JusticeZero

No, I haven't been to Okinawa, and neither have the great majority of Karate practitioners who spend a lot of time studying kama forms. If you're in Alaska, it's important to train on ice and wearing winter clothing. If you're in Hawaii, it's much less valuable to spend time worrying about those things.

I never feel safe or let my guard down around people who practice any sort of "pacifistic" martial art. Occasionally you find one with a sadistic, passive-aggressive, vicious streak that runs deep, who will do horrible, cruel things and completely divorce themself from the act. They just can't hold their evil, I guess.. Myself, the worst i've done was to step up and into a front thrust heel kick, and catch it between the legs with my weight high. Picked me up and launched me into a nearby wall. Didn't really care at the time, it didn't hurt until a minute after I sat back down.

Well, yes. I strongly approve of handgun training. I also approve of short stick training of various lengths, since it's not hard to find various stick shaped objects. Also flashlights, and any other ubiquitous object. Sai, various swords, sickles, flails not so much though...

Different ruleset and training. A little bit like saying "They'll be playing Poker. But they're playing five card, not texas holdem; that guy has only ever done texas holdem and they don't play the same."* *I don't actually know squat about poker, so I probably have at least some terminology wrong here.

Most of them are just for historical preservation, and have very little use. There are other things that are crying out for training with, but don't. Many do kama forms. Kama is a sickle, a common farming implement and something ubiquitous and beneath noticing in the possession of a peasant. A sickle in the hands of a laborer in the city these days is very unusual and noteworthy, and draws suspicion. Not useful to train anymore. My own art has some techniques with straight razors. A straight razor was a ubiquitous item a century ago. Nobody would think twice about someone carrying personal hygiene stuff with them, especially if they were likely not able to go home every night. Today, though, most people have never seen one, let alone seen one used. It's a wierd knife, now, and a bit pointless to train. You can pick up these metal barrel flashlights all over the place. Nobody thinks anything odd about someone carrying a flashlight with them, I mean, they might have to walk home in the dark. Where are the flashlight forms...? I spend a good chunk of time with a hardened steel U-lock close at hand. Two, actually. Are there any U-lock forms..? I differ in opinion on this with many people on this forum, but for me, a weapon isn't worth training unless you can leave it around the house or carry it around in public under at least some common circumstances without raising suspicion. And I am disheartened at the lack of commonly available weapon training for tools that meet those criteria. Everyone is too busy trying to be a ninja turtle or a bit character in a wuxia flick.

They are further defining what they do as a specific STYLE by saying that. If a TKD stylist trains and starts competing in Kyokushin matches, it can be said by the Kyokushin folks that "She has a TKD background, yes.. but she does Kyokushin now." It's because the style and the venue are closely linked. If you train and do the venue and conforming to the demands of the rules, you are doing the style. MMA more and more is.. a style. Like Karate. Or like TKD. Or like Boxing. No more, no less.

Oh my. What's going on with the followup on this?

Relax, get in the center where they have to come to you, and toss easy things that make them have to do the running around and exercize. Lots of flourishes and feints. Remember to breathe. Use proper dynamics - use falling, use alignment, use gravity, use stored energy and the like instead of powering your way through movements. Capitalize on every one of their attacks that you can - don't do any defenses that don't end up clobbering them.

Three things: - Soccer moms ("You do Karate? But that's just for kids!") - "Unrealistic" stances misapplied out of context - horse stance is useful for a lot of things, but if you think that you should go into a fight by dropping into a horse stance and putting your hands at your hips and waiting for them to come up to you, you're not helping matters - Fads - Every time some new art becomes the "new thing" and people become enamored of it, all the arts before slide a little down the totem pole as being old school. Look at Judo; that art seems like it's almost impossible to find these days. It's just too 1970's. And who does Boxing by itself anymore?

