JusticeZero

Don't do assisted stretches, you'll tear the muscle. The other person can't feel your muscle response and will overextend them.

Um... yeah, actually, i've needed my MA training to protect myself while walking across an ice-covered parking lot a couple times. The ground did -not- get a chance to hit me. There was also the incident with the person carrying the boards and turning a little too fast.

I do a basic Zen meditation to develop focus. Count breaths. At ten, start again at one. If you're not absolutely certain what the last number was, start again. Do this for 20 minutes nonstop. I use it to practice ability to focus attention.

I've only seen one clip of a fight with Drunken - it sounds like the one ScottnShelley mentioned. The problem in the clip was that the Drunken stylists were unable to close through the kicks that were being used to keep them at bay, and that one factor completely defanged them. Hopefully their sifu proceeded to spend the next month drilling them on how to get inside of a kicker's range, but that's not apparent from the clip.

I just wanted to mention something here that I tell to my students.If you're in a club or bar, it isn't self defense. Self defense means you took at least some reasonable precautions to avoid the situation. Anything you want to learn in order to go to a club or bar with, you want to learn so that you can jump into pointless fights.

I'd favor the European knight. For a period, people of various training were wandering the world as mercenaries. Where knights earned some distinction in this, as well as the forces of other countries, samurai never seemed to earn any real note in such matters. Western swordsmanship tends to be more defensive than the Japanese sword arts - Samurai swordsmanship texts seem to be filled of imagery of something closest to the Western gunfighter, with both fighters suddenly lashing out in one committed attack - Western schools of swordsmanship tend to be more defensive and cognizant of the need to wear through defenses and thus will probably take the advantage as soon as the first attack passes (which they would be looking to block/parry/evade, rather than simply attacking in full into the other attack)

Main worry i'd have is that a lot of people who wear protection over a body part proceed to not defend that body part. If they have a helmet, they walk head-first into kicks and punches fearlessly where they need to be defending, and learn bad habits. I'm not sure that the helmet causes a decrease in injuries as a result, because where the guy with the head gear is bobbing and weaving and blocking thinking "Yikes, that almost took my head off", the guy with the head gear is walking into the same attacks getting clocked upside the head with kicks and punches going "OW! Good thing I have head protection! *BAM!* Ow! Good thing I have head protection!"

Gently stretch every day. The flexibility will come over time Every day: Do leg raises front side and back - lightly kick your leg up but don't try to push yourself 20x front, side with base foot forward, side w base foot pointing away, back looking at foot over shoulder. Use a wall to balance. Then slowly raise and extend foot out as high as you can get it and hold it up there for 30 seconds in all those directions. I also like to use the side of a wall to stretch, lie on your back, put feet againts the wall piked, then spread legs, also turn on your side for front splits - that way you can use the wall to hold your feet from going further when they reach their stretched limit instead of having to use the muscles that you're trying to relax to hold you up.

Yes. Go to class and practice the material they show you. Seriously. Just start. You'll get your "preparations" as you learn it.

Qi may or may not be real; I suspect the question is more in the definition than anything else. Fireballs, levitating, teleporting, and other such comic-book wizard type things which fiction writers come up with, however, are not. If anyone thinks they can get a flicker of such abilities to happen with their chi, there's a million dollar prize for them at randi.org and.. ..I have to admit that i'm a bit tired of alternately having to adjust my wording in class to teach people to direct their focus in efficient ways without being accused of being a death-touching fireball throwing delusional crackpot, or, having people get angry at me for daring to suggest that I, and thus they, can do a walkover without the aid of mysterious magical supernatural spells. If there's someone who can ACTUALLY DO such things, they kind've owe the world to come forward; if not I would prefer to not have to hear more claims of such abilities as a serious possibility.

Do kicks that are pulled to a stop just short of making contact count as "contact"? Do sweeps count as "contact"? The first should be happening in some clips and the second should be happening a lot. The former is pretty low because we're really good at defending our own basic techniques in isolation. But it's not really nice to kick someone in the jaw who's been reduced to the level of a confused rat running face first into a trap, either, and plus, if a slave harmed another slave, that's a property issue, have that dangerous beast put down. Bruises are hard to hide and a pretty clear sign you've been doing something connected to fighting. In any case you should be seeing plenty of people getting dumped. If not it's because they're putting their 'pretty' stuff online. Sweeps and throws aren't 'pretty' and it doesn't draw in high ego rich kids and their checkbooks.

