JusticeZero

Well, what's close by; if you feel comfortable, what general area are you looking in; and what sort of price range do you have?

Any thoughts on the advice in the thread?

http://www.adn.com/2011/12/01/2198513/army-lieutenant-charged-in-girdwood.html Various things to take out of this story. First up: What's the response time for police in your area in a bad case? Do you have some way to keep a threat subdued that long? Do you have some plan to keep them restrained in such a way that, for instance, leaves you free to do first aid on yourself? During chaotic situations, things get broken or knocked over. How prepared are you to deal with these? In CERT we were urged to keep hard-soled shoes covered and under our bed, so that breaking windows would not fill the shoes with glass, and so the shoes would be available directly out of bed without searching around a hazard-filled room. Slip-on would be best for this. While it may seem obvious to people, the full gravity of the fact that threats are often simply not acting in any rational or comprehensible way doesn't always seem to dawn on people. You simply cannot easily talk down someone who isn't even in the same universe as you are. Some people like to think that firearms are a miracle cure to incidents. Unfortunately, even if the level of force they provide may be legally justifiable in a situation, and even morally justifiable, it is a level that can be difficult to justify emotionally. This can impair defense, or cause lasting emotional issues afterward. Any other thoughts on the story and the lessons to be taken away from it?

No matter how you slice it, you are studying violence. Violence that is more controlled, yes. But still violence. You are going to need to come to grips with the fact that any technique you learn is inherently violent. It can be applied somewhat more gently for control and dominance, or it can be applied more forcefully to break and damage. But they are all violence, and they are all meant to be used in ways which are inherently violent. If you cannot deal with this, you need to quit the martial arts. In my experience, people who cannot settle with their own potential for violence, yet who insist upon gaining skills with violence, are a danger to everyone around them. I would feel safer training around a self-admitted ganger street thug than around a conflicted pacifist of that sort. The reason is this: People who are not comfortable with their capacity for destruction make abysmal pacifists. They generally "can't hold their evil". If someone introduces me to a boxer, or something similar and aggressive, and tells me that he wouldn't hurt a fly, I believe them. They are doing a very aggressive thing with very explicit violence. They know exactly what they can do, how that would be done, have practiced how to do it, and choose not to. They have felt the force of their anger fall on them in the ring, they have ridden it, dug in spurs and mastered it, holding on and experiencing it. They know what anger feels like, and they know what it does to them, and they know that the anger does not control them. If someone introduces me to someone who is trying "not to learn any damaging techniques", I give them a wide berth. They don't know what sort of violence they are capable of, and very likely would rationalize it away if they did it. They have no control, because they shy away from the consequences inherent to so many of the actions they are able to take. Any flare of anger on their side, and for some reason they anger easily, might send people to the emergency room. One person I remember encountering from my younger days talked calmly about how he had non-violently and peacefully tripped someone, causing them to fall down a short stairwell. They had done nothing to provoke them, and were simply trying to go home for the night. The "pacifist" explained that "Their aura" had manipulated them into doing it, and that it was to "protect" some other students, none of whom had been the slightest bit threatened, nor had they felt any need for "protection". Even if they had, they wouldn't have found an attempt to kill the guy with a subtle push AS HE TRIED TO LEAVE to constitute "protection". I don't even know exactly what happened; all of that was from the guy's story to explain how peaceful and enlightened he was. Pushing someone down the stairs after class to show off to the girls in class is pacifism? Really??

Probably it's a personal art. Some people make these after they've learned as much as their teachers can teach them and they start picking up other things and tweaking their personal tactical set more and more to fit the eclectic research. Sometimes, they know a whole lot, it's just that they only want to teach the 'good' stuff and their understanding of what that is has deviated over time from their original style. Sometimes, they're some clueless scam artist out to make some money off of clueless yokels while looking like a tough guy and they blended things because they never learned much in the first place. I'd think that the less expensive the training is, the more likely it is that it's good, but that's hardly an ironclad rule. I'd go watch a class.

Stepdaughter (who is 19 and is showing all the street smarts and wariness of a drunken lemming) wants to bring this boy cross-country. He made her pay for the ticket, wanted to make changes, was given the number he had to call, and arranged for her to do it as a three way call so she would have to do it anyways. He started micromanaging her finances over the phone, and has no income. The kid seems like a classic Narcissist, one of the sorts of people I tell my students to run from and never let close to them. We had police show up at the door, because his relatives wanted to check up on him. (We hadn't given any permission for anyone to have our contact info, and yet they had it.. grmbl..) This ended up in a phone call with the relatives. My wife, wanting to keep things peaceful, decided that he would visit for a week over christmas break, stay in our apartment, and bus home afterward. She thought this was grand. I think we're going to be cleaned out, I think we're going to have any number of schemes redirected to point at us, I think the guy is going to be abusive and I think i'm likely to end up having to knock the guy through a wall or something. And in the end, I think the guy is going to walk out having victimized us telling himself and anyone else that we were the ones who forced him to do it all. However, i'm not being given much of anything in the way of ability to veto the idea. I just have to sit and take it. Any suggestions?

