JusticeZero

Lots of things will "help your reflexes", but they will be less effective at helping your sparring than sparring. In any case, your response seems to indicate that you have not actually listened to what we have told you about not focusing on winning. Go back and reread it. Concentrating on "winning" your sparring matches is the absolute worst thing you can do; down that road lies the way of the completely ineffectual rules lawyering martial athlete. These are the people who, in fencing, approach a martial art to learn about swordfighting by flicking their sword at people so that the thin gauge for safety foils will bend around to lightly tap the button on the tip of the sword against the back of their opponents' head and score a point. We may not be fighting with swords anymore, but most people would appreciate at least keeping the pretense that one is learning to use an actual blade, rather than a springy piece of wire with a button on the tip. This is where you get the martial art people who's defense against being punched, kicked, or knifed is to turn their back on their opponent and abandon any sort of defense, because if they turn their back it is illegal to attack them. You can imagine how well this works against a rapist or furious mugger. Concentrating on winning in sparring is like learning to play football, and focusing all your attention on learning how to move the tackle machine, explicitly and knowingly using a technique that would be ineffective to use against an actual opposing football player, apparently out of some desire to look good in front of the team by really shoving that training device around even though it's going to get you sunk when the game rolls around. Just work the stuff you're practicing!

The main thing I see here is that grappling seems to be associated with the cultural position of authority and community, while striking is more associated with division and weakness. If you are the police, it is to your advantage to grapple with someone; you will tangle them up and have any number of tools to submit them without great harm into whatever situation is appropriate, the people around you will not interfere and will be glad for your presence. This is one reason why grappling is favored in MMA; there is no outward threats, no surprises, and nowhere to run. If you are a fugitive or outlaw in your own land, you do not want to grapple. You want to deal with threats to your person decisively and rapidly, retaining your mobility and ability to act throughout in order to be able to flee to live another day. If a technique tangles you with your attacker, it is useless to you. You would be capturing yourself and delivering yourself to your attackers. From what little I know of Karate, the original history of at least some forms of the art and many of its underpinnings of thought more resembled the latter state, not the former. This might partly explain why grappling has not previously had the attention in it as that it might have had otherwise.

It's not that i'm uninterested as much as that the entire post is really meaningless to me from my perspective. Momentum vs. force? 'Which one wins, muscle or physical strength?' Pressure? What do you mean by pressure? And what does it have to do with moving? And why are we doing versus comparisons on any of these things to begin with? The language just does not link up here at all. Sorry.

Talked to people I trained with, and trained in the park on my own on material I already had or with senior student types, or with the instructor even. Really, a huge portion of what you pay for training is for the room and equipment. But you can do a lot without those.

Wierd art; we can't not use footwork.

Yeah. Debrief. After you get "destroyed", don't settle for "He beat me", tear the whole thing apart and try to work out exactly what happened. Also, don't try to "win". Sparring isn't about winning. It's about working on the stuff you've learned. Trying to "win" in sparring is what creates things like the martial arts "experts" who get attacked by a real threat and throw several lightning-fast kicks which barely ruffle the mugger's clothes, then turn their back to try to foul out the mugger.

That still looks like 'pulling shoulder' with a bit of weight snapback to me. The strike still is made with the torso turning away from squared, and the dynamic makes for a pistoning chain action, as i'm seeing this. As noted, while it is style specific, I disapprove of twisting the spine away from center to generate power. It's lossy and fighting against body mechanics. Beyond that, it seems like looping paths would allow you to add more of the body to the mechanics than pistons.

Trying to parse that, but the original post was a bit of a jumble to read to me, not knowing exactly how you mean. "Pulling Hand" - I am reading this as trying to rotate the striking shoulder forward in a punch by forcing the opposite shoulder to retreat, which means it's more a "Pulling Shoulder".. which is hard to get people to do, because 'pulling' is not a verb one associates with shoulders. Is this an accurate summation? Personally, what I do and try to get people to do avoids trying to generate power with spinal rotation or curvature accelerating away from square. That's fighting against the structure of the trunk of the body. Acceleration TOWARD square, on the other hand, is fundamental.

I can honestly see both sides to this. Yes, you shouldn't be confined to your own school. That said, it is very irritating to have newbies constantly challenging your authority because "In my joe Foo Do class they told us never to do what you're telling us to do!" Yeah, sure, but your Joe Foo Do class isn't falling onto their heel intentionally, or whatever; if you follow Joe Foo's ideas you are going to either injure yourself, or be ineffective with what we're trying to teach, or you're just not going to be able to proceed. There actually is a method to our madness, there are specific strategies and doctrines that mesh together to make the system work. The last thing I want is to have some guy who's been there for a few days to be sticking his chin out at me challenging me like i'm some sort of quack because i'm saying something different from what a teacher of something different who is running under completely different assumptions, doctrines, and structures said to him earlier. I can explain, but the explanations are often fricking long, and the guy has very possibly already made up his mind that he knows more than I do anyways.

