JusticeZero

The way I generally formulate it is with a curve of applied revenge/blame potential. Less harmful techniques have less chance of you getting in trouble and being blamed; if an attacker would be able to make it to work the next day after failing to catch you, repercussions are fairly unlikely or minor. In more extreme situations, more harmful techniques are sometimes needed in order to successfully flee the situation in order to not get blamed for the incident. On occasion, enough force can be brought to bear on the practitioner is justified in using lethal force. This brings vast amounts of risk of blame, but on the bright side, if the practitioner can justify it to escape immediate repercussions, the attacker will no longer be able to seek revenge. Using maiming force is probably not as good as using lethal force; this troubles me a bit, but that's the advice i've heard from various sources - 'if you have to turn it past 7, just crank it to 10, you'll get in less trouble that way.' It is a point of our specific martial philosophy that, in any altercation, the practitioner will be the one accused of all crimes in the general vicinity of the attack regardless of any circumstances or evidence. Escape, disabling pursuers if necessary, is thus the preferred response to most defence scenarios. Gentle restraint techniques, as a rule, are foreign concepts for this reason.

Well, I usually use an 'advanced' label for techniques that are based out of things like a transition through plantar bananeira, as many beginning students are not even able to reach that stance in a stable manner, let alone be able to control their fall out of it in a precise way. An alternate way to see it is "If you want to practice this with someone, your partner needs to be pretty darned good at escaping so they don't get maimed."

Proud to be living in a state where texting while driving is both a primary offense and, if combined with any sort of incident, a felony.

It's also possible that you would like the Goju better - feel free to check it out, but don't think that you will do both and be bettered by it. When I was trying to train two arts, I spent more time retraining my basic stancework back and forth than I did learning, so it was a complete waste of time.

Yes, it will cause confusion; yes, it will slow down your progress, particularly if done at the yellow belt level. After you've internalized your core martial art, whatever that is, then go ahead and branch out - but focus first on gaining skills you do not already have.

No, you cannot begin to teach until 84th degree black belt when you have learned the secret fly beats mountain over octopus technique and you have mastered the art of perfection of mind and body! Seriously, their teacher likely told them that they should start teaching on the side while they work on their technique and form. If their teacher is not available, you take what you can get. They might be a good teacher, for now. Go ahead and ask about their training and how they came to be teaching.

A couple of basic escapes right away. More intricate ones on occasion for anyone as part of a technique related to it. We have the advantage that we view "advanced" techniques as just being different combinations of the components of basic techniques; that 'advanced' technique is just a basic technique performed at an unusual angle, usually.

From my post here: I have some ideas in mind, but I am curious as to what you use the folding chair for? The primary thing that I use it for is as an easily portable intention focus. Without a designated target or partner to keep in range and center one's eyes on, it is easy to let one's focus wander into practising techniques aimed in a relatively random and unfocused manner. A chair is an excellent stand-in for a training partner in this regard. If you aren't looking at the top of the chair, you're doing something wrong! Furthermore, it is just the right height that you can practice throwing kicks just over the top - the top of a folding chair on a standing person often approximates floating rib level and the level of the upper abdomen; the seat is around knee height. The legs of the chair are shaped in a handy way to plant foot sweeps on; you can train not just the basic sweep positions, but also deeper hooking and entering techniques by hooking legs other than the closest one presented. The chair is also a useful aid in stretching, or for things like pushups with raised feet. One can tumble over or off of one to train breakfalling techniques. Lastly, while not the most inspiring tool for this purpose, it can be used as a light unbalanced weight to practice lifting and manipulating far from one's center in the more exotic body positions when trying to develop familiarity. Hope some of that helps!

To me, it means "You need to already understand the mechanics behind the components of this technique already, or else the explanation will be impractically unwieldy to teach."

Saw this one on a flash video once.. "You'll never believe this! On the way home, I was attacked by martial artist muggers! Brutally attacked and beaten.. by a Tai Chi gang." "I mean, they only hit me once. But it took half an hour! Who has that kind of time?"

Other than a shoe? Which really is a weapon in a lot of ways, when you start using the structure of the shoe to better advantage with your striking form.. Call me a brute, but i've always had a warm fuzzy for a generic club. Bat, baton, heavy stick, flashlight doesn't matter. Something heavy and easy to improvise, and the mechanics are pretty straightforward. Big 5+D flashlights are fun in their own right with their complete legality and practicality out of combat, and then you have a nice club that you can use for blocking or restraints that has the advantage that in a ready position, you can knock out a good chunk of an attacker's visibility. It's pretty easy for me to find improvised weapons in a pinch though, that's one of the reason we do all those cartwheels all over the place, so we can grab dirt and sticks and rocks and things. I don't really carry much that would make a good weapon, and so I don't really train with exotics that I won't have.