That's somewhat mythological. If you think about it, most of what Boxing is portrayed as is one stance. The same with sport wrestling, to a lesser extent. "Chinese Martial Arts" signifies fighting skill to audiences. So directors signal this by having actors display various training or transitional postures out of the forms at each other to foreshadow and build the whole "These people do Kung Fu!" vibe, before their more traditional fight scene with more form movements mixed in, not necessarily in ways that make sense. Remarking on this, a gungfu practitioner once posted a picture of a boxer in the middle of a pushup, and remarked on how ineffective that stance looked for combat. "That's not how they fight, that's how they train arm strength.." "Well, that "ridiculous fighting stance" that was posted earlier was a flexibility exercize, what's the difference?"

What kind of hand coordination? How would you operationalize it? (That is, what will they be able to do when they've got it that they can't now, that will tell you when you're seeing results?) As far as building correct form, there's not much better than super slow speed mindful technique execution. Either in the air or into something similar to a makiwara. Speed covers many profound sins. When you do the technique very slow, you start thinking "Wait, where IS my elbow supposed to be here?"

"Good job. But I see we're going to need to work on awareness and composure and criminal psych and stuff so that it doesn't get that far."

I'm debating on a chicken, since that's a more reasonable size for us, but that would still be 'cooking a bird for the sake of cooking a bird'. A pot roast might be better, if I can't come up with a real-food vegetable sort of option. (While i'm not vegetarian, from time to time, meat becomes unappetizing for awhile.)

I was actually sick over the holiday, and the wife was working overnight, so we are belating Thanksgiving for later this week. I'm still deciding what to cook.

(video) http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9647000/9647585.stm

Sounds good to me. Make sure your nutrition (protein in this case especially) is good. Remember that you will lose a little bit of power purely on account of losing mass - that isn't too bad a thing. Also don't go overboard on it. It's one thing to make sure you've got low enough body fat to have a good 6-pack, but bad to turn into a male equivalent of an anorexic.

I mostly only care about senior/not senior, with seniors knowing the routine and how to do the movements. People from somewhere else are welcome, but they don't know the routine, so they aren't 'senior' unless they're guest teaching for some reason. The usual procedure i've experienced seems to be to take a quick bit of one on one to highlight where the differences are, ask that they do the movements we're doing (not "movements with the same name and a similar purpose that are nonetheless constructed completely differently", but minor stylistic differences can be ignored once they've been noted) and generally leave them to their own devices to follow along.

I had a spot of muscle strain once that acted a little bit like that.. Eat bananas, drink lots of water (Get a gallon jug, fill it in the morning, and work your way through it over the course of the day), take a hot shower, and it'll probably fade in a couple days.

It's very hard to bulk up like a bodybuilder. It's pretty much impossible to bulk up like a bodybuilder without consciously trying to do things specifically for the purpose of massively boosting the increase in bulk from JUST weight training. Google images for "vegan powerlifter -bodybuild". Now ignore everyone that has extreme muscle definition and size, since they generally are doing some extreme things to achieve those. They have some bulk to them, but generally they look fairly reasonable.. this is pretty much the EXTREME OUTER EDGE of the muscle development you can get by just weight training with a standard diet. And they don't just accidentally get to the point they're at. Don't cut back on exercise because you're afraid of bulking up to huge levels. If by some genetic miracle you find that you are getting bulkier than you want, just adjust your exercise routine for more endurance stuff.

I like my steak recipe, personally. Get some petite sirloin steak. It's the cheap stuff because it's so lean that it cooks a bit wonky, and has no marbling whatsoever. Trim the fat off the edges, and cut it into single serving pieces. Sprinkle a little bit of garlic powder at it for taste. Now take kosher salt and completely cake the steak on all sides. Set it out somewhere (that isn't cold) for just under an hour. Rinse the salt off. Pat it dry to get the rest of the excess off. Grill it up as normal. The meat is now exceedingly tender; you can cut it with a plastic knife. It tastes juicy, and not too excessively salty. (Most of the stuff you get in a can is this salty or more.)

