JusticeZero

The actual firing of a gun that's not exceptionally large is relatively uneventful. You'll need the same sort of focus and such that you would use with a bow. Unless it's something like a .22 or .410 shotgun, however, it is worth noting that the noise in unreal. The gun noises you hear in movies are like the tiny "bip bip bip" of some old video games in comparison; any decently sized gun is very likely going to be the single loudest noise you hear over the course of your life.

That there is a lot of equipment and infrastructure to do those exercizes, and none of that time is likely emphasizing proper structure etc. I can see how many would be a bit intimidated by that shopping list, since i'm usually happy to just find a patch of space that will allow me to play my bow without annoying the neighbors.

Hmm, trying to figure how this one was by "submission".. and i'm not seeing the bragged about invincibility there either. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNMgevrH8EI&mode=related&search=bob%20sapp

>>you may lose face in the immediate moment, but the administrators will see you were only a complete victim rather than a person who fought back. The problem with that is that "face" is the very thing that you need to prevent being attacked. Try to talk your way out, but always from a position of strength, not bravado or appeasement. If you are attacked, you will get hurt regardless of whether you fight back - saying to not fight back is the very attitude which, for example, empowers rapists against their victims. Since you will already get hit, you may as well demonstrate that you are not, in fact, acceptable prey, and concentrate on making your attacker into a public demonstration of the fact that you are not a helpless victim. Yes, you will get in trouble. Suck it up and don't hide from your actions. If you are called on the carpet, just say what happenned straight up. "I was being bullied. I tried to talk my way out of it. He took a swing at me, so I defended myself." Adults have to deal with the consequences of their actions, even if they are perverse. "Yes, I chopped the cherry tree." You will have to deal with the consequences, but you will gain respect; respect is what will protect you from being considered "prey" in the future.

Don't think about "blocking". Think about attacking. Work on your own on attacks that begin out of a defense, and force yourself to focus on those. Keep your own score. "I defend and don't counter or use the defense to better my position (successfully or not): -1 point. I stand in a stance (thus, defensive) waiting for 3 seconds or more: -1 point"

How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli

Shoes aren't all that heavy, compared to the mass of your leg. Don't hyperextend and all the usual precautions. If you're hyperextending your joint, sure you'll have problems, but it's not because you're wearing shoes.

As I recall, that test allowed the gun wielder to have their gun in hand, and assumed that the knife was not in hand. The test circumstance was that the LEO was to approach a person for an arrest who was empty-handed, forewarned that at some point the person was going to draw a knife and attack. The LEO's got pwned. A friend of mine at the time didn't believe it, so we did a quick run of tests using a rubber knife and a squirt gun. Unless the gun was not only already drawn but already aimed, the advantage was clearly in favor of the knife user. In any case, I currently don't advocate carrying a weapon, for the pure reason that being unarmed gives plausible deniability, since the assumption is that you will be blamed as the aggressor in any encounter by the authorities.

I've never heard that, and i've never seen it. I'm not entirely sure what the cause of such a situation might be offhand, unless it's concern that it's harder to pivot in shoes. It's not hard to pivot in shoes, unless you're standing on a mat, and I don't train on a mat.

Among people I know/have known who do just fine, thank you very much, in Capoeira are included a 70 year old woman, and a couple people with "beer bellies". Quit mythologizing people.

Personally I train in street shoes, and encourage the people i've taught to do the same. If they don't want to wear shoes, they can't wear socks either. Socks is sort've the worst of all worlds.

I teach the art and I can't do a "cartwheel" either. A "cartwheel" is not a movement we use; we have a movement that looks similar to it that's structured utterly and completely different to it that I can teach a 70 year old or a couch potato to do passably well in 5 minutes.

As an aside, your marine friend is in serious trouble should he actually get into a knife fight. In the ranges where a knife is dominant - which is, in fact, something like 20 feet or less, shockingly enough - a gun is at a SEVERE disadvantage. I'm talking a win/loss rate of 3% or something like that under a test situation that favored the handgun. The few wins were really only achievable if the gun user kites, fleeing from the knife wielder while they can bring their weapon into play in order to create distance.

I don't do any jumping techniques at all. The turning ones are safer to do, since the counters to the linear attacks tend to be quite a bit more brutal, and I don't want people being dropped potentially on the back of their head quite so often. We don't hold to a 'rhythm'. The other guy has a rhythm, we follow it in order to use off-beats and the like to use it against them. I dunno, I usually recommend that they go somewhere else for their hip/leg flexibility, as we don't kick above the ribs as a rule and never have. Monitor, Traditional Capoeira Angola

Not much different.. really it's quite startling how much you can't actually accurately attribute to Lee et al. which is attributed to him just because it seems like an easy explanation.

After the first week, you will learn more in two hours with an instructor than you will in two years studying alone.

Right, and they also seem to use a sort of fencing L foot position. My natural default stance when handed a sword and shield was to put my feet parallel at a 45 degree, a leg length apart in a very natural and simple stance.

