JusticeZero

Let me detail this a bit more. My lineage doesn't do side kicks, because to us, it looks a bit like some of the taiji postures with arms separated and away from the face with chin high would look... to a boxer, who has 'keep your head covered and chin tucked' drilled into them from day 1. However, that specific resistance is in part based on a form peculiarity in my line. Some schools do use side kick, apparently related to a difference in their footwork that is probably a geographic variant or some such thing, or they do side kick because someone along their line wanted to add it to their system even if the body dynamics didn't quite mesh. That said, there are a lot of kicks in Capoeira, and the terminology is not standardized; all of the schools and books I have encountered so far personally use the term "Martelo" (lit: hammer) to describe a roundhouse, but there is plenty of disagreement on any technique's name from line to line. I think i've heard "hammer" used to describe the so-called "capoeira" kick, which I have seen described by at least four names in portuguese and which our line does not use either for similar reasons to the side kick - specifically, the lineage I am in enters esquiva lateral and au by turning to the side fully, and both techniques are based on positions related to au and esq. lat with the hips perpendicular to the direction of travel.

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.

Two small targets A few musical instruments - alas, waiting on my teacher to finish making me a new set of bows to play, mine shattered awhile back and I've been in withdrawal ever since, but also travelling and such too much to procure new ones, and I don't know enough about how to make them yet to experiment with local wood (will try to correct that next time I'm in the same city as my teacher) A CD player - important! A folding chair - probably the most important piece of training gear I own Padded pole - albeit a bit more makeshift than i'd care for

Mmh. I'd think that you can make a decent amount of that power back with good use of chambering and the hips, but i'll admit to not being completely conversant in how -exactly- a Karate stylist of any given lineage does a front kick as compared to any other given front kick. Further, if you chamber high, you should be able to drive into the floating rib area of someone side on, going over their knee and thigh. You don't -have- to just sweep up like you were kicking a soccer ball off the floor.

Many styles consider the primary benefit of a front kick to be in generating space, with the shock of impact being a nice bonus. That said, if one likes front kick, then by all means work on perfecting it. It's a completely reasonable technique to chose as one of one's few signature movements, in my opinion. It is a good thing to specialize in a couple of solid bread and butter techniques above and beyond one's commitment to learn the full curriculum; I've often heard of those who are highly regarded for fighting skill speaking of spending two or three years just studying one single technique in depth.

Personally if I was teaching in that class, i'd forbid the two problems to wear their black belts for now. Maybe I can't take them away, but they can't be worn in my class until I see behaviour and skill representative of their rank again.

I'm trying to work this out a bit; I don't use an oriental horse stance per se, but I do spend a lot of time squatting and lower in my art. What i'm seeing looks like the form of cocorinha used in some Capoeira lineages that uses V shaped squat and L negativa with flat foot as a result. My line uses the form of squat with knees together, and that involves coming up onto the balls of the feet, and developing flexibility in that joint in order to do so. The V cocorinha is one that seemed fairly sensitive to the build of the practitioner. Nonetheless, you should be able to build some body familiarity with that general position - looks like the 'squat stretch' in your first length, but without the stretching aspect - by just squatting down and sitting there for awhile, while moving your arms, head, leaning in various directions, and such. Maybe while talking on the phone, reading the newspaper, or something. With any luck, experimentation will build your capacity to move your CG over your feet with trunk control in a squatting position more readily.

Well, the first question would be "What do you want out of your training?" Of those, I personally think somewhat highly of Judo; many (but not all) TKD schools are garbage, and have given the art a bad name; there are some solid fighting TKD teachers out there, but they are generally the exception. Don't rule out things like Boxing just because they don't come from places that speak foreign languages. Keep digging around in your area; many of the best teachers can't afford yellow pages advertisements.

Yep, that's the one. It has it's advantages, certainly. It also has a rather short base - good in some applications, bad in others - and without a large structure change, is limited to relatively small steps. The 'float' popularized by boxers has it's cons as well. Boxers get use out of it and are successful, but then again, they also train a lot and originally worked with tightly constrained rules and circumstances. I use deep stances all the time, generally pegged at feet the same width apart as the length of the extended leg, and I run circles around people with ease. I also keep my elbows in and so on. The boxing stance just sights in as very permeable and immobile to me when i'm sizing up targets and such and working maneuverability.

Shin to floating rib, from the trailing leg of a lateral step - IF i'm upright, and that's a big if. More often, it's shin or instep to the head (depending how tall they are), full rotating, with both of my hands on the floor.

Well, after fairly extensive breaking down and rethinking of tactics, I have a hard time believing that people EVER fought using high boxing stance.. it seems very impractical and immobile to me, and it has, in fact, been modified into the form now seen due to sporting adaptations which people are now individually trying to work their way back out of after discovering the issues thus created. Nonetheless, it is a very influential stance in the martial arts today and is commonly replicated verbatim in a very rigorously dictated manner. It's not hard for me to believe that if some people were being very effective using the forward stance or gungfu stances, that others would start rigorously adopting them for similar reasons. Once these people started training hard, using those stances, the superiority of those stances would become in ways self fulfilling. Someone skilled used that stance, people driven to become good copied and worked with it, and then since they trained hard, they had good results and the cycle perpetuated. Currently the people who train hard and research best practice are copying the boxers and derivatives thereof, and most of the people who use the stances you look down on do not do much to prove their abilities with them. Maybe in a hundred years, it will be just considered common sense that nobody fights using those ridiculous boxing bounces, all REAL fighters fight from some other stance, maybe deep horse or some such, that was popularized by a bunch of fighting pioneers after the MMA/boxing crowd got geriatric and started teaching kindergarteners in no-contact classes.