Or even without a combative situation. "OK, i'm going to do a thousand kicks! I wonder why the guy turns his foot like that, oh well it can't be important.. Gee, why do my knees hurt so much?"

Yes, practicing kicks can damage you, or anyone really, if you are doing it with poor form. I was cringing the other day in a school (not a MA school, a school with kids) because a PE teacher came in and was having the kids do cardio kickboxing from a video, and not turning his base foot for kicks. I mentioned it and had my concerns dismissed. If they were to continue practicing like this, in time, maybe a few months, their knees WILL be injured. (Not that I expect that they will, since the girls were making the absolute minimum of noncommital gestures needed to make a show of doing the techniques, and the guys were, while actually doing the techniques, obviously bored by it.)

Uhm.. go.. around...? Not sure why this is so hard for people to work out. If someone wants the space you are in, and you aren't especially attached to it, find a new and better space. Behind you generally is not better, so don't go there. You have stance transitions, practice wandering around just using those. I'm not talking 'a couple times', i'm talking 'several laps around the gym using nothing but random stance transitions, not repeating transitions, and timing your laps'. No 'floating'. Step.

I'm going to assume a right straight, stepping forward with the left leg. That puts the attack at 11:00 and attacker's lead foot at 1:00. My personal flinch reaction tends to be to step back with one foot and drop into an evasion, which is basically going to look like a wide side stance, or rather, a somewhat horse-ish position turned to the side with them off my right side, my torso leaning over my back leg and my arm covering my ribs and face. I'll continue the momentum and twist around to look at them over my back, and turn it into a spinning kick movement, but i'm probably not going to actually kick them.. rather, i'm spin-kicking my foot into the ground right beside their lead foot and shifting my weight onto it rapidly. Keep the hands up, obviously, because they're probably trying something else through this.. Step through behind their body with the other (my right) foot, sinking down. As part of this entry, my arm is coming across. Probably my palm is somewhere vaguely near their groin and my elbow is in their abdomen; these are just nice gimmes if they happen to go my way. My other hand is guarding my face. Now turn right to a forward stance, which should roll them over my right knee with my elbow. Once again, potential bonus of a backfist into the face. Left leg comes over to chamber for shin kick to the face as needed, or if I decide to fall onto him and roll off him as my footwork. Is it going to actually go that way? Meh, they may or may not move to make something different happen, i'll figure that out when I get there.

Mine are going to be weird, i'm sure... Heel stomp kick.. this contains a knee strike as the chamber, so.. Spinning roundhouse kick from the ground (posting on hands and lead foot) Foot sweep Heel kick from cartwheel - weapon recovery and breakfall applications 360 spin kick - because it hits an area that's usually in a bit of a shadow of stance

Statistically speaking, getting into an automobile is the single most dangerous thing most people do. It is the leading cause of death between the ages of 3 and 30 for everyone in the world. After 30, people start dying of health problems, some of which probably wouldn't have been so dangerous if they had gotten more exercise. Cars kill as many people as the equivalent of three jumbo jets plowing into the side of a mountain every week; about 40,000+. Since seat belts, safety improvements only make tiny dents in this number. The fuel crisis a couple years ago saved over ten thousand lives; the fatality numbers dropped by some eleven thousand or so when everyone slowed down to save gas. We're back above the panic point that made people drive that slowly; gas is more expensive now than it was when people were panicking about fuel crises; but nobody seems to care. In case you're curious, not only are you significantly safer on your bicycle, but you boost your life expectancy in other ways. Including from air pollution, as a bicycle rider on the road in city traffic in intersections and such actually has half the exposure to exhaust fumes that a car passenger does. If you worry about American troops, seven percent of the oil used in the U.S. was produced, ultimately, by Persian Gulf countries, some of whom are probably bankrolling the people blowing them up. Because of the way that oil is mixed, traded back and forth, sent through pipelines in batches, refined, mixed, traded around, tanked, then delivered to fuel stations from whatever source is most economical at the moment, there is absolutely no way to reduce one's share of involvement in that, according to the US Department of Energy.

We don't actually use the concept. That said, my hand will be one of three places: By my hip and open, where I can drop and put it on the ground; by my chin, with my elbow covering my ribs; or in front of my opposite shoulder as I cover near my face with my forearm. All my hand stuff is from one of those three positions; different techniques for each.