If it was easy, you would not need to practice. Roll three dice and total them up, you'll have some number around elevenish, but it will vary. That is your number for this session. The first month or so, just use the number ten. Sit quietly without moving. Count each breath. Here's the hard part; when you get to your number, start over at one again. If you even think you might have lost count, if you find yourself having to recreate where you were - 'What was I on, wasn't it four?' or find yourself wandering into the teens, start over. When you can do that for thirty minutes without having to start over, you will have made a substantial amount of progress. As far as harmony, try taking some time to see things from everyone's perspective. There's a mental thing that happens to people who meditate a lot in focused way, apparently, where the mind briefly stops recognizing the self as distinct from the things around you during a meditative session, and many find the experience to be life-changing. That said, just trying to get past the ego by stopping to think of how things are being experienced from different perspectives goes a long way.

First, get some people who feel defensive and like they need to learn to fight. They don't need any sort of background at all. Second, give them some sort of gladiatorial game with simple rules. Third, let them play and tinker around with different techniques for awhile. Just enforce the basic rules and ask them to please not hospitalize each other. After a couple decades, you have a TMA with masters and a set of distinctive techniques. Say for example you give everyone a helmet, bulky mittens (not necessarily like boxing gloves, but something that makes grabbing completely infeasable), and a tight, non-grabbable uniform, put them in a marked space on hard ground, and tell them that a ring-out or touching their uniform to the ground (mittens excluded) gets the other person a point, but they have five seconds to see if it's a tied point. Also that if they have more than two points on the ground for more than 5 sec, they lose that point. I know of no competition with that set of rules, so you would get something unique. You'll see a lot of very specific tactics come from that set of rules.. lots of very specific techniques that would be applicable all over the place. You would get a movement style, and a culture of practitioners. And you would not need any sort of lineage to create it. Just time and enough people to play and compete. You'd end up with transmission methods appropriate to the culture. And they would probably be pretty good in a scrap. Give them a generation and they'll probably come up with mystical stuff, too. Any thoughts on the theory?

Well, what is it exactly that you like about ROSS?

And I disagree with it top to bottom. The way you become great is by setting goals and working toward them. If you realize you don't want the target anymore, you've built up enough foundation building toward it that you easily can turn it toward a new goal. No goal and you'll just spin in place. If you decide that you want to build a Care Bear theme park, though? Sure, it might be a bit goofy. But by the time you go "wait, maybe that was a silly idea.." you may have picked up business administration skills, professional contacts, artistic contents, a functional knowledge of real estate, and so on.. if you then go "OK, the Care Bear thing was goofy, maybe I should set up a martial arts school.." then well! You might not have done the training yet, but you might have the skills and connections and resources left over to slam down a big training facility to rent out, and have the skills to promote it into being the biggest martial arts megastudio in the area and be able to find a great teacher to teach you. "Be great" doesn't give you a goal to triangulate and work toward concretely. Great what? Greatest Minesweeper player? Maker of the meanest bowl of popcorn on the block? You NEED those targets, those "dreams", so that you can build the smaller goals toward them. Without a target, none of those building blocks are revealed to you, and you won't go anywhere far.

Right.. though unfortunately, the offender list is pretty clogged with people who aren't a threat to anyone, since it gets used to zealously.. It loses it's ability to be a warning and becomes a meaningless klaxon of fear. I prefer things that warn me of danger to warn me of actual danger, instead of being laden with false positives to keep me needlessly jumpy.

I've always wanted to see a movie where the whole model of 'teacher teaches the newbie how to fight' gets mixed up by having the style learned be a mismatch to the exotic setting. Like "We're in Mystic China and i'm going to get attacked by the Red Dragon Lotus Fighters! Can you teach me Kung Fu?" "Naw. Never learned it. I can teach you how to box, though.."

Personally, I think people collect too many, and destroy the purpose in so doing. If the whole thing is a mnemonic, why would it be good to learn so many that you are constantly going "Wait, it goes left in Flying Muskrat IIX but right in Neon Butterfly VI, which one was I doing? Oh wait, I was trying to learn Blessed Mango Digs Down III, and in that it goes straight into a mirrored lefthanded Unicorn Strike.." Seems that you should be able to do just fine with an extremely small number of forms, probably as little as one, plus a few other exercizes to work on on the side.

