JusticeZero

Not everyone trains Karate. At the school I learned most of what I do at, non-streaking street shoes were preferred. As an aside, if you have problems with callusing and wearing on your feet, show up before the place is swept and get the soles of your feet covered in dust. Dust, ash, rosin, etc. will protect your feet by, as far as I can tell, drying them and letting them slide better. Clean, sweaty feet will be ripped to shreds in ways that dry and dusty ones won't.

Something a Taiji teacher told me once.. "You get a good student, you nurture them, you teach them the best tricks, you help them along, and then.. you grab a pitchfork and a torch and you run them out of town. There's only room for one teacher there." I'm sure the proximity is part of the strain. Nonetheless, it sounds like he has been less than completely up front. You should be in contact with your main organization. Make sure to speak well of your instructor, you are only contacting them to straighten out some "parts that have you confused", and "making sure you are doing everything properly and that everything is in order". But give them the whole story, and be helpful so that they can sort things out. The result will no doubt be the same, but you will not appear to be acting out of malice.

Well, if you think nunchaku are the coolest thing ever, and you still think they are the coolest thing after knocking yourself silly with them a few times trying to get the basics down, and you just love to pick them up and swing them around with the proper form that you were shown, then that would be the easiest weapon that you could learn. Personally I don't care for nunchaku, and so I would find it difficult to learn to use them.

I wish I could. Unfortunately, following a poorly treated injury, my wife cannot flex one of her feet; my art requires consistent and rather extreme foot flexing. She has expressed some desire to train with me, but we would have to find another art - one which was flat-footed - in which to cross-train in to do it. I've even tried to find some structure of mine to do which would work for her, but the dynamics would be too alien, and I would have to essentially create a new art from the ground up to do it.

Really, the easiest weapon is the one that you enjoy picking up and practicing with even when you don't need to. The hardest weapon is the one that you think is silly and you just don't care for.

It might help the stench, but to get the stench to actually go away the bag needs to be clean. Sorry, but you're going to need to actually clean the bag.

Well, first you need to turn it inside out to get the stain on the outside. Then you're going to want to wipe it down with a damp soapy cloth and get the spot washed off. Once you got the guck off, wipe it with a damp but not soapy cloth to get the soap off, then a dry cloth to get the wet off, then dab a bit of olive oil on a paper towel and give it a quick rubdown where you washed. Let it air out awhile (leave it to air out, do other things..) then put it back right side out. If there's a lingering stink, sprinkle some baking soda in.

Do you know what it was that spilled?

Right. I suspect that there were some vague memories of Taekkyon floating around, so Choi tried to use a lot of kicks that were close to the little he remembered for nationalistic reasons.. then they found someone who kind've sort've vaguely remembered the actual rules, probably, and again motivated by nationalistic pride encouraged a lot of energy to be poured into rebuilding from that.

That's one of the "other stretches to do during your cooldown".

Dynamic stretching every day, plus other stretches during your cooldown. Something like yoga helps too, though really that's mostly "extra training time involving a lot of stretching exercizes". Dynamic stretching is like gentle stretch kicks. Do about a dozen per leg per direction each day. Also do some of the stretching of 'raise your leg as high as you can and hold it there 30 seconds without touching it - just with your leg muscles' type - increases your movement range. Next to your bed, get a piece of rope, make a loop (stirrup) in one end and tie it. Before bed, use the rope to gently pull your leg up for a stretch. Don't do this past the point of mild discomfort. Hold thirty seconds then let it go back down. This is really just your basic stretching exercise, but in bed is a nice time to do a last round of stretching exercise. But really, the main thing is just to do it every day and don't overdo it.