Ghots, do you have palm heel, forearm, wrist, etc. techniques and the like that you can drill and practice instead for now? you can really deliver a lot of punishment with your hands and never make a fist or hit with your knuckle. Even if, heaven forbid, your finger never forgives you for your bag work, it does not by a long shot mean that you can't use hand work.

Paired drills down the room - one attack (advancing) from the back, one defense and retreating role on the other. The point was to 1: stay in synch with the opponent and 2: don't rush the defense - defend when the defense is called for, not when the attack starts to sprout. Walked around the room for over half an hour trying to fine-tune a serious posture issue on my young student; had her sticking her chest and hips forward to an excessive degree to try to offset a bad habit of tilting her hips forward, then arching her back back to compensate, ending with a slouch. Apparently someone in her family walks like that, and has a number of back problems and the like blooming from it. Lots of discussion of how posture grants the ability to control one's balance. Falling and tumbling practice; getting used to going over the inverted position; posture upside down. Zugzwang is a myth: Importance of, when you don't know what to do, doing SOMETHING. Keep things changing so that you can keep opportunity churn, rather than just letting the other person advance their agenda.

Hi there! Don't step out of techniques being demonstrated on you; there will be no stepping out of them if they are done faster, which whoever is demonstrating will have to do if you keep walking out of slow motion demonstrations. This can hurt; I had a student briefly who liked to walk out of takedowns as if to challenge them - so I had to actually DO the takedown once or twice on them. They didn't step out of that. =) Don't 'just go through the motions'. It is better to do a technique slowly and deliberately ten times with focus on where the power is going than to do a casual flail in the general shape of the technique desired 1,000 times. You are going to suck. A lot. You are going to flail around, fall down, and be a complete klutz. That goes away eventually. You'll still feel like a klutz, but in time, your definition of "clumsy" will refine to be better than the newer people's best technique. Don't think you are hopeless just because you're not very good when you start; if you ever find something that you are amazingly skilled at the first time you try it, give it up because it won't impress anyone. If it's worth doing, it's worth making a complete hash of to begin with.

Go get it looked at and X-rayed; something might be structurally mucked up that might still be correctible. (6 months rest? Probably would make it permanent.)

I suppose. I guess i'm just trying to find a way to slip in the idea that one does not have to abandon being feminine to attack effectively; indeed, many of the attributes of good offense are based in attributes that fall more on the female side.

Pull their arm straight, then attack the elbow joint is the first thing i'd think of. You already have one point of control and at least one of the attacker's limbs tied up before you start moving after all. I'll have to see if cocorinha lines up for that or not when I have someone with more plausible dimensions in front of me to beat on; it would be 'fall into squatting stance and X block up to force the attacker's arms to extend, spread block with body twist to expand between attacker's torso and attacker's elbow joint'. If the attacker follows you down to keep their arms bent, jump upward into a head butt to the throat, and drop the X into a downward hammer strike to the groin, then grab their thigh and use the remaining interposing hand to see if you can now slip your heel behind their other foot and dump them backward onto their head. If they persist in maintaining some control in that but are going down, dive with them and do a cartwheel off of the elbow on their sternum. Like I said though, i'll have to check the geometry on that on someone - probably Vidro, since he's taller than I am. The attacker would probably twist to an angle that would call for somewhat different technique, maybe needing a scissors takedown in the middle instead.

Anyone have any thoughts on telling females to hit like a woman rather than a girl?

???mestre - we're from Brasil, not Mexico. =) I've done Capoeira for years and years, i've done taiji for a couple years. Some people put a lot of stock in Candomble's influence. Myself, I feel it is essentially a distraction, much in the way that obsessing over five element theory or animals or whatever can become a distraction. It's got some good stuff to learn, but that's early on, and then people say "There must be more, deep mystical secrets.." and distract themself. This stuff isn't that complex. Learn psychology, learn how eyes work, study how people respond under stress, watch people and mirror them. If you want to study Candomble, study Candomble; it will give you a number of insights, but you don't need to overstudy this. As far as moving with your joints - look, we're moving all the time. Vidro (student of mine) notes, after he's been taught ginga in pretty exacting detail, that it takes very little energy to maintain it; it's this happy little metronome of weight shifts and using the calves as a spring. Our legs in a kick are LIMP. I don't tense up even when I DO hit something in general. It just works better that way; we don't slow ourselves down or tire ourselves out. Use coiling body dynamics, dropping, things like that for power instead of straining with your muscles. Nothing magical there. Oh, and the concept you mentioned ("moving with the joints and not the muscles which I take to mean to be aware of your body and keep relaxed until the right moment of focus") appears pretty often in boxing too. People who go to a gym in hopes of being the next Holyfield/Tyson/whoever get that lesson pretty early on. Although, 'move with your joints instead of your muscles' is usually 'use your balance and your hips to move yourself instead of straining away with the nearest extremity'. IIRC, and the Okinawan/Japanese stylists can correct me on this, the Chinese martial arts are the ones to go into extensive detail on mystical/philosophical things like that. JMA tends to use, if anything, a Zen core of philosophy. I rather like Zen; 'Quit overthinking this; relax, clear your mind, and just do it.' Here's a book you might be looking for. When you're looking at that review, make sure to read and understand the negative reviews too. The guy was guilty of that stuff, imo.