Well, I play, I don't spar; in a chess game you don't throw away a few pawns just to get a feel of the other player before you start trying to advance toward a checkmate that I know of; you start hammering away and working your strategy straight from the word go and any personality will reveal itself on it's own accord. In any case, the concept of spending thirty seconds of one of your fighting drills not trying to work on your offense and defense but instead teasing the other person as a personality test seems like a waste of a perfectly good 60 seconds. It wastes your 30 seconds for working on a self-defense-useless skill, as an attacker won't play pattycake with you for half a minute to get to know you more intimately; it wastes your opponent's time for the exact same reason. What are you trying to develop with this exactly? Seems like precisely the sort of thing that led me to disregard sparring as an unrealistic and misleading drill counter to developing martial skill. If this is the sort of thing that people think is 'realistic', i'd rather they do something more reality-based like forms or blindfolded defense drills or bag work or some such. Trying to read what someone will do before you ever start trading blows is a good skill to learn, though. Get a bit of malicia and figure out what sort of sneak attacks they might throw when they think you aren't paying attention.

Their build, the way they walk, their facial expressions, their eyes, and the way they shake hands first are all clues. Beyond that, i'll get a good feel when they're in the ring.

Well, fighting games usually aren't accuate representations as the animators program in the movements based on themself, whimsy, or whatever. There's a Capoeira Regional character in 3+, but the applications are strange and there are motion captures of a gymnast mixed in. The rest? No clue. Some gungfu guys, some karateka, Hwoarang is TKD, and so on.. but how accurate any of them are is dubious.

Was teaching the daughter, who i've just started teaching, how to do basic striking with the hands. In this case, galopante, which is basically a slap that works much like a boxing hook. Her mom was sitting on the sidelines at the time (she doesn't train because of a foot injury) "Okay, you need to twist your hips like so, and drive through, then extend your hand out to hit the bag. Just be careful, because.." *THWACK!!* "OWW! *clutching elbow, wiggling fingers, and making pained gestures*" "Honey, you're supposed to hit it softer!" "I WAS HITTING IT SOFTLY! Owwwie.." "...you can generate a lot more power that way than you expect. Um.. are you okay?" Mental note: do not teach power generation to a student for the first time while they are next to a bag...

If they are incorporated, they are not different styles and you should not be able to see any differentiation between classes beyond the types of drills and exercizes you are doing - you practice the one incorporated art every day. If they are differing styles, then it seems foolish to be randomly mixing them to me.

Mm. My dislike of mixing system training togther is intense, to a large degree because I essentially wasted two years of training that way. I don't recommend it to anyone; using different art's DRILLS, sure, but only one set of movement principles should be used. I tried crosstraining two arts once. I was using a lot of my training time trying to undo the other training I was doing.. and in the end, I only got a tiny bit of material out of it, because the structure was incompatible and didn't map. Out of two years of being continually broken down in both classes for having form elements from the other style which were completely incompatible and dysfunctional in the other, I got a couple of movement principles - then when I moved to a new instructor, they drilled me on those same principles and introduced me to more advanced and functional forms of them just because they were part of their lineage that they were covering for all their students, and it took them less than two weeks. Two years of "Toes forward, toes forward! Lean in! Cross those arms! I SAID TOES FORWARD!".. "Aargh, you need to turn your toes out to the side! Spine vertical! Don't cross your arms! Turn those toes!" and I got less than two weeks out of it.

I too am not sure I see the value, as described.

Sorry if I have upset you; mostly I have a highly developed cringe reaction because of how many people come into my art doing that sort of thing. "I wanna know how to fix my (insert series of advanced movements here) can you help?" "Well, first you need to develop your basic stances and structure before we get anywhere near that stuff; you still haven't got your first week stuff down." "You @#$%&! You don't know anything!" It gets really tedious, and I am as a result quick to see such tendencies.

Most likely the same sort of egotism that leads people on my art's forums to ask for tips with advanced movement sequences without being able to articulate which one of the sub-movements in the technique they are trying to do, then offhandedly comment on not having the basic default stance that a student spends their first day learning down.

FAIR: Term for the techniques used by the loser. Heh. For us, we'd be more inclined to call foul on a BLOCK. But in your case, no, I see no reason why you couldn't point and jeer, something about not seeing the point in standing around being used as sa punching bag.

How much exercize would you consider to necessitate stretching? For shorter and more frequent trips, would simply dialing the speed down to not be strenuous be enough to not need a full stretching routine after arriving?

If I had to chose one? Open scenario drills incorporating body armor.

Well, some people really enjoy sparring; it comes to be what they do MA to do. And that's fine. It just isn't really aiming toward fighting skill to go in that direction, is all.

In Kurz "Stretching Scientifically", it is warned not to bicycle because it is thought to reduce flexibility. The specific mechanics causing this, I admit to being hazy on. The only thing I have seen in response to this was an admonition that "If bicycling is your sport of choice, you do not need that leg flexibility." Bicycling for me, and many others, is not a "sport", but simply the way that we intend to get from place to place. Owning and operating a car, according to the AAA, costs in the vicinity of $9,000 a year, and I want that money to pay off my student loans and to travel to Brazil for my next rank test. Does anyone know what exactly causes this issue, how much of an issue it is, and if there is any way to mitigate the described flexibility decrease?