at work, where she got upset at something strange, and security removed her. She tells you that she is going to kill you, because some bizarre consequence that could presumably be linked in some strange way to her getting thrown out had ruined her life and made it worthless. Her breath smells like alcohol. You can see that she is psyching herself up into a more adrenalized state, and that the grip on the knife is changing in a way that appears that they are preparing to cut. A siren goes past, but passes not going to you, and she looks away, moving the knife off line with you. She now has the back side of the blade facing you, held in her right hand; her right arm is over her chest and her head and attention is focused on looking to her left to identify the noise. At this point you note the following: She is somewhat unbalanced, tipsy and wearing heels for crying out loud, and standing on the edge of the sidewalk, with her feet perpendicular to you; she would have no way to avoid being pushed backward. Behind her is a puddle of water, which you know by familiarity has a treacherous and deep pothole at the bottom of it, which has caused more than a couple of people to trip and fall into before. Your right hand is in a fence position; by shifting your weight, you could shove her backward, causing her to fall backward into the puddle. Your right hand is also perfectly positioned to draw your handgun, though if you push them, it obviously won't be quite so well placed anymore. You are six steps away from the front door to the otherwise empty house, which is slightly ajar. The door will latch if pulled closed from the inside; it also has a deadbolt. There is a telephone inside. For that matter, you have a cell phone. What's the response? As noted, it seems as though a troublingly large number of people's first reaction would be to draw the pistol. Certainly a valid response, but is it the best?

Right. Pure grappling (eg BJJ)+pure striking (eg TKD, boxing, etc.) art is the absolute best combo in terms of avoiding confusion. No worry about confusion because one art is virtually mute about how to deal with responses in the circumstances that the other is best at, and vice versa. The only thing to watch for is that you will become aware of ways to change ranges to the range where you are not training in in a given venue.

Exactly a concern I have had about a lot of things I see. Someone threatens you with a knife and says that they are going to kill you. An opportunity arises that the threat is momentarily distracted, and you could extricate yourself safely from the situation with a gentle push and a short, slightly brisk walk. Do you: A: gently nudge the guy away and leave, or B: try to draw a pistol and shoot the threat, since you are permitted the use of deadly force in this situation? It seems like way too many people talk as though B is the best option.

I have never heard of wrist locks being described as "flashy". Indeed, they tend to be about as non-flashy of a movement as one can get; if a wrist lock is a "flashy" technique, then conservative technique choice leaves you with little more than standing mutely with spittle dripping from your lip. Are you familiar with some sort of exotic wrist locking techniques that I am not?

Looked more as though the mugger did something to make himself a non-threat for a moment. He had already in a minor way moved crime scenes, so that seems like a reasonable response.

There's actually another point that I saw in review. So.. do YOU know who lives close to you? That seems like they had about the best neighbor they could have hoped for in the situation. Does one of your neighbors not even have a phone and live alone in a wheelchair? Probably not the best person to go to for help. The one on the other side of you might be a doctor or something. KNOW WHO LIVES CLOSE BY. Also, if something does happen? IT MIGHT NOT BE TO YOU. You might be the one who finds themself being come to for help. Do you have a plan for how to intervene in someone else's emergency?

And we don't necessarily have that information. The common usage of "knocked out" seems to tend to be a pretty broad definition of pretty much anything that would keep someone down past a ten count. And you gave a couple of scenarios, which included responses that were relatively specific to your curriculum. Honestly, my first thought of how to respond to being given a hard shove from the front involves a low flexibility spinning roundhouse kick to the side of the neck, and it's a pretty basic response that isn't even especially combative.

There is also the issue of what tools a given art teaches to have available. Not everyone teaches to "pop them in the nose". Mine avoids punching range like the plague, because hanging out in punching range, in the context of where it was developed, is an open invitation to be stabbed by a blade you never knew they had until after you realized that your socks were getting really wet for some reason. "popping them in the nose" simply isn't a response that gets practiced. Dodging to the side, and using the momentum to power a spin kick might be a more probable response. If the attacker were to move in a way that put their head into such a kick, a knockout is actually not unlikely. We have a couple of takedown/throws, too. Ours tend to have a very high probability of slamming the attacker down in such a way that the back of their skull takes the brunt of the impact with the ground. There's also the more nasty form of the application of the head, which usually is closer to wrestling techniques, unless you then take the head that you stuck into the opponent's chest and jump upward into their chin while they're folded forward. So no, I don't think I would be astonished to discover that a knockout might happen in a scuffle. We don't monkey dance around, we learn to disable and run. Which is what I tried to communicate to the people I was teaching before - don't be there, failing that, run, failing that, disable and run, over or through threats if necessary. But that example isn't even unique. What if the kid is learning Judo or Aikido? The bully gives him trouble, and the kid throws him. The bully doesn't know how to breakfall and goes "splat" onto his back instead and spends the next few minutes trying to get his ability to breathe back. That can be an effective knockout, and the kid was using a "peaceful" technique. TKD? As noted, a head kick can be a knockout quite a bit more easily than a punch. Grappling? He choked the bully out? It is what it is, and i'm not about to punish some kid for defending himself as best he knew how and SUCCEEDING rather than getting into an ineffective social dominance slap fight.