JusticeZero

The gloves also improperly change your target selection criteria. Faces are a horrible target to punch because of all the bones and edges, and the boxing guard actually has pretty big holes in it when done without gloves. The old school bareknuckle boxers had a much more Traditional Karate like stance with a lower guard.

Maybe on the general case, mainly because of the emphasis on contact and fitness that you get in the usual Boxing gym, but Boxing is just as stylized as Karate, with unrealistic elements (huuuuge gloves that alter the tactics massively and don't condition the hands for striking) and there are Karate styles that do some serious amounts of knocking each other around the room. (*looks for Ev*)

I had it noted by one person I dealt with who had trained a few things that the best combination he knew of arts was western Boxing with Judo, as they both used almost the exact same stances in most cases; as soon as it gets into the boxing clinch, you are in Judo's realm already in a proper Judo stance and position. Both of those arts are easy to find and affordable and have lots of contact and competition to test yourself with.

The first question is "What is available?" Without knowing more about the area, nothing can really be said. I don't know where you are geographically and I don't know what your options are. You will most likely need to check out the schools in range of you one at a time to get a feel for them. The second point is that you are almost certainly not at a McDojo if you have contact sparring. That word is being tossed around far too loosely, since a McDojo is, by definition, an unrealistic horror story with awful instructors to flee from, which most places are not. McDojos would never dare to do anything in class that might give you any experience to compare what you are learning with reality. TKD is specialized on kicking. They have punching, but their competitive rules de-emphasize it in favor of linear kicks from a side stance. If you want competition, you might also look into Judo (an Olympic sport, even - it's based on grabbing people and throwing them on the ground hard, but they don't wrestle there much), or a good old Boxing gym. Neither will spend too much time making you memorize forms. If you can find both, you have a great combo, since they use the same stances and transitions. Then the MMA stuff like Muay Thai that you can sometimes find, though i'm not sure that there are many schools of that that aren't just MMA-style schools at this stage, and that involves rolling. Which you really shouldn't dismiss offhand, lots of people find it to be a really interesting skillset to work with, and it's easy to find competitions that involve it at this stage. Next for the exotics - you might not even have any of these. Things like Savate, etc. can be found scattered here and there, but they are not commonplace so there's not much point in suggesting them. Ask if you see something you don't recognize for a synopsis.

Yeah, that's the whole point.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/07/130107fa_fact_green?currentPage=all Yeah, you're going to ask why I put this up. The few people advanced enough to be working on such things will see the three or four concepts in here that are pretty darned interesting, and others will at least learn a few things about operational methods of pickpockets. It's a bit hard to explain all the little bits though, since it's long and rambly, but it drops a lot of things about attention, gaze, and movement. I thought it was interesting, gave some new ideas on ways to hide movements or close distance.

I assume it's decent enough, though the only Paleolithic people it seems to be based on appear in kids' cartoons. My main concern with the meat-based diets in the past few years is that our fuel and land supply can't handle it on a large scale unless we switch to insect protein. It might still be a really good diet, but people have eaten a lot of things. The main thing that seems to trip us up is the huge amount of obscenely sweet and fatty stuff that is all over the place whenever we stop trying to micromanage everything we eat. Pretty much any special diet seems to accomplish that.

Why wouldnt it be a "valid" weapon? How are you defining "Valid"? I mean, i'd define a towel or a bicycle lock as valid.

You are most likely about to be asked about reps, diet, and your specific goals. I'll just say it now so you can start answering before the experts get to it.

Well, yeah, there are lots of things that we've been doing all our life that we've learned to do that the evidence is now saying is counterproductive. We haven't been examining these things very closely for all that long. But nowadays there's a lot of research going into exercise and athletics. I try to track that and keep my techniques up to date.

Stretches extend the muscle, and in part this is done through defeating the reflex of the muscle to tighten and pull back from the end of its reach. Muscles have a reflex where when it gets close to its full range of motion, it tightens to pull back away to prevent injury. This is why when doing a static stretch, you wait a few seconds then can increase the stretch; the reflex is set up to stop sudden movement. If you are doing stretches first, you are trying to disable or lessen this reflex, immediately before you do a lot of movements that rapidly move lots of body mass violently at the edge of range of motion. It's like cutting your brake line before driving through an obstacle course "so you can go faster".

