JusticeZero

Define 'hardest'? Most strenuous? Longest time to results? Hardest to find?

Not all strength building is about tearing up muscle; quite a bit is just about increasing the performance and responsivity of the muscle you already have. THAT does not need downtime. If you're not doing anything hard enough to leave your muscles hurting and recovering, you can keep on doing it, and you can still expect gains from it.

If you have a day when you really beat yourself up, rest that part till it stops hurting. If it's not so huge, every day is fine, imo.

Hola Chris, what part of Alaska? It's a big place, after all.

I meant, was it the fact that it made the guy fall down more or less instantly you liked, or some other aesthetic?

Which part?

Well then, just go rocking up and say that you want to learn, but you are especially interested in those weapons. You probably won't have a weapon in your hand right away, but you can most likely get to using one soon.

There is also the question of what sort of weapon training you plan to do. If you find an Aikido school, I suspect you will be working with wooden swords, staffs, and jo (basically a cane) quite early on, but I don't know that an aikidoka would ever expect to pick up a sai or kama or nunchaku. Handgun training is a martial art, and obviously you would be using a specific weapon from the word go. I've spent, oh, two hours playing with knives... in my toes... and ten minutes with the knives in my hands, over the past decade. If you want to geek out with swords, you can always look for a fencing club. And so on. It's not like there is one single omni-martial-art out there. =)

What sort of town? If it's somewhere like say, Cold Bay or smaller - an isolated place - you might have to settle for whatever teacher has a plank out. If you pass through Anchorage or Fairbanks or Juneau or some other midsize place regularly, you get some options there. But yeah, varies from school to school.

The problem is that we have several types of kick, which use different mechanics. You can't just pop off a heel thrust kick and think that a crescent kick is the same kick, for instance. In our case it's fairly important as we have to be able to use techniques in two very different ranges, and be able to seamlessly adjust. How much power will you lose doing an outside crescent kick compared to a spinning roundhouse if both of your hands are on the ground? How would you get the power maximized on each? The two are very, very different down there and they will do radically different things. You need to know how they work instead of being satisfied with lobbing your leg in a general direction.

We train a lot of techniques not unlike the kick at 0:30 If we were to clobber each other in the head with wide-base full-body kicks on a regular basis, we would have some medical issues. If you're trying to elicit a realistic combat response in your training partner, you need to be spending all your attention trying to protect yourself from the storm you are calling down, not on trying to score. If you're trying to duel for training, that's a good skillbuilder, but it's not a fight simulation, and it runs danger of adapting the art to the drill, rather than of using the drill to gain skill.

It sounds as though you are saying that the breakdown under stress comes out of abandoning control of breathing, rather than from the specific tempo as internal time regulator, am I interpreting your answer correctly?

Sure.. but until then, it helps to have names so you can explain the mechanics without having to engage in a lot of 'you know, that one where you F, G, and H..? You do I on that one, but not the one where you do Q, R, S, and T..'

Excellent answer and not one I usually see. Very Capoeira. What of the theories which place breath rate control during a conflict as necessary to hold the adrenalized arousal rate in the controlled, performance-assisting range? I would think that a synched breath rate would allow the stylist to drop out of the performance range, assuming a distressed attacker.

I will also add that the combinations we do, at a lowish-intermediate level, I was taught to include referring to defense holes; students are instructed that if any of the common holes in defense or timing appear during the drill, that the other person should exploit them; the one making the mistake is still expected to defend against the 'off-book' attack. That's well within the realm of "form practice" in my interpretation. There are limits to 'full contact sparring". Using full force all the time does tend to break and wear down training partners rapidly, and one still is limited. I will note that, for instance, I do not necessarily consider Judo randori in the same category as "sparring". It is presented sportively rather than as "This is like fighting!" and the structure modulates that force in a way that supports the stylists in wielding their power unrestrained, without breaking their training partners in the process. If one is in a fight, they are trying to break their attacker and render them incapable of attacking, not merely batter them. There is only so much pounding that a person can sustain, and there really needs to be some way to accomodate that paradox and preserve the fighters without raising unrealistic expectations in them. Anything presented as "like a fight" needs to be non-competitive; anything that is competitive needs to not seem like a fight. If the two are mixed, then either people at the school are ending up in the hospital, or bad habits are being ingrained.

