JusticeZero

MMA takes the most proven techniques. Not necessarily the -best-, but the ones used by the people who fight, who learned from people who fight. This creates an effect that we planners call "path dependency"; essentially, you're good at something because you started out good in it, and you're bad at something else because you early on chose to be good in the other thing and arranged everything to support A, not B. What we have NOT seen is any conclusive demonstration that A actually IS better than B, simply because all the people who intend to get good do A because that's what their peers are doing. After all, some of the techniques that are well known and loved by MMA stylists are the ones that even TMA people thought were a bit goofy and impractical before someone tried them on one of the proto-MMA guys and took them out. Suddenly, that technique is "practical, duh!" and no longer in the slowly dwindling set of "ridiculous and impractical" techniques that TMA people haven't yet floored an MMA guy in an octagon with. Though it is important to note that it was pretty easy to see who was staying in and who was losing out - the people who trained against resisting opponents who move in a variety of ways and take real hits? Stayed. The guys who do empty vacuous forms by rote or ultra-stylized touch sparring, while thinking that that was in and of itself sufficient to go against fighters who specialize in ring matches? Went away.

The past week or so, i've been feeling increasingly stiff and achy. It feels like the standard sore muscles from overwork... except for the fact that I haven't been overworking them. If anything i'm underworking my legs; my activity dropped quite a bit a week and a half or so ago when my main reliable student was injured. But now, I get up and mostly just wince and grimace whenver I start moving as I move with my muscles in my legs feeling sore, achy, stiff, and tense. After i've warmed up, it's less uncomfortable, but my output is still quite a bit reduced. Any ideas what it could be?

Right.. It's also a mistake to apply a FLOOR to your force scale, too, in hopes that you can enact some sort of punishment. Sometimes, an optimal response, because of circumstances offered to you by fate, just isn't that high on the scale. Committing to a -more- violent response than opportunity presents an option to use can endanger you needlessly, just as much as committing to a -less- violent response can. For instance, if there are potential witnesses/allies nearby, a loud verbal warning/alarm might be the best option to make the danger go away. Of course, you might think "But I want him to pay for what he was going to do" and pull out a knife - but maybe they had a knife that they didn't have the will to use before it turned into their own defence. Just make yourself safe. Don't adjust your response up or down based on your desire to see the guy suffer, or anything similar to that.

I wouldn't really advise thoughts of that sort. Beyond the fact that there are a lot of sociopaths in the world who can commit horrific atrocities and then happily go to bed and have pleasant dreams (4% of population was a figure I heard), there is the other point, related to the nature of forgiveness and the like.. hate tears ourselves apart. It is not to us to try to exact vengeance or payback, but merely to append two words to the tragedy or horror of that criminal spree: "The End." Whether that involves injury, death, arrest, or merely forceful application of a clue upside the head hard enough that the perpetrator realizes that they should never try it again really doesn't matter. The betterment of the world does not in the slightest bit require or desire an eye for an eye.

The basic thing is that you will get better at doing controlled kicks by doing controlled kicks. Do them slow so you have to work through the entire movement consciously, and do them high. Then do more reps. Don't do them FAST or WITH POWER. Do them TECHNICALLY PERFECT no matter how slow and low you have to do them. And practice those; if you're wiring in good form, the rest of the attributes will come. If you're flailing to try to get height and muscle, they won't.

It's similar to my explanation of dealing with being held by someone with a weapon - "The first thing you need to do is to get their mind out of their trigger finger/knife and into the back of their head. Otherwise you won't have the time or space to act." With a group, you have to get their minds out of the group and into their individual heads - against a mob of people, you can't realistically win, but against a group of thinking, self-aware individuals, you have a bit of hope. Destroying the leader is supposed to shock them out of the group and back into their own heads.

It's an interesting MARTIAL ART STYLE that's developed; it has some definite things that they've shown, and it's popularity means that everyone pretty much needs to assume that a model foe will fight like them. It's mostly a duelling style though rather than being a more pragmatic type of self defense, and they tend to have a lot of ego; mostly they manage to keep their ego because the people who want to train hard often end up going to them, creating a golden cycle that fulfils their expectations because the people who are going to be good keep coming to them because of their present positioning in the media.

After a couple times that you actually DO get run into a wall, and then they use you as a speed bag, you should understand the whole "quit backing up" thing a bit better. Know that you're gonna get hit. Know that you're going to get hit a lot. It's not the end of the world; most of those strikes aren't going to be directed solidly as long as you have a guard up, and you should think of those kind've like rain. You can dash around cowering under awnings, or you can walk confidently; both people will be soaked to the bone when they arrive. Quit thinking "Oh noes, i'm getting hit!" and focus on just keeping guarded and covering a few more vital spots and dishing out accurate techniques in return. Know also that the hits aren't like radiation streaming from your opponent; it's actually all concentrated in a specific point in space in front of them. Any direction to get away from that spot will work; you can go sideways, down, or forward too.

Good observation! Definitely a good thing to point out.. But actually that wasn't what I was referring to. =) There's all sorts of articulation and mobility all up and down and around the torso that people seem to ignore; the result is that they don't have much ability to express movement in the part of the body that they want to start their movements from. They move as a block with their entire torso 'from the dantien', but end up sacrificing a lot of power and mobility because they're using just their leg muscles for tasks that could have been done with the aid of the abdominal and trunk muscles. Instead, they're using all those wonderful muscles just to keep their trunk rigid and level.

Sure; I just think that people tend to focus too much on "moving from the dantien" and not enough on actually being able to MOVE the dantien.

