JusticeZero

They teach you techniques with sticks in the same way that Aikido exclusively teaches you techniques with swords. It has a bunch of joint locks, takedowns, and other unarmed hand to hand, that happens to be based on stick/dagger/sword movements. Aikido - that Japanese art that everyone associates with pacifists without weapons throwing and locking people as they attack - is all sword stuff. Nobody asks "What do they do if they don't have a sword?" Arnisadors learn how to do techniques with sticks, and then go "Oh and here's how to apply it with bare hands to do all these really awesome things". And that's not counting where they mix in all the stuff that Presas worked in from judo and small circle jujutsu that happened to blend in with the base art well, throws and standing joint locking stuff that was made for bare hands. So don't worry about the weapon bit. You wouldn't be weapon-dependent.

BJJ and Arnis both have those. As noted, on account of your knee, i'd take a closer look at the Arnis; you already have some wrestling background, so you're already smarter than the average bear in that department, and you likely have enough skill to deal with a non-groundfighter handily in a grappling situation - that's better than many people have. That's me, though; I am very risk-averse when it comes to exposing injuries to danger.

I assume you're gathering information, so if nothing else you'd know because we told you. That said, Lee had a strong philosophy of "Do what works". He communicated that more than the results of his research. "What works" is not a question with a single answer, though. So some JKD people focus on wrestling techniques, some do arnis, some do boxing hybrids, some do unholy mishmashes of a thousand arts, none of which they can do with anything resembling skill.. it's practically an open license to do whatever you want. Some are good, some are bad, but just saying "It's JKD' says nothing about what is taught.

Arnis is, as I recall, based on stickfighting, dagger fighting (which was usually 'what's left of the stick after the first few hits' back in the day, apparently) and empty hand fighting, using the same base. I've heard good things about it. It's not exclusively stickfighting, though you'd be using sticks a lot in it. Mostly hands, very fast paced. The whole weapons to hands thing is nothing new, Aikido is well known and it's a bunch of people doing sword techniques with their bare hands for the purpose of throwing people around the room with various bits broken off. JKD is the school that Bruce Lee set up, yes. Unfortunately, Lee's philosophy was such that saying that a class teaches JKD does not, in fact, convey any information about what they will be doing in the class!

I'd gather some information on the arnis class, if it was me.

True... though I think it's the beginning of the attack that is at issue, not the end. That said, does something like shying back, holding your hands to block in a way that leaves your face wide open and calling out 'Don't hurt me, don't hit me in the face!' so that you can set up a counter to a punch to the face count as an attack?

I'm sure someone who knows more about JJ specifically will pop in here shortly. My almost completely uneducated perception is that they do a moderate amount of leg stuff. That said, maybe the inevitable groundfighting expert might find it easier if they knew more about the teacher/class/whatever, and also, what your other options are? Plus, how much wrestling did you do?

I'm glad to hear that you are finding the lessons helpful! I look forward to hearing more of your experiences and perspectives. Don't be afraid to jump in on topics, we're not all wise arch-masters, and even those who are want to hear other perspectives and ideas.

I think part of that comes out of the ideology of the ards. Gongfu is perfection over time with effort, and they focus a lot on perfecting their movement, posture, and suchlike. The IMA (taiji, bagwa, hsingyi, other less known) do this to a particular extreme. Karate stylists seem, from what little i've seen more focused on immediate results and learning things that just work, and work right away. There are those who are more extreme with that, too. Different arts focus on different things. Aikido has a different flavor of movement which is also not at all jerky; it's Japanese and comes out of sword work rather than a boxing type base. The stuff I do focuses on movement to a great extent as well and likewise is very smooth - some teachers focus on perfecting movement more than others. The ones that don't tend not to have very old students, I suspect. I tend to obsess over getting movements right and stress free, personally. But I recognize that I can't stamp 'perfect movement' into someone, since it's a laboratory process. On the other hand, I don't mind saying the equivalent of "Today, we're going to work on our basic stance transition.. by maintaining it for an hour." The serious internal gongfu people make me feel downright softcore when I do things like that when they talk about their training exercizes. "walked in a circle in a low stance transition for four hours", "stood in (insert chinese ideogram here) for three hours, before class"..