Lots of people talk glowingly about desire and will and such. However, desire and mindset do not trump the laws of physics and/or biology; the graveyards are full of people who wanted very badly to overcome the situation they found themselves in shortly before their arrival.

One other thing - "developing your ki" is in no way a substitute for working up a sweat trying to build your skills and physical strength up, probably feeling like you look like an incompetent fool the whole time. Many of the mystical feats you see really are magic - David Copperfield style hocus. They look really very impressive and awe inspiring, then you look into it and find out that there's a party trick way to do it that just happens to match what you saw exactly. Others are "mystical" because someone got sick of trying to convince people that it really was a trained skill and not a magical feat of supernatural ability; i've had to fight with this before, when people start arguments with me trying to convince me that my ability to do moderately acrobatic feats are not because of my development of strength, body dynamics, and balance as I claim, but rather because of my tapping of supernatural magic powers. Expect that 'mystical' skills you hear about really are all about putting in the hard work to model good body mechanics.

Sounds like your interests are all over the place right now. You like both "classical" and extremely modern recent martial arts, you like internal stuff and external stuff, and you like a variety of categorization/classification/structural schema introduced mainly by chinese martial arts - pretty much all of the varying ways that the chinese found to classify and consider things really, even if those methods really weren't, imo, expected to be mixed. There's really not all that much that you *haven't* mentioned there! For starters, do not expect to tie all of that together. No-one ties all of that together. The successful ones start somewhere, build that up, and then connect -some- other things in as they develop their skills. I'd suggest doing a good survey of what is available to you, find ONE thing that fits decently well, and devote yourself to it, keeping an eye out at how others do things. You actually need that path dependency to make solid headway, but you want to keep your eyes open to the thoughts and methods that others are doing so that you can 1:keep it real on your own stuff and make sure that the skills you are learning are good and 2: keep adapting your skills to be able to deal with what other people are doing.

I would note.. Boxing once had elbow, knee and ground techniques. They are no longer applied in sparring.. and.. Theoretically, a superb TKD, Karate, Gungfu, Taiji, Aikido, etc. stylist in a dirty garage somewhere can get very good, escalate, etc and maybe even go pro.

Things like back fists, high kicks in general were both seen as somewhat dubious by TMA's and as completely silly by the MMA crowd.. then one day, the MMA people adopted them, and instantly they became "practical". The set of "Practical, MMA tested" techniques has changed over time, generally by adopting techniques that were a mere day before considered to be absolutely ridiculous impractical fluff. MMA seems to me to be a big exercise in path dependency and personal history edits, all working toward development of a specific martial art style with it's own blind spots and pre-packaged assumptions and doctrines. They're pounding hard to work out their style right now, just like so many martial arts that they dismiss pounded hard in their formative years. They aren't inherently DIFFERENT, though; their history dictated a number of elements go into their development that are dictated by the well-forged tools available to them at this unique moment in the world's history. One day, MMA people are going to be teaching the kids class, and will look up in surprise to hear that the world dismisses them as formulaic and impractical, just like the Karate guys down the street and the Kung Fu forms school next door. Don't go there, they'll hear, those MMA sports guys aren't realistic or practical like *insert the latest new thing here* is...

I do see a lot of "feminine" attributes that I flat out dislike and want to squash. Striking meekly and apologetically without commitment - a 'girl' thing. Trying to avoid putting forth any effort by feigning weakness - a 'girl' thing. There are some 'boy' things that annoy me that mostly only turn up in the males, but most of the males I deal with are pretty willing to set aside those bad habits, where the 'girly' tendencies to let weakness and meekness dominate them is exceedingly difficult to break through even briefly in the female students who have them. Not all females do those frustrating 'girly' things, but if any males do them, I haven't found any of them. I think I did hear this construction of the idea once.. "Don't hit like a girl, damn it, hit like a woman!" Pretty much I don't want them to hit like they're playing pattycake and apologizing for touching people because they're oh so traumatized; I want them to hit like the feminine female action hero type of their choice; confident, precise, cool, and without excessive masculine bravado.