So, basically it's a lot like training on puzzle mats then, I take it.. It still shouldn't give you any issue if you're wearing any sort of shoes - and i'm a firm believer in training in street shoes. Is this just a chipseal job then, where they throw down a thin layer of something sticky and then dump crushed rock on top of it, run a roller over it and then a broom and call it done? Most people classify that as being on the upper end of "a dirt road".. it's certainly not any sort of real paving, and is still prone to corrugating when you run traffic over it. Tomorrow i'll stop on the chipseal on the way to class and see how bad it is, if they haven't paved it over already. (They tore a section of road up to redo it, and the first step was apparently to replace it with chipseal.)

Put your hand on it. Run your palm across the surface quickly while pressing into it lightly. If your hand isn't actually INJURED after you do this - no lacerations or scrapes or places that feel like they've been bruised a bit or similar - then it's fine. I do handstands and breakfalls on that stuff all the time. Asphalt concrete - typically used on parking lots, roadways, etc - is a mixture of crushed rock and bitumen, and is what I presume you are referring to. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/Asphalt_base.jpg/300px-Asphalt_base.jpg I haven't personally seen any asphalt concrete that I wouldn't happily train on; it simply isn't a harsh enough surface to be problematic under normal circumstances. If that's an issue, i'm sure you can find surfaces of portland cement such as you might see on most sidewalks. They run lots of that through parks.

Right, that's what a broom is for. You don't need it to be perfectly clear of gravel in any case; always useful to leave a couple of pieces of rock in there just to keep people awake. You take the big push broom and sweep the space clear and it's not gravelly anymore.

I'm big on practicing in what you wear. My wife is less enthusiastic about it, as I blow through pants at a ludicrous rate..

Both unusual and shady. I'd have run too.

Well, you can always do what i've done in the past and get your hands on a good broom..

My main concern is that martial arts seems to be being relegated to 'something that only children do'. I like watching them do amazing things, but I ache because I want to be able to teach them more than I probably can without raising hackles of parents and the like. (You taught little Suzie how to do WHAT?? You freak, I didn't send them to learn martial arts so you could teach them how to fight!)

Vidro is recovering from injury, so I don't get to do much. If I try, he jumps in and aggravates the injury (a cracked collarbone). Thursday, I covered dirty tricks; knee strike to the floating rib or head, and turning a side slip into a palm strike targeted somewhere from the groin to kneecap, using breath and a body drop for power generation and staying defended. Also covered application of the basic crossing hand movement and its importance in power storage and defense. Saturday was music practice, as I got a berimbau in. So was today.

nworkable.) So I don't really look into it much. I would rather have clean pavement over grass though; you won't damage the grass and it's a much safer surface to work on.

I tend to focus more on the ability to activate the hips abdomen and spine in general, rather than on some simple point within the entire assemblage. People entering my class, including those with martial arts backgrounds, tend to move as a big block from thighs to shoulders; they might 'move from the dantien', but to really get things running well they need to stop 'moving from the dantien' and start wiggling the hips and twisting their spine instead.

They catch on the mat when we're stepping or doing spinning kicks - and we do a LOT of spinning kicks - or when we're twisting our foot relaxedly into the floor with most of our weight on it - which is a large part of our footwork. It's mostly negativa-role (floor movement), tesouras (floor movement - scissors kick takedown with both hands on the floor), mea lua de compasso and armada (both 360 spinning kicks, the first with the hands on the floor) that seem to be the worst offenders for having our toes getting caught in the seams of the mats so far, and we do most of that list every day; negativa-role we generally end up doing about ten lines down the room, give or take, ON DAYS WHEN WE'RE FOCUSING ON UPRIGHT STUFF (ie *not* negativa-role work) I never have any issues doing any of that in everyday street shoes, it's just 'barefoot on puzzle mat' that gives us trouble. Usually it's not toenail so much as 'toe gets caught in the mat a third of the way through a movement where more than half of the weight of the person doing it is on the ball of the foot in the process of twisting around 180 degrees to land on; like having stuff that catches and injures Aikido and Judo players any time they try to do a roll.

They're there because the instructor who is letting me use his space sent some of his students (mostly kids, which I try not to cater to) to my class to try it out. For added annoyance, it's the kick in the 0:20 KO video that they were griping about; It can't sacrifice power without sacrificing speed.

I'm practicing/teaching out of a TKD studio; the owner put down puzzle mats long ago, and if we're inside, that's what we have to train on. Because we do have those damned mats, I need to accept that me and my students are going to continue to be losing toenails on a fairly regular basis - I had one ripped off Thursday, and my senior student lost one off of a different toe, just doing basic stuff. I hate those mats, but I don't have other options. Is there any sort of typical treatment for or concerns to watch for for torn off toenails? Beyond just "wash it off later and don't let it get infected"? The one I tore off the other day still has a little tiny bit of the nail left on the toe, and i'm not sure if that's going to need to be watched or anything.

Well, we do a lot of gliding and stepping with feet and legs that are almost limp, and then we twist a lot standing on the ball of our feet with our heel way up where we can sit on it. In shoes, this is very easy. In bare feet on a grippy surface? Toes get caught a lot. Vidro started getting his toes caught in the mats a lot around the time that he started to grasp the body mechanics. On your other note: I can deal with rolls as a breakfall, but these rolls were just being used as a method of covering ground.

Reasonable enough; the facing meant "hm, there was probably a memory glitch in there, but it was executed solidly and effectively, so that's not so big.." The only reason i'm as picky on getting patterned drills as accurately as I do is because I have people doing them in pairs in range of each other; even then, advanced students can get away with more because I expect them to react to unexpected angles.