Liver: Yeah, that's actually a better idea. Make something that passes as a large D-cell flashlight. It actually uses C cells or even AA in this thick case hardened pipe of a barrel that a jedi knight could use to parry small arms fire, if small arms fire could be parried. My main concern is actually with the spring holding the battery, i'm not sure how well those hold up under the load of the batteries suddenly centrifuging toward the cap, in practice.

My main concern with this idea is that it will look substantially more like a weapon than a tool after finishing. I'd almost think that going up to the 6 cell mag, stepping the bulb down to a 3 or 4 cell version, and replacing two or three batteries with a tight fitting, snug steel rod with an end cap that looks stock might be a better move. That way, you have a flashlight that would pass visual inspection as "just a flashlight", that happens to have substantially more heft and durability to it than the norm. One could even do that by making an extension to a small light that mimics the shaft.

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. If it's worth doing, it's worth flopping around and looking inept at. If you ever find something that you can do perfectly the first time and look good doing it, give it up - it won't impress anyone. See the people in class that move like something out of a chop socky movie? To them, they still are flailing around badly. It's just that their idea of what constitutes 'bad" has glacially advanced to where they are now. When they came in the first time? They were out of breath and flailed around and generally made a fool of themself. They aren't thinking 'Wow, that new guy is a fool', they are thinking 'Wow, I remember when I was that bad.. hey, he got that technique kind've sort've vaguely right! It must have took me WEEKS to figure out how to do that that well!' Why worry about looking like a fool at home? Where nobody can even see you? Go to class, do your best, try to take something away from each lesson. Then go home and practice it. If the best you can manage to do is vaguely directed flailing, then flail in a vaguely directed manner. You'll get better, I promise. Each flail, on average, will be infinitesimally better than the last until suddenly you're like "What the..? You mean i'm actually good at this? How did that happen?"

They control for physical factors that weren't involved in the question, and puts them into a totally unnatural context that has virtually no resemblance to an uncontrolled fight. It was, after all, trying to examine uncontrolled fights, not duels; studying MMA matches is a bit like trying to get an "accurate picture of medieval military combat" by going to a fencing match.

MMA fights are not representative in any way of fights on the whole, though; they are completely unsuitable for use as a control for anything but MMA fights.

The "prediction" is just the application of the principle of "This happened in the past, so probably it will happen the same way in the future, as we know of nothing at this time that would indicate change." While I agree that it is not a perfect representation, I would also note that one should not fear to use imperfect data to draw conclusions with, when perfect data is not available.

I'm used to having to make inferences from astonishingly poor data sets for the pure reason that that's the best you're going to be able to get your hands on. Are you suggesting that it is ethically and practically acceptable to grab random strangers and induce them to start fights with other strangers in order to get a better sample? It's pretty common these days to record whatever odd thing that people see and post them up on social media. Fights are out of the ordinary. So fights get posted online. Not a perfect sample, but fights are inherently an outrageous enough notable event that they are likely not going to be filtered much by the posters. It's like trying to gather information on troop movements through a country by sampling the diaries of children living in the area. While it won't give a perfect picture, it will give a good amount of data to work with, because "dear diery. 2day i saw a gajillion skary soljers in tanx!" is a pretty good indicator of some kind of troop movement in armored vehicles near that point, even if it's not as accurate or raw as you might prefer.

It's still a reasonable sample. It's very hard to find ANY sample of fights that are in any way a good representative sample; YouTube is most likely one of the best ways to find a vaguely representative set available. Furthermore, it was pretty much explicitly trying to AVOID having "skilled ground fighters" dominating the representation, as the original purpose of the study wat to examine the very high "95% of fights go to the ground" claim. Most certainly if you are an expert ground fighter you will find that most of your fights go to the ground, much in the same way that a boxer will find that a lot of their fights will involve someone throwing punches.

http://jiujitsu365.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/do-most-fights-go-to-the-ground-research-i-conducted/ Read this the other day. It generally confirmed a lot of things I had heard, but a few things came up that caused some thought. emphasis mine..Seems to explain the TMA position of "Don't let yourself go to the ground!", as well as giving some validity to those arts which focus more on knockdown than on infliction of damage. After all, if an opponent who falls is almost certainly going to be defeated by followthrough, it is entirely reasonable to concentrate your attention on learning to unbalance an opponent and cause them to fall down - in fact, since techniques to knock an opponent down are not as damaging in and of themself, they can more easily be trained in a resistant context! Sort've like Judo or Taekkyon or various other arts... Just make sure to work in a handful of techniques to finish off a downed enemy.