Really, it's not a 'good and evil' thing.. I study transportation, so I know the costs and compromises involved. They are pretty much 'unsafe at any speed', much easier to get rid of for most people who don't live on a farm than people imagine, and involve a lot of hidden issues that I personally feel are incompatible with my values. Plus, the financial costs are easy for many people to overlook, and they are higher than I want to factor into my family's budget without good reason. Still, the safety factor is a major concern to me. I have family who has killed people on the road. Driving a car using seat belts and obeying the laws seems to me to be similar to walking through a creepy abandoned lot on your way to work - but it's okay because you have light, situational awareness, and a cell phone.. Yes, you have taken good and relevant precautions to minimize the risk, but it would be better yet to change your routine to remove the need to walk through the dangerous place in the first place.

I'm not a fan of cell phones, either. Been going after those pretty consistantly. And actually, I HAVE checked it out. The oil market is too indirect, and there is NO WAY to avoid having significant amounts of oil in the mix from places like the persian gulf. Boycotting a company that imports from a place you don't like just means that those places will sell the oil to someone else, who will sell the oil to you. http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=gasoline_where It has in fact been noted that the oil market is tight enough that individual refineries and the like can, if they so wish, set the global price of oil through pure supply and demand economics; the supply is tight enough that one facility refusing to sell at a given price will cause prices to skyrocket, generally to whatever level they demand. Next: You were not forced to have a house far away from town. Nobody put a gun to your head and told you 'You are going to live out in the remote suburbs where everything is far away.' Nobody is holding that gun to your head now. Furthermore, providing transit to those faraway points is not a herculean task. It would cost only a tiny fraction of what we pay to put free streets everywhere to have buses, streetcars, trains, and the like roaming as far out as you need. For reasons beyond my fathoming though, people think it's perfectly OK to drop a few hundred million dollars of property and income taxes on a small section of roadway to make people able to shave 30 seconds off of their drive, but if you propose spending one percent of that to pay for bus drivers who would cut traffic just as effectively, people come out of the woodwork to complain about the wasteful spending.

Beyond that - there is no such thing as a car ACCIDENT. If there was a factory that had no guards on a big set of saw blades, and an employee had their hands cut off, that might be an accident. If the factory continued to not put guards on the blades or to enforce any safety procedures around the blade and someone else's hand was cut off, that would be much more grey. If the body count built much higher, it would be careless negligence, not an accident. Cars have killed more people than all the wars since they were invented, INCLUDING BOTH WORLD WARS, combined. They aren't safe, and any sort of injury or death caused by them is not an 'accident'. Accident is such a harmless word.. sort've like "Oh, we were sparring, without gloves or safety equipment, and not really paying attention to what we were doing, and I was too busy watching the cute brown belt practice high kicks and I punched my training partner in the eye hard enough to injure him. But oh, it was an ACCIDENT, nobody can be held at fault for an ACCIDENT, those things just kind've HAPPEN! That's just how things are!"

I generally don't wear a seat belt because I generally am NOT DRIVING IN A CAR IN THE FIRST PLACE... Cars PERIOD not only kill over fourty thousand people every year in the U.S, equivalent to plowing three jumbo jets into a mountain every week. Globally they are the #1 cause of death for everyone between the ages of 3 and 30. Cars and the infrastructure we build for them are the primary reason why we are losing farmland and forests. The estimated public subsidy cost of free parking spaces alone is larger than the entire national defense budget. They drive for free on the largest taxpayer-funded socialized (for those who care about such things) infrastructure in the country, which they do not come anywhere near paying for with fuel taxes. Every time someone drives their car alone in the US, they are committing treason against the country. Seven percent of the oil that we use in our cars, after being traded back and forth and mixed in big tanks to become untraceable, is sold to us by the governments of the Persian Gulf, some of whom are blowing up our soldiers with the proceeds. I take a bus or ride a bike where I need to go. On occasion i'll ride a cab, because it's uncommon enough that I really can't justify the massive expenses I would need even to maintain a free car, even if the fuel was also free. Furthermore, the DoT keeps track of bicycle safety. It's actually safer to ride a bicycle than to sit in a car, especially if you ride predictably and follow the road rules. Then there's the health benefits of exercize, and the neighborhood safety benefits of having more people out on the street paying attention to goings on in the community.

What do you mean by a "puncher"?

Gun at close range is definitely a tactical black point, yeah. He might have had a good idea of how to use it close in, maybe as a control surface, so I can't say anything to that. Though I have a small theoretical disagreement with Lupin; hyperextension is a valid control mechanism and is in fact how a number of our throws work.

I appreciate wanting to get in touch with your heritage, but really - just do the kali. You do what is available to you that's good. If it's not available, then you don't.

One attack, one defense against the attack, one attack application of the defense, and one defense application of the attack. Rinse, repeat. =)

Hope people find it informative!