A hip-pointer injury is a bone bruise at the top of the hip caused by an impact. What you are talking about sounds closer to hip flexor issues. If you are doing your stretching before exercise, your students have much less defense against this type of strain, so as they pop their leg up, and they reach the end of their range of motion, their muscles do not prevent the strain from going to connective tissue, and the inertia means that it gets strained with a fast yank. I have no idea why it would only be women reporting this. I can think of a few things that might skew the statistics slightly in that direction, but none of them should dominate to that degree.

Well, for one thing, stretching before strenuous exercise actually increases your chances of injuring the joints. The important thing before such exercise is the warm-up, but stretching before exercise counters the body's responses to protect itself from over-straining joints. Stretching should be done as a cool-down exercise instead, to stretch the muscle tissue that has been freshly torn by muscle building exercise and help it to repair itself at full length. Second, pain in the hip can be caused by a variety of issues; a hip-pointer injury is one specific type of impact-caused injury, which looked like a violently red bruise visible on the skin.

A fair amount of discussion about the need to specifically train to regulate heartrate for best performance under stress. Breathing exercises are specifically mentioned, though the actual exercises were not detailed.Some of these ideas seem like they might be important for some of the people who are training for competition. Most of the ideas aren't specific to the racing bikes that were being discussed. This isn't specific to racing; I recall both Miller and MacYoung advising breathing and relaxation type techniques to moderate the heartrate when entering potential combat situations. As I recall, that advice was to shrug and relax the shoulders and force a deep and slow breath as part of the movement into a fence position. (I'm hazy who suggested what, and don't have the references in front of me, alas.) Competitors, however, have a lot more time to prepare and a longer encounter time. Any thoughts on the matter?

Avoiding a sucker punch is somewhere between unreasonably difficult to impossible, and i'd peg it far closer to impossible. I wouldn't be alarmed by not being able to defend against something like that with physical techniques. The only defense there is awareness and psychology to try to read the intent being decided on, because once it flies it is too late.

Check out other schools, talk with others about your training and technique. Get an idea of where you stand with everyone else in ability. If you are progressing well in skill, there might be a mismatch with the belt but at least you are learning good skills. If people start pointing out massive and dangerous holes in your technique (locked joints, broken force chaining, sparring outside of encounter range, et cetera) then you should probably take that into consideration.

Learn how to do zhuan zhuang posture training as well as you can and practice it. Standing and the grabbing the tree one, things like that. Gongfu seems to be more focused on postural alignment and skeletal structure than what you are used to.

Again I find myself advocating for the Guest Belt, a belt wildly alien to your ranking system to be worn by visiting artists unfamiliar with your school.

Hmm. It looks like those are normally caused by an impact to the hip, not from a movement. I assume a female hip is just a more prominent target if a force is directed at the side of the body.

I just pointed out that specific issue since it's a common and recurring theme I see. There are a lot of other problem areas that people have with their posture, and those are important too. "hip-pointer"?