Well, there are some principles that are the same. Some are different, though. In one of the threads in KMA I addressed a controversy where some people were claiming that one of the Taekkyon variants had roots in Capoeira, which is what I do. So I looked at some clips. The power generation used for kicks by the Korean martial arts are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from the power generation principles used by Capoeira (and others in it's class). As such, they were very distinctive from each other, by simply watching the lines of force. We both kick, but where we generate the power differs so dramatically that the kicks don't look at all similar if you know what to look for. Specifically, the Korean arts open the hips and turn to the side to use the long muscles of the legs, whereas Capoeira twists the spine and closes the hips in order to use the muscles of the core. They both work great, but the principles are alien to each other in ways. Then you have rule differences. Hand people the rulebook for American football, and they will on their own develop all the strategies and tactics that make the game complex. Boxing's stance and strategies changed drastically soon after gloves were introduced. And so on. Just a few core fundamentals and the whole art can be recovered from it. It might not look exactly the same, but what art hasn't changed? Therefore, it is our responsibility to dig down and isolate these core elements. When it is time to have students, these are the things we should make sure they know. If Armageddon happens, and all you have left in your art is a devoted yellow belt - such as has happened to some arts, KMA i'm looking at you, along with most of the reconstruction efforts - that yellow belt should be able to experiment with people and recreate a pretty decent interpretation of your art.

I don't like using "evolve". I know how the word is correctly and incorrectly used in context, and it gets misused a lot. Particularly as what I described is philosophically probably closer to Lamarck rather than Darwin, and "evolution" was coined to describe Darwin (who didn't actually use the word) rather than Lamarck (who was soundly disproven by the genetics discoveries to follow which verified Darwin.)

I was rereading the whole debate about Taekkyon and TKD, and it reminded me of something. What if Gen. Choi was trying to keep Taekkyon.. but had an incomplete or corrupted seed to work with? Imagine that a bunch of children are abducted by aliens to a huge dome on Venus. After years, they regain their independence, and want to rebuild their culture. One of them says "You know, a long time ago, I remember watching this game once.. A bunch of people were running back and forth, dribbling an orange ball, and throwing it into a hoop.." And someone says "Did it have tackling?" "I don't remember! But I think I saw someone fall down, so it must have had." "How high was the hoop?" "Uhm.. i'm not really sure. Let's just kind've stick one up and guess at it." And through such a process, a game is born that has a lot of semblance to basketball.. except for the random football elements in it that end up changing the tactics and the like completely.. At least until someone else remembers they didn't tackle each other, but by then there are entire leagues of the way they came up with, so the two end up being different things entirely. And they never did figure out exactly how to keep score. But they can still stomp visiting athletes! Every generation must use what they are given to rebuild their art anew. They only have the previous generation to appease with their interpretation.. usually. I've said it before - the core of a martial art is just a few seeds. All the strategies and variant techniques spring out of those few techniques, attitudes, body dynamics, and philosophies. If we can communicate that seed vividly to new students, the art will be kept alive.

Do you like TKD because you like TKD, or do you like it because it's familiar? Hapkido is basically TKD-like kicks, punches, throws, joint locks, and tinkering with weapons - no tournaments. I'm thinking that your TKD skills would carry over pretty well. TKD is basically lots and lots of fast kicking and a tournament focus. You've already done this so obviously your experience would carry over. The other folks here with more experience and knowledge on those arts would be able to sort out the specifics for you. As well as, you know, the magic of Google. Which do you see yourself doing?

What do you want out of your classes? TKD has a reputation, unfortunately well earned by a lot of its instructors, of being mostly for sports. That means distorted technique useless for anything other than scoring points in their particular competitive venue, poor self defense applicability, and a focus on belts and tournaments. Some people like that, though, and that's what they came for. They do do lots of competitions and the like, and you can find TKD anywhere, so those can be plusses depending on what you want to achieve. Hapkido doesn't do the competition thing really, but they do a lot more throws and takedowns and self defense work. If you can, try them both and go with the one you like most.