1: Yes, though we don't train them as much. We have maculele, which is in a way training with stick (Kali sized) or machete, doesn't use the same form and is of 'eeh' use in combat as most people who teach only have a very limited base in it for use as a timing exercize - it does add familiarity. We also learn to use knives and razors; this does use the same basic form as the unarmed techniques. 2: There's a bunch, but of various schools and various levels of quality. It's like asking for videos of TKD sparring - not much way to control whether you can find solid 'combat' TKD done in a solid way, or a low quality cardio olympic sporty school with their arms down and flicking kicks with abysmal range. Plus, "Capoeira" is a pretty general term, not a name for a unified art. We don't have the language to refer to the interior divisions within the art, unfortunately, and i'm not certain why.

We do more takedowns, sweeps, throws, and defenses to all the above than a lot of striking arts do. The hand stuff is simple enough but come on, this is the 21st century. We all have office jobs. We have to touch type, not pound our hands into clubs. I personally make sure to work hands with the people in my class on reasonably regular occasion. As far as the kicks, mostly we drill the basic kicks or variants on the basic kicks, all of which hit pretty hard and effectively. We work pretzel twisty bizzarre kicks too, because it really helps the improvisational ability of being able to deliver fundamental attacks with changing targets and such out of some pretty odd situations that we find ourselves placed in, and develops structure. When you see a crazy angled kick don't think of it as a 'kick them off a horse" wacky direct attack, think of it as being like our equivalent of mixing an attack in with a breakfall.

It's what we use to pay for the GM's airfare, groceries, etc. But it's not a testing fee, it's a workshop fee that incorporates testing/advancement.

Capoeira music, obviously. Harder to keep the class in time without it, because there's nothing to hook onto other than visual to take a tempo cue from. It'd be irritating in other arts though, since they use timing differently

We do all those. We do not jump, ballistically commit (eg. handspring where there's no 'outs') or turn our back for those. (Well, mea lua de compasso, in a way, 'turns it's back', but not in the way that a lot of showy movements do, and we're aware of it turning and how to protect it.) We're well aware of when and when not to do au, as we strongly encourage each other to slam each other out of the sky if we do au's and acrobatics when it's possible to disrupt it.

Might have been different person, the one I remember he didn't jump. I know Mestre Bimba, for one (others were doing other things) was tearing up people in anything goes matches in his day.

Hey, what's up with the lost posts? *repost* Works fine. For what I was taught it's pretty much the same, we don't really change much because we don't do anything especially impractical. (No jumping, no ballistic-commitment flips, no turning our back, all attacks at effective range) Item 1: Don't hang out in a ginga - don't ginga at the first sign of trouble, because that's the same as when a kung fu guy goes through five or six flowery movements in a form for no reason with no target to settle in some stance before the fight even starts like they do in the movies and nowhere else. Stand in a neutral position that has structure like a point in ginga and use that to respond from. Item 2: You have hands. The ginga contains quite a few very effective hand techniques, you don't have to 'default to boxing". Trust the form and use it to make opportunities. Item 3: Move. The roda is about (or should be about) controlling, dominating, and manipulating space. Esquiva is great for getting off the line; there's lots of ways to get into scary angles on someone, and if a capoeirista hasn't gotten an inexperienced fighter cramped against a chair, wall, etc. then I have concerns about their skill in the roda. Personally I like to spar in spaces about two yards across, preferably with walls but any sort of disastrous enclosure or edge works fine, just so I can work on this.. that's a common exercise, though I admittedly get a bit frustrated when it gets down to 4' diameter, as some of the form starts eroding out of necessity. We have some very destructive throws, our elbows can be very scary (as, actually, can be our trapping against people who don't do that range), and our ability to move off the line and around attackers is top notch. The only major concern is that those skills are 1: often neglected by worshippers of the almighty dollar (which I will note is not in and of itself a bad thing, and understandable from people who are trying to raise the money to give their family a chance at a better life than a third world hovel) who adjust their teaching to cater to the upper-middle-class testosterone-pumped lithe teenage gymnast types who often drift toward Capoeira alongside the underdressed upper-middle-class teenage muscle-worshipping camp follower girls who tag along after them, 2: usually neither understood nor contemplated by the students aspiring toward either of the two stereotypes mentioned in 1, and 3: esoteric and slow to develop and grasp by those who care to learn. Hard to avoid learning it, eventually, but if you ignore it it takes longer. I wish I had footage from the NHB fight a couple month back? where a pure Capoeirista (Secondary Grappling background, used to avoid grappling range) won some matches. Wasn't one of the huge name competitions. Bimba was famous for taking on all comers and winning, and there have been some other effective fighters. A couple stories of successful use of Capoeira in spontaneous self defense situations have trickled over to me over time, too.