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/2011-releases/canned-soup-bpa.html BPA has been associated with heart disease, obesity, and diabetes, and we last saw it when people raised the alarm about plastic bottles. The study did not speak to long term effects, or to the BPA-health link beyond the scope of the research method used, which was to test for the presence or absence and the intensity of exactly what they found. That said, most evidence seems to indicate that having a lot of a plasticizing chemical bouncing around your body probably isn't the healthiest condition. More than ten times increase is pretty significant. More reason to cut out soda, other canned beverages, and to try to cut back on canned foods.

Yep. They're important to set some techniques up, I understand, even if only in the manner of "I pop him in the face just for the purpose of having him either block or try to grab my wrist, so that I have an arm to throw him with"

Yogurt. Make sure to eat some yogurt. Yes, you will feel weak after you're sick. This is generally Nature's way of trying to prevent you from doing what you did.

This is in Sports, so this is presumably for competition. Question is "Are there any things I can do, beyond practice, to improve my score in kata performance?" Presumably recognizing that practice is important, but if not paying attention to extra detail will shave a point off (because someone who looks like they got their gi out the dumpster they live in doing a picture-perfect technique will still project an impression of "sloppy") then those details must be addressed. Yes, wear a heavyweight gi as mentioned. Have it cleaned and pressed before the competition. Bow to the judges. Beyond that it gets tricky, and you may need to do some research, because I expect that different venues will operationalize a 'good kata' differently. See if you can get hold of footage of the kata competitions before. Look for things that all the winners do. Work those things in.

Sounds more like a list of needs than anything else.. Someone probably could make a career out of researching all the team control techniques and such, building a framework out of it, then teaching it to departments.

Because there are a lot... and I mean a LOT.. of really bad TKD schools. There's a thread on it in the.. KMA forum, I think.

Point one: Most knife stuff in martial arts is generally agreed upon to be kind've junk, unfortunately. The best approach here is some partner work with a felt pen or similar. Point two: A knife is a deadly weapon, and using it can easily get you in waaaay over your head, legally. You should probably first go looking for information about self defense law as it pertains to deadly weapons! Point three: Are you really cold-blooded enough to use it? In my younger years, we lived by a highway. Once, a cat that someone had tossed out found its way to us, with horrible injuries in great pain. We tried to find out if there was any way to help it, but no luck. The obvious solution was that someone was going to need to put it out of it's misery. I had the tools available to me, so it should be easy enough.. ...I couldn't do it. Have you ever killed an animal? Say, gone to a farm and killed a live chicken with a knife. It isn't as easy as it sounds. Most people can do it, but there is a hurdle involved, and that hurdle is not one you want to run into face-first in a bad situation. If you add a weapon to a situation, and you suddenly have the epiphany that you can't use it, it becomes a liability. Point four: The three small towns I have experience with all have noticeably higher crime rates per capita than most cities. And those danger rates have gone down over the past few decades across the board. Danger doesn't map out to the places people feel threatened by, more often than not. I advise that, before worrying much about weapon use, you brush up on awareness and criminal psych so that you can avoid walking into traps - it's a much lower hanging fruit with much higher rates of return, in my opinion. That said, the most important part that I remember was in the ability to draw the thing in the first place.. not just because you might want to, but because it would be a good idea to be able to recognize if someone else is ready to draw a knife of their own. A weapon that you have to fiddle with buttons and snaps and do contortions to draw might as well be in a safe at home. A weapon that you have to have hanging out advertising its presence to everyone who looks at you is more of a liability and danger to you than to anyone else. In review: First, study how not to get into bad situations; Second, study how self defense and the law works, Third, figure out how to carry the knife so that you can get at it, and how to draw it in a natural and relaxed way. Finally, try to come to grips with the knowledge that once a weapon comes into play, things end very quickly and messily; often times it is hard to decide in retrospect who the winner is, even if one of the people escaped without a scratch on them.

In a more technical vein.. You could try a reset technique - I don't recall if there is a specific term for it. Specifically, learn to, when you feel adrenaline winding up, do a rote movement to force yourself to relax your shoulders, breathe, and regulate how adrenalized you are. A certain amount of being stepped up on adrenaline is unavoidable and helpful, but if you get too wound up, your performance is going to go in the trash. Pause a moment to smell things, taking a long breath and making some movement to relax yourself, such as rolling your shoulders or clearing your spine. This relieves some of the tension you noted, and pulls your adrenaline level to a more manageable point. This might be a good time to check the lay of the land, too, since you're going to want to check for exits and hazards at some point anyways. According to Miller and MacYoung, who both use and advise forms of this, this also tends to cause a lot of conflicts to end right there. They decline to hypothesize why, but I suspect the action is recognizable as something done for very good reason by people who have a lot of experience with fighting.