Because a backfist covers a wider area and thus cannot be slipped through holes as easily, and may require you to lift your elbow further and open yourself up more.

I'd say that the grappling styles being downed here are still extremely valuable. You are very possibly more likely to have to fight someone who it is important not to overly injure, surrounded by friends and family, than you are to be jumped by the "ninja horde" of criminals in a back alley. I've been focusing more on softer techniques for awhile - too bad so many of them throw the target on the back of their head.

Seems reasonable enough - though I can't speak to it personally since our base is symmetrical.

What Montana said. Expect both of you to get in trouble from the school, since the schools generally don't want to think about such things very hard. Some admins are worse than others on that point, and it varies from school to school, but usually the one who shows up in the office to tell the story gets the better end of the bargain in my experience.

Nonetheless, they'll still get irked if you start contradicting them. And they will both have a different interpretation. remember, "no right or wrong" doesn't mean "I can do whatever I want", it means "I need to internalize these principles", and they still can be irritated if there is some faint disagreement between teachers. If both teachers think it's a great idea then hey. But usually that sort of thing results in some exceedingly annoying student behaviour that does not help their learning or my patience one bit.

That is still 'switching'. A lot of teachers ge very irritated by it because they don't do things exactly the same way for reasons that are very hard to explain to a new student, and have lots of trouble with students who think they know all because 'Well master Soanso said I should do it THIS way!' If they didn't set it up, it's a snake pit.

OK, your art contains some hypnotism oddness in it and christian symbolism somewhere. My art contains in it a mixture of Catholic and Yoruba (mostly Yoruba) philosophy about inverting the world, the african pantheon in place from there jumbled up with the Catholic saints, protective charms, a mythic wuxia-like figure said to be invulnerable to bullets, and a variety of quirky oddness fueled by nationalism, racism (in both directions), machismo, and general cultural confusion. If it makes me scratch my head and tilt it oddly, I often end up having to simply accept that a lot of the people who came before me were in to a lot of odd things for various reasons I cannot begin to guess at, and those things are still in the art they taught that my teachers are trying to faithfully pass on to me. Nobody expects me to go to a priest of a religion alien to me to get a patua like Lil' Ze in City of God. But that sort of thing probably happened with someone back when, and in the attempt to faithfully pass on the art, it got forwarded to me. And I forward it to my students, as context and maybe there's some wisdom or knowledge or inspiration they can pull from it. I am told that there is a master of some lineage of my art, somewhere in the U.S., who converted in a big way to Hare Krishna. (Reportedly, they had a large roda at a Burning man festival that they, along with a college colleague of mine, were at. I was not there, and cannot speak to any details.) He proceeded to merge his interpretation of the art with his beliefs, and teaches it that way; I am told but cannot verify that he only accepts Hare Krishna as students, and that his skills are enough that people have done so in order to learn from him. (This amuses my gamer friends to no end, given that it makes their flower-selling monkish image in their minds' eye take on a wierdly shao-lin-esque image.) If one of his students reaches a level of teacher, then breaks from their religion, their lineage will still be heavily tinged with Krishna. It wasn't before, but now it is. Their students will frame things in ways that ring of Krishna thought. They will do this even if they have never been a member of that religion. It has tinged their teaching, and it is easier to pass on the tinged material, openly acknowledging the flavoring, than to try to exorcize the influences, hoping that they are not cutting away valuable insights. As such, even if they haven't the slightest bit of Hare Krishna leanings, they would still be teaching 'They do this because of the Krishna principle of blah blah blah..' because that's how it was taught to them, and that teacher may not feel confident in their ability to eviscerate their own art just to purge the Krishna philosophical references, and not lose things in translation. And then someone will come along and look askance at the teacher and go "...But you teach Hare Krishna with your martial art, and I don't believe in that." What's the poor non-Krishna teacher from the Krishna lineage to do? Shrug a lot, mostly. Don't obsess too much over what might tinge the style's roots, worry about whether the stuff works and is solid and testable.