It -looks- like complete hocus. But then again, a lot of people think what I do looks like hocus too. Whenever asked, someone who does the style is completely unable to explain how any of what is seen works. I can explain my stuff, and people say "Oh, that makes sense.". The people I have asked so far have tended to go off on cultish ramblings with no actual substance. As a result, I don't think highly of it because I cannot derive any idea of how it works from observation or by questioning practitioners. Every other art, I can watch or ask questions and get some idea of their operating principles.

Don't be afraid to screw up. Try to get it right, but realize that the first few times you try to teach, most of them are in some way going to suck. That is the way of learning a new skill. Beforehand, if possible, contemplate: What am I trying to teach? The students are going to take home about three things from each class. You can't really control what three very well. Chose them wisely. Don't obsess over the fine points you aren't working on that day.

Yes, because the good habits of one art are the bad habits of the other art, and they both teach very different reactions to very similar problems. If the arts are different in focus, no big deal. Just took a BJJ class today, since they just openned one at a time I can make it to. One of the newer people there had a bit of Regional, so we jogoed a bit, then I esquivaed a kick, entered, reversed to the rasteira, got side control, and went straight into a submission on the elbow. Very little confusion. I -did- encounter some confusion in the clinch, as I would immediately drop to the cocorinha, but didn't really have a good escape out of it for a bit. Ended up having to do negativa role to throw someone from a clinch because my structure just was never where I needed it for the standard throw. A few days back I picked up a class in SCA style swordfighting. My stances and such were totally screwed up from their point of view, to the point where the main trainer there just decided on the spot that he needed to adapt most of the movements specifically for me to use. My stances were far deeper than they were used to seeing, and my footwork was, to them, strange. Furthermore, I had a tendency to dodge and go to the ground in ways they found rather odd, and somewhat implausible in their training armor, as well as counterproductive by their ruleset. Since that is by far not a formula art, that's okay, but you often don't have that luxury.

*shrugs* I have. One guy gets all aggro and starts flailing away, the other guy steps back, sets himself, and explodes a good hard hit into the other guy, folds him over. The other guy is technically good enough to keep going, but stops. Fights are often stupid little ego things. Puppies tumbling around.

I fail to see why a new STYLE would be required for this - just an adjustment of training methodology with the same material should be sufficient. Look at what some of the modern people are doing with adrenalin, stress, and fear reactive exercizes and just add their theories to your work in your core arts. In the academic analogy, the way you were taught is weak in a specific area but the research to fix it up has already been done. You don't need to do new research (Ph.D level) to find a whole new approach, you just need to incorporate some theories into your existing body of knowledge which have already been studied.

A 'one hit' will stop a lot of fights though, not so much because the other person was physically beaten as by the psychological freeze. Many people who can't fight well expect to flurry each other with weak, relatively harmless hits, and if something hits hard enough to register as a significant injury, they stop because they'd never imagined a fight could hurt. (To be fair, most fights don't really hurt with people who don't know how to fight.) Of course, if the 'one punch' doesn't stop them, then you need to do another 'one punch', then another, then another, till one of them finally does the trick. =)

Yeah, how many years have you been studying? Creating a style is essentially equivalent to completing your PhD thesis. You have a specific concern you want to address - such as 'I want to be able to grapple while wearing gloves and thus being unable to effectively use my hands' or 'I want to learn how to adapt my boxing to be more functional against opponents who kick and sweep' or something like it to think of a couple examples, you devote numerous years on top of the numerous years you already have done to gain your foundation to research and experimentation, then when you finish you have a style which is most likely just a substyle of another established art. It's not something you do to sound cool, because those who claim to create arts often are met with extreme skepticism, serving a similar purpose as the review on a thesis with hostile reviewers. Technically you can just get a business licence, but most people who do that who can't show that they've backed their stuff up with the necessary work and development are considered frauds, much in the same way as I can't expect a warm reception if I were to bill myself as a Ph.D from an obvious diploma mill online "college" that lets me get my degree online in an hour, and how I would not trust a surgeon who studied medicine through a fifteen DVD video correspondence course.

Cats drop to the ground to free up their limbs to fight. It's like a martial art style that teaches you to sit/lay down as soon as a fight starts so that you can kick and punch with all four limbs without worrying about balancing or being swept. It's obvious when watching the cats at my mom's house spar, because the mass difference between the two of them is huge, and you can watch the bigger cat consciously lay down after being tackled by an attack that in no way had enough force to tip him over.. kind've like watching the 90 pound girl go for a flying tackle into the football player, who gets tackled, doesn't move an inch, looks down at her, and drops to the ground. Cats are quadrupedal, and without dropping to the ground they can only free up one limb at a time for effective striking (two at a time is a bit of an XMA-ish trick for them, and the effectiveness of it is questionable in a similar way as people look dubiously at flying kicks), and without flexibility training they don't have a wide range of targets with that limb. They're low to the ground and can stand quickly, so they drop to turn their limbs toward their opponent.