I'll post this here in order to not clutter someone else's thread too horribly... And a line I hate, too.. There is a constant static of minimal risk. You can't avoid being exposed to it at all times. Something can always kill you at some very low level of risk. If you stay home to avoid the shark, you might die of radon poisoning, or a house fire, if you go outside you might die from an allergic reaction to something accidentally mixed in your sunblock, and so on so forth.. there's always a tiny chance that something unlikely will pop up and kill you at any given time. So what you want to do is to compare the risks and minimize your exposure to the big ones that are much more likely than the rest. Worldwide, the biggest hazard anyone is exposed to is cars. With infants, things like birth defects are king, and once you get older then there's a lot of things associated with age that can reap you, but between 3 and 30, the car is king of the killers worldwide. After 30, you start getting hit with some things that are related to inactivity and obesity, which by the way is strongly correlated to having driven everywhere for the past twenty-seven years. As a comparison, if one presumes that the Iraq and Afghanistan military action are all connected, along with 9/11 and the 2007 fuel price spike, then 9/11 SAVED thousands of American lives. The fuel price spike got people to drive slower and less, which in turn resulted in a lower rate of car crash deaths that year. That dip in that year was equivalent to all of the U.S. military and civilian deaths in Iraq through the entire action, all of the U.S. military and civilian deaths in Afghanistan through the entire action, all of the deaths in 9/11, with thousands to spare. The car death rate is similar to two or three fully loaded jumbo jet airliners plowing into a mountainside with no survivors every week. If that were to happen, the outcry would ground every commercial air flight until measures could be taken to stop the bloodshed. But the U.S. seems to utterly ignore that same rate of deaths in a car, and even has people convinced that they should forgo substantially safer activities in favor of driving.

Long response regarding cars, i'll put it in a different thread - the one where this was mentioned earlier actually. http://www.karateforums.com/post461909.html#461909

While I am glad that he will not be in a position to cause more harm, I cannot find that thought pleasant in any way. Does this sort of thing rehabilitate? No. Does it prevent? Apparently not. The only thing it does is to spread misery. There is plenty of misery in the world already. I really would prefer if they found a way to have such people be a safe and productive member of society who just happens to be in a situation where they cannot or will not be able to harm anyone again.

Another concept that needs to be noted here is that media causes peoples estimation of risk to be seriously skewed. First is density. Imagine an island country with a population like a small city. People go out swimming and fishing all the time. Every few years someone gets eaten by a shark, and that's a tragedy, but it doesn't happen very often and really, it's nothing to worry about. Now the island gets hooked up by TV in a network of several thousand other islands just like it. Suddenly, every day there is lurid coverage of the vicious shark attack that happened that afternoon! What happened? Did the sharks get more dangerous? No, the sample size just got a lot bigger, but people are only seeing the hits in the sample. They don't do the math and think "The chances of being killed by a shark today are one in one billion. If I know a thousand people, the chances that one will be killed today is one in one million. There are three hundred and sixty five days in a year. One million days is almost two thousand, seven hundred, forty years. I'm almost certainly not going to be eaten by a shark." Second is media bias itself. In America, we do not pay to have a free press, so we have really poor quality news. One specific feature of this is than news has to pay for itself with advertisements, so what news is shown is biased toward sensationalism. As a result, ONE freak incident which is sufficiently outrageous can feed the news for days as people are bombarded with image after image of the same absurdly low percentage incident. In the meanwhile, car wrecks make people uncomfortable and anyways, they're FAR TOO COMMON. So we don't even hear about them unless they are profoundly bizarre or unusually noteworthy in some way. And even then it's just a little side note. It's a bit like living in a world where you are surrounded by live machinegun fire and land mines, but the TV news choses to sensationalize and obsess over the danger of food allergies - so everyone has themself tested and retested for allergies and is intensely critical of their food intake even as they raise their voices to be heard over the zing of ricocheting bullets and explosions, which they completely ignore.

Might be a target, but under those circumstances, they are still safer walking, even if they are walking through a high crime neighborhood. The risk level of a car is just that severe.

....like what? I can assure you that there is nothing along that road that is anywhere near as dangerous as it is to be driving in a car on it. If she was worried about your safety, she would MAKE you walk. But eeh, everyone who studies this has been telling everyone that for years and nobody listens.. sigh.

Competition martial art can be fine, if it's solid. Judo, for instance, is "competition", but those throws can really put the hurt on people, they're tough and can take a beating, and they have good fighting attributes. Boxers are similar. (The two combine really really well, too.) MMA is a pure competition art, but people never seem to dismiss it as "just being for sports". What area are you looking for schools in? Maybe someone here knows of a school there that you might not have spotted.

Oh, it's very good acrobatics. I just always notice the parts in movie fight scenes where an acrobatic technique is done that only works if there is no significant energy transferred between the attacker and the target.

I was allowed to walk alone by busy roads when I was 7, personally... things were a lot more dangerous then and there was a lot more crime. It's gotten a lot safer since then.