I was once told that in the olden days of lore, that students did not have books to record diagrams and notes in, did not have the opportunity to spend much time with their teachers, and had to do a lot of self-training. They had to learn a lot of techniques and be able to remember and train them for months before their teacher might be able to come and give feedback, and they needed to see substantial improvement regardless and a minimum of repeated drilling from their teacher. For this purpose, because of how the human mind and memory works, forms are ideal. If one adds the ritual as a specific part of their day, for instance, "I will get up in the morning and do the 108 Movements twice in my kitchen before I start my day", it creates a memory aid to help recall. "In the morning" and "in the kitchen, where my teacher helped me when he visited" both help to create strong context for recall. The use of a ritual sequence helps to key memory of the next technique in the series. These together mean that more time and mental effort can be spent on dissecting the movements given and on perfecting the flow therein, while at the same time giving movement-specific exercize toward doing the techniques properly with strength. With the ability to spend time at the studio on a regular basis, and keep notes on scheduling and techniques on the computer or in your ebook? Not as important. But the method is retained because not many people feel comfortable enough in their totality of knowledge of them to cut them, for fear that there's something in them that they will miss and accidentally throw out.

Right. Let's assume that the swordsman is the aggressor in the typical "karateka beat up a samurai" story. As noted, troublemakers often are not as competent. So instead of a karateka against a competent swordsman, we're now looking at "a karateka against a marginal swordsman". Lots of bluster but likes to let the fact that they have a sword do their talking for them, instead of learning to use the sword effectively. That takes good training habits and hard work, and to many troublemakers, that's not needed - most people back down when you point out the big chunk of sharp metal anyways, so why not relax and enjoy the easy life? Next, we're thinking "an unarmed karateka against a swordsman HOLDING A SWORD". We've already seen this assumption played out with guns. The swordsman might not have pulled their weapon out yet. Now it's a trained karateka with the initiative against someone with a weapon retention problem but no weapon readied. I think the LEO's here can verify that that is a situation that has already gone pear shaped, and barring backup showing up quickly, a large amount of skill on their part (and see the point above), or raw luck, is very likely going to continue to go poorly for them. Finally, we're thinking "an UNARMED karateka against a samurai". On of the distinguishing factors I always see about Karate is the sheer amount of training time they seem to spend with various sticks and pointy things in their hands. The "stereotypical karateka" as is often portrayed seems to carry around assorted "farming implements OF DOOM!!" just about everywhere they go. A fight between two people who are armed is a much more even encounter. Nobody expresses shock when a swordsman loses in a fight against, say, a person with a staff, or a big club, or a spear, or a flail, or any other bit of mayhem that a peasant might be able to cobble together and find time to train with. That seems, in fact, to be a scenario that played out over and over during assorted portions of European martial history.

Depends on the style of kungfu, and your goals for training. If it's kicks that give you trouble, have you looked into something kickless? Boxing (dunno if the feet would be an issue here), aikido, judo, BJJ or similar? Maybe something to strengthen your arches - barefoot walking or similar?

Karate seems to have an awful lot of improvised weapon forms in it for one, and for another, in my admittedly limited experience, the kind of people who like to stir up trouble are most commonly the same kind of people who can't be bothered to spend time practicing and training.

Unfortunately, most of the TKD out there where people see it is all those things. A lot of arts with a bad reputation have almost gone out of their way to earn their rep. It used to be that if it wasn't boxing, it was suspect. Now if it's not MMA, it's suspect. You won't see respect given to anything that isn't the weapon of choice in the local gladiatorial arenas of the day regardless, as a rule.

Excellent stuff! I like how you describe your training. Sounds like it's really working out well for you. Keep on training!

How critical is the footwork in this case? Sub-optimal as it might be, would tkd footwork function at all for this? I am generally hesitant to change out more pieces in a fighters' keyring than necessary.

I wouldn't call judo 'more gentle'. 'gentle' refers to a particular movement quality they try to use, but those throws can be pretty punishing.. Judoka seem like they take as much of a pounding in training as boxers, muay thai stylists, and ballet dancers do.

I seem to recall hearing that there is a LEO in Alaska who has some minor fame in the jujutsu world for the pure reason that he had to modify the heck out of his techniques in order to accomodate them being used while wearing winter clothing. Apparently, all those throws and gi techniques don't work so great when you're wearing heavy gloves or fleece mittens.