JusticeZero

He is absolutely correct. If you retreat, you are being controlled and probably put into a worse situation. You wouldn't have had to have that rule put in in my class because it's one I put in on day one. You're thinking "forward" or "backward". There are lots of other directions! Before sparring, think of what will happen if you put about a dozen folding chairs randomly in the space. Now try sparring. If you back up, you're going to get run into all of them. Instead, move forward, but forward doesn't need to be straight toward your opponent. Cut angles. Our "sparring" is in a ring about fifteen feet in diameter, with people ringing it. If you hit the edge, you trip over people. We use quite deep stances and constant footwork, so we eat up a lot of that space. If you retreat, you're in someone's lap.

A boxing gym would be counterproductive since you'd be drilling completely alien footwork. You need to drill this on your own time.First, break down your form for all of the footwork in it. Everywhere in your form where you move a foot, drill those in combinations, just roam around using those for speed and accuracy and distance. Now, get yourself a folding chair. That's your opponent. Using those steps, start running circles around the chair using only those movements, keeping your guard up and relevant to the chair. The chair is throwing punches and kicks and if you give it your back you are sunk. In conjunction with the steps (not in between, at the same time as), throw out defenses and counterattacks. DO NOT PAUSE OR STOP. Do not repeat ANYTHING. Fade in, fade out, circle circle, left right left right. Next exercise, put several chairs down. Do the same thing, but now and then shift your focus to an adjacent chair, as if your target had moved there. DO NOT TRIP OVER ANY OF THE OTHER CHAIRS. Now is a paired drill. Block off a section of floor no more than ten feet across. Get someone else to spar with you and only count "ring out". But don't actually TOUCH each other, and you can't stop moving.

Well, I cover a lot of tactical movement and try to have tips on how criminals plan attacks as main curriculum, too.

That is most of what I know. She knows the language. I have no idea what the model threat for rural central America is in this case.

I don't know if that data is available. It's a rural area she's heading to from what I've been told.

So my student is going to be going to Columbia this summer; she is going to be spending time in smaller poor communities with a small delegation, I don't know what all she's going to be doing. I have a couple classes before then; what are some things I should cover as far as important skills to work on?

I'm teaching on campus, 50 minutes by bicycle and an hour by bus. I was training at a yoga place 8 blocks away, but the one i was training with there moved.

Palm or wrist. Conditioning the knuckle into a weapon takes time and we aspire to desk jobs.

The issue isn't that you "should not strike a female", it is that if you do, regardless of the situation, you will be judged more poorly for it than the circumstances call for, and you may be attacked by men who have been strategically or incidentally placed on the scene as her weapons.

I'm sure some of that comes from having to structure to deal with the "zomg when I was a kid I could get a month of classes for $40 and you want $60? omg mcdojo" crowd.

There seem to be lots of options, but I don't know anything about them. try googling for "open source billing software" and tweaking the search terms to fit and you will see a bunch of things that may or may not be appropriate to the problem at hand.

Well, there are other costs involved too. One thing that bugs me when I hear about "how much things should cost". Take bicycles, for instance; people go looking for these box store bikes because "When I was a kid, you'd go to the store and pay $50 for a bicycle and it'd last forever." Yeah, and then you'd throw it in the truck, drop $10 to fill the gas tank, and grab a $0.49 burger. Also, the bike was a single speed cruiser without suspension. Today the price point for that class of bicycle is about $250-300. The box store things with a bunch of fancy frills that you can buy for less than a hundred dollars are engineered to last 70 miles from store to dumpster, and use nonstandard parts. I can put more miles in than that in a week of commuting. "Back in the day, martial arts schools only charged like, $20 a month..." ...yeah, and what was their overhead? all that stuff is affected by inflation.

You can be aggressive with a smile and a laugh, too. One of the CM's i've trained with before has this un-nerving thing in his game where he presses the offense like crazy, grinning and mixing in these moves like something out of the Stooges while he steamrollers people back. It's not an anger thing in the slightest.

Camo? Zebra? Rainbow? Anything that's plainly out of place in your grading color scheme without looking like a punishment to wear.

Aggression is not an emotion, aggression is a strategy. A tire can be aggressive. A computer program can be aggressive. A treatment program delivered by a doctor can be aggressive. Anger is an emotion. People who are angry often use aggressive tactics, but the tactic is completely separate from the emotion.

LibreOffice will do the all the same things and is free. Is it just billing you're looking for, or what? There's lots of open source programs out there for that sort've thing..

Yeah, that looks like a good explanation. I've seen a Brazilian Capoeira movie from the 70's. Some of the most gawdawful bad chop-socky i've ever seen. The hero would do a throw at mooks and they'd fall over dead and not be thrown.

Many people who *don't* practice karate can take shots to the groin with little or no effect. At least, not until after it is no longer relevant to the situation. I've gotten clobbered there with a hard kick. I didn't even notice until a minute after i'd sat down. Then I had to drag myself to the bathroom and be sick, mind you. But in a self defense situation i'd have gotten away with whatever I needed to do to you by then and run. People like to think they're this magic move that defeats MMA training. They aren't; you still have to deliver the attack, just like any other body or head shot, and you can still be dismantled when you try. There's no magical component about one head strike that exempts it from the usual concerns of defense and counter just because it's aimed at a sensory center.

This is the reason (well, one of them) why I like the idea of a 'Guest Belt' completely outside the normal colors. 'You have some unspecified training in a different school, but you arent ranked here.. here, wear this black-and-white stripe belt till you test.'

There is a distinction between an "___ese instructor" and "Instructor X, from ____". in the second case, go ahead. You're learning from an instructor who is teaching in a general way to students. The first is worrisome, because i've seen entirely too many ridiculous "traditions" created from whole cloth out of silly (and often racist) stereotypes and sold to Americans who gobble them up and think that they have gotten real value.

'History and cultural roots' tends to be a canned and marketed tourism product. I would rather deal with real things.

Aside from touristy 'experiences', what measurable skill results can you expect from a foreign teacher that you cannot get closer?

How much really does it matter what flag the guy who trained before you was living under? People are people.

They used to use Combato, now I think they just grab a couple of tricks and move on, since the troops are overwhelmingly expected to use the "One Finger Pull" instead of boxing it out on an open battlefield.

I've already made my opinion on the matter pretty clear that it's just raging cultural xenophilia at work. there's no rational reason.