I do think that it is important to have an unrehearsed tactical drill of some sort; however, I think that "sparring" in the way one sees has entirely too many flaws. If sparring is focused as a drill for specific purposes, without a sporting, competitive aspect, it is a good drill. If it is presented in a way that it is not seen as combat, with more realistic scenario and armored attacker drills used to prepare for fighting, it's a good drill. Just jumping in a ring and touch sparring though, very rapidly becomes very counter-productive. Sportive sparring greatly rewards a large number of strategies and habits which are deeply counter to SD effectiveness; an extremely effective fighting-prepared fighter will lose every time to a sport-playing touch tag player at a much lower level in a "sparring match". My art has something like sparring/randori which it is heavily focused on. It is speed-modulated instead of power-modulated, and furthermore, it does not "feel" like a fight; while it has a bit of an adrenaline dump to learn to use, the student still understands at all levels that a fight will be different and will not blur a sportive touch sparring match's protective rules into a self defence attack.

Two exercises are important to that; one of the main ones is the basic au. Essentially, do a cartwheel (don't look at the ground!) which passes through a handstand position, and do it very slowly and controlled; when your feet land on the floor on the other side, they should be silent. As you build strength, sink into the au lower and lower. This is much the same as how one might build strength in their legs by practicing increasingly low stances. At a moderate level of strength, practice going into a handstand, then lowering oneself carefully into a headstand, which builds the same muscles by using them to generate resistance even when they might not yet be able to lift the body. A number of other exercises push power in these areas or require it as well; low footwork and a number of other movements require significant strength in this area, and thus help to develop it. I'd also like to develop ability to push into handstand from queda de rins, as it would create an extra set of transitions for me, for example; it is the same motion as a handstand pushup in essence, but one arm is drawn all the way to the hip and has the majority of the body's weight on it.

Made a circle about 3.5 meter diameter out of standing bags. Sent both (not at the same time) students into the circle and asked them to stay in the circle and move around, so long as they don't stop moving, touch ground with only hands, head, and feet, and always have at least one of the former that is not a foot touching the ground at all times. Later, jogo (sparring) in the circle with nothing but upright footwork; no attacks or defences. Also had them drill basic kicks in air as they're still learning basic form for those. We ended up walking fast about a mile between classes to meet the family for dinner; some discussion included. (Well, strictly, the adult walked, and the kid rode on the back of the freighterbike while I pedalled alongside.)

I figured that something like the 'training log' thread might be an interesting way to generate discussion and thought.. lots of us teach, and classes differ so much from one person to the next.. maybe something someone does will be a good idea for someone else.

Taught class today; about 3.5 hours worth. I was working on movement and various kicks, no specific focus. I rode my freight bicycle there and back, as well as a round trip to the bus station to meet the Girl for dinner and some exploring; probably 8 miles in total. Mental note, need to get the studded bike tires switched out for the summer slicks asap.

OK, did a couple of quick tests, I think I have that area isolated. Put your hands up over your head and tuck your head forward a bit. Now go isometric and slowly pull your hands down to your shoulders behind your neck with dynamic tension, resisting with your own muscle tension and making sure to recruit your back behind your armpits; then push back up to where you started from. I suspect that you will note that you've basically just hit all of the muscles you were referring to as feeling sore. That's a handstand pushup with straight spine (if you look at the floor, beyond mangling your posture, you also shift to use different muscle groups) and a pullup. Both are bodyweight exercises, though pull-ups will probably need you to put a bar across a doorframe somewhere, and you can do them isometrically if need be.

I'll have to think on that one, but I -think- those are the main spots that get hit by handstand pushups (always, always keep your spine straight for this instead of looking at the floor, btw or else it moves) and pull-ups.

Well, my style omits side kick. But say, a roundhouse kick (martelo) is generally a martelo whether it's snappy, spinning, done from the floor, or jumping; the mechanics aren't the same as, say, mea lua de frente (outside crescent) to a degree where things break if they are, for instance, switched haphazardly in a sequence drill. In the same way, a front kick done to the side works very much differently from an honest-to-gosh kick radiating from the side of the hip straight down the plane of eyes-spine-hips-heel with knee aligned with the body, that is, a side kick.

30 minutes of handstands outside on pavement while watching a PE class at work.

I'm sure the flexibility for low level kicks will come with a bit of practice. You don't need to kick people in the head really as a rule; abdomen is quite high enough, and many don't even need that. I don't even generally kick head-high standing on my other foot, and my art is considered to be as kick-intensive if not more than TKD. If you can't kick at all, it just means you'll spend the time you would otherwise train kicking on how to get inside of kicks to compensate.