Sure. When walking across icy parking lots, when deciding what alleys not to walk down... oh, you mean if I completely forgot everything I learned for long enough to get in a hopeless situation? Sorry, haven't done that yet.

My understanding - and I did spend some time training in Bujinkan (Ninjutsu, now Budo taijutsu) once upon a time - is that they did not use Katana because Katana were out of their price range (They used ninja-to, which is a general term for the cheaper, shorter, straight swords they used that were designed to their specifications to be more utilitarian and disposable) and I never heard of them using Sai. Maybe a couple of them did. I recall seeing material on using a kunai (heavy gardening spade), nekode (hand 'climbing' claws), hanbo (short staff - think 'cane" sizewise), shuriken (hammered nails and flat metal plates like hinges, basically) and other improvised objects, but I don't recall anything sailike in that list. The instructor I remember working with also recommended, IIRC, that all his students get checked out with firing handguns and rifles at a shooting range, and i've heard that this isn't unusual. The ninja of history were apparently an early and enthusiastic adoptor of firearms, according to some of the stuff left over. Acrobatics was not a particularly highlighted thing taught. The whole exercize pretty much struck me as historical preservation; the people teaching the skills which were reputedly used by the ninja weren't what I would call 'ninja' themselves, but they knew a decent amount about them. Flashing katanas, sai, and black stage handler costumes was not a significant part of that history. Peasant clothes, improvised gimmicks, and 101 Twisted And Wrong Uses for Everyday Household Objects was.

My "sparring" isn't "Kumite", but mostly I try to keep my attacks and movement on/from the floor clean and running well, since that tends to be the area where I notice rustiness most dramatically. The rest I keep maintained, but I need to make especially sure that I don't misjudge my positioning on any of the kicks where i'm small and have my hands on the ground; usually those are associated with much more limited open space and i'm having to come out slipping through and under knees and stuff more often.

Over summers in Alaska, attendance dissapears for everyone. I had one student, who's been with me for awhile. Fall, people come back, but that isn't the problem - the fact that my last Summer session lass is in early August, and my first Fall class is in mid to late October is.

Frankly, i'd just do the aikido. But make sure you get the Atemi techniques that Aikido was created with - striking techniques to augment the throws which are an intrinsic part of Aikido, though many teachers nowadays frown on them out of some misguided sense of purity, trying to take out the little bit of aggression that O'Sensei left in for reasons that were probably best left untampered with.

I disagree. MMA is biased intrinsically in favor of grappling to begin with, and there has been quite a lot of shift to a standing game in recent years in MMA. It's no longer about the pounce and grapple. You can't say that "Grappling is the base of all fighting" because it simply is not true. When I talked to LEO's and asked how often their fights went to the ground, not counting the actual act of handcuffing a restrained suspect, I got answers like "10%", "6%". Watching clips of random brawls, a lot of the fights ended up, at some point, with one or both people on the floor - AT WHICH POINT THEY IMMEDIATELY STOOD UP, generally without attempting any grappling, and continued the fight in a standup striking mode. And usually the fight "went to the ground" not because someone was taken down, but because someone was off balance flailing and fell down/tripped.

Sure it's it's own thing. (a jujutsu variant, basically.) Sure, it works. But you know, there are people who can teach you how to shoot an english longbow, and a clothyard shaft is still very effective, but you don't see much, if any, demand in modern military forces for an archer, either.