Had to do some serious repair work yet again on my female student's posture. Certain basic structural tests were being failed, muscle pain was being reported, and we simply had to stop and work on fixing it. Posture is critically important to martial arts in power generation, power absorption, and general health. She has complained in past about back pain. This has often been associated with particularly prominent features of female anatomy; her body form is overall near the median in any given measurement, though, and this is no exception. When we worked on trying to perfect certain aspects of form and power, certain problematic features of her spinal alignment - which were testably correctable - became quite clear. These are all habitual alignment issues that affect her posture any time i've ever seen her around, even while she is doing other non-social things and hasn't yet become aware of my arrival, such as when I stumble across her studying on campus. They are specific breaks from a natural posture that are ingrained. Furthermore, she is not in the least the only female I see with similar posture issues in either direction. Around the middle school years, females are suddenly encumbered by a certain body form change which has social effects, particularly on the middle school boys that they have to spend a lot of time around. Through specific posture changes, this effect can be enhanced or repressed, and the effects are a double-edged sword no matter how much or how little is applied. There are different strategic effects of either strategy, and it is not at all unreasonable that one might learn to default to one strategy or the other for all situations and adjust other social tactics to fit. At this same time this is happening, everyone is also experiencing shifts of limb length and weight distribution which force them to have to re-adjust and relearn how to walk and move. If both of these are combined, the postural shift becomes ingrained as "normal" in spite of being out of actual alignment. Increasing "display" involves the drawing back of the shoulders out of it's neutral position. Several back muscles are activated to pull the shoulders back, and remain continuously flexed. The rib cage is raised, bringing it out of alignment. This also causes the head to adjust to counterbalance, by being bent forward. This causes it to be more difficult to create a solid link of force through the body to the feet without relying on the muscles of the torso instead of normal skeletal structure, and can cause muscle pain created by fatigue from muscles forced to be flexed continuously. increasing "display", however, causes the illusion of increase, which might cause an illusory "mass" association with pain. Decreasing "display" reverses the process, activating different muscles in the torso, but placing a load on the back muscles to hold the torso upright in lieu of using the structure of the spine. Again, back pain can result. This posture also has been associated with large mass, though this association need not be strictly necessary; again, this may add to a false correlation with pain symptoms. Exercises where the pelvis is held slightly forward and underneath the body, over hip-width feet weighted over the ball of the foot, with the spine raised up solidly, shoulders slightly concaved, where one attempts to relax into the posture while managing it are well known and associated with Chinese internal arts such as Taijiquan. They are easily researched, but rarely seen outside of this specific set of arts. In Capoeira, this effect is found through endurance ginga, for the simple reason that bad posture in ginga quickly becomes painful. Nonetheless, I prefer to ask students to stand around and practice posture on their own, rather than to simply inflict repeated backaches on them until they improve. These postural elements are critical for other arts. If a student's spine is out of alignment, it robs power from her techniques and causes her to seem physically weaker. Any punch comes from the power chain from the back foot; the back foot is solidly in contact with the floor, and a structural connection can be made through the knee, hip, spine, and shoulder which blocks the force of the strike from rebounding her back off of her target. If her spine is tilted back or forward, this chain of force gains another serious leakage where the muscles of the torso are required to maintain the spine in position, while fatigued and flexed out of their optimum position. Therefore, posture is important, and this is a specific issue to be aware of and address in ones own training. This attention to structure and balance creates a more "grounded" feel to the posture; one where the student is creating a posture which is more ready and strong as a human being rather than a posture which is appealing or deferential as a viewed female. The first possesses inherent power, where the second merely attempts to co-opt the power of others; the power of onlookers can be withdrawn, where the power of the self cannot.

5/28 Posture, posture, posture. Lots of structural testing of basic ginga positions. Weight distribution when in transition between several basic positions. Weight shifts must be explicit and centered, staying over a foot instead of ballistically trying to converge weight and foot from different origin points. Effects of women's habitual display/conceal adjustments regarding their chest on their spinal alignment and muscles. This was deranging good stancework in particular and causing muscle pain. It's not the weight distribution, it's the exertion to hold the spine and shoulders in a position that is not a normal neutral position. Examination of the position of the relaxed hands when in an actual neutral position and how to link that to a different type of "confident". This includes discussion of the CMA Zhan Zhuang exercise, which I so far have found to be an important thing to practice, though usually more critically for females due to the aforementioned habitual postural derangements. (Unlike girls, middle school guys can't change their social position in predictable ways by adopting bad posture while they are having to relearn how to stand and walk. Thus, their posture usually isn't actively bad) This is probably worthy of a discussion thread of its own. One takedown - no name on it, but it looks like an aikido pulldown of some sort with a body twist to bring the arm along, setting the other arm down on the shoulder and sinking. As part of this, the importance of trying to do all of ones takedown type movements focused on the elbow near the ribs and near the spine for leverage. Arm/hand attacks: galopante (hooking centrifugal palm strike), cutelo (backfist/hammer strike thingy), cutevelhadas both cutting and thrusting, palma along centerline to face. How to combine hand attacks with footwork. How to use the footwork combined with strikes to create angles and move to clear space to escape ambushes. Discussion of ambushes as spatial traps in choke points; awareness of choke points and watching for potential threats positioned along choke points in ways that they can close in. Importance of focusing on seeing targets and guying an attack into the hole in defenses instead of seeing the body or trying to think of counters to movements. How to use a plastic grocery bag with a small object in it as a home practice equipment for strikes.

Back is out. You have more options than forward: You have lateral left, tangent left, lateral right, and tangental right. None of those are the bulldog charge you seem to be expressing a concern about.

It's my name and a number.

5/21/13 A footwork pattern to defend and slip around the side as a fakeout. Deep stepping using kick mechanics, using a kick to power a sudden lunge. Focusing off the side of a person to watch them in peripheral vision. How to size up a room, how to watch people in a room, the predator mental drill for homework. Suggestions on distributing valuables to avoid crises from pickpockets.