JusticeZero

Hypnosis, with people who know they're supposed to be knocked out.

I'd just go back to class. It's not like you're expected to keep in form and trim while you're in the hospital etc. and the stuff will come back quickly enough.

...yes, but this isn't a "woowoo" magic effect, it's completely within your mind and doesn't need to be explained with mystical forces. I drive faster when i'm going to see friends and family who I haven't seen in a long time than I drive when i'm on my way to do something dull and distasteful, too. That doesn't mean that my car's engine has been magically sped up.

Most - maybe 90% - of the females I see tend to at some point mightily resist the commitment needed to be very good - like actually sparring, training hard, and the like. If someone is in the class who won't step up their performance, i'll let them keep training sure, but they aren't going to advance. I can only assume other teachers are like this as well. So i'd expect to find that there are lots of women stuck in limbo forever at some intermediate level, while the men around them kept crawling slowly (some very slowly) in rank toward the level needed to teach. I hear a lot of "I'm a girl, I can't ____!" "But i'm not like you guys, I don't want to ____!" and it just irritates me. The female posters who complain about other women holding back in their class and not hitting hard have pretty much shown why there aren't many high level females, but i'd suggest they examine their own performance - after all, almost everyone feels that they are above average drivers, and it seems like every woman who posts talks about how every other woman holds back - the women in one of my early classes, years ago, were pretty quick to talk smack about how tough they were too, but one of them I stopped defending against entirely because I knew that even with two years of experience, they wouldn't touch me, and the other stalled at some level too.

In my case, I quit practicing the old style completely. Intellectually, I remember the movements. If I want, I can still do the movements cleanly. But I have to consciously call on them, they aren't in my normal reactions anymore.

Dillman's stuff always seems closer to hypnotic suggestion to me. People who don't 'know' that they're supposed to pass out when he pokes them tend not to, from all accounts i've heard.. his own students, of course, go into a swoon at the slightest provocation

It wouldn't be as bad if they intended to do something besides 'spar'. To do nothing but spar is just as bad as deciding to do nothing but forms. And i've seen a number of groups spar. I can confidently say that ALL of them do that unrealistic jousting. That's why people "revert to kickboxing"; they drop to the long striking basics they can do with low commitment and are never granted any openings for other techniques.

Do the technique to whallop them. If you can hit a spot that knocks the wind out of them, numbs their arm, or some such thing, then bonus! but don't think you're going to be a supreme master of mayhem just because you memorized an anatomy textbook.

Probably something to the whole body type thing. Cousin of mine is built like a bear. Seriously. I've seen actual bears lankier than him. When he was in my area, he trained taijiquan. It seemed as though those at that school ended up gravitating to certain techniques they liked most. With him, the adjustment he ended up making for his own body was that he LOVED deep stances. The stuff I do is pretty deep, but just watching him practice his forms made my thighs hurt. He'd hold bow stances where you could literally balance a glass on his thigh and have a long conversation. He sparred with a boxer punk we knew and ended up winning because his stances were so deep the boxer had to bend down, fouling his footwork and stance, to reach him - his knee was in the way. But he could still glide across the room fast, and was pretty darned mobile. He didn't think the high stances were mobile enough. Made some other comments on why he liked the deep stance stuff that seemed to fit with his structure.

Not really, as I do not know what you study or what you consider "submission".

The other thing is that sparring is NOT a realistic drill. It's a useful drill, yes. But it gives you bad habits for one, and the usefulness of techniques is distorted by the non-fight-like behavior of the combatants. I spar with people we stand outside range waiting for one to enter, they jump in with some low commitment flicky long range thing, I have to whip out a fast counter and hope I can pop a return in before they flee out of range. Other videos I see of sparring sessions reveals similar behaviors. I can't use a lot of my arsenal in such a situation, they won't commit enough to give an opening, and it's not easy for me to "control" (in itself another bad habit) driving my head up into someone's chin or some such, even if they were to not flee from it in a manner unlike someone who actually meant me harm.

If the head instructor doesn't offer private lessons, why don't you try finding a senior student who seems pretty insightful and ask him for help after class?

Seems like a foolish idea to me. I can pop out basics easily, but if I only train advanced techniques for a week, the next time I do a basic technique, I can feel how far they've slipped, even though they are partly made up of basic movements.

Cah/poh/ehr-ah and yes, it's the right spelling.

While there might be something to that "in theory", the fact is that it's not hard to find a situation where it's too iffy to bother. Maybe it's possible to trip a bus. I'm not going to let someone think it's viable.

The fact that they are all Chinese. Chinese martial arts, (collectively called Gong Fu, or "Skill Over Time", include a wide variety of arts. Usually they have a few stances and philosophies in common, as they come from the same general area, and those who developed them were more likely to trade notes with other CMA stylists than with stylists from other countries.

That's exactly the same limitation as Karate and most Gongfu styles have, though, and noone calls them on 'have to be in a certain stance to throw certain attacks'.. *shrugs*

You get used to it. People who haven't done martial arts much, when they get hit, panic. They don't know the language, but they know it's bad news. People who are used to contact still feel pain, but it's not frightening, it's informative. Imagine you're on some sort of big battleship thing. You hear a 'boom!' in the distance and the ship shakes. Pain is the sailor who runs up to the deck to report on the damage. People who are used to taking hits (MMA fighters, boxers, etc) get a calm engineer who steps up and says "We just took a hit to the starboard hull. We're taking on some water, but not much, we'll have it patched in no time, and it didn't do anything that should slow us down." People who aren't used to pain get, for the exact same situation, a hysterical kid running into the room running in circles and screaming "OMG OMG THE WALL GO BOOM AND WATER! WATER EVERYWHERE AND EEEEK WE'RE SIIIINKING OMG OMG HEEELP!!" Just get beat on a lot and learn to feel into the pain for information instead of just flinching from it as a horrific thing.

Well, another thing is that samurai were in a way the police. What's some of the most useful arts for the police? Grappling, control, and the like. No surprise they'd focus on a grappling and controlling art - if they need to strike something, they're armed. The locks and such give more options than direct damage. Karate wasn't originally Japanese, and it wasn't a Samurai art - it was from Okinawan peasants. Sumo is Sumo. Maybe there's some connections in there somewhere, I don't know. I suspect Sumo gets shortchanged just because it looks odd, I know there's some featherweight sumo stuff, and it doesn't strictly require mass, and it'd probably be palatable to people if it wasn't for the image of 500 pound guys stomping around in underwear.

Your classes take the entire day?

I am. The people I have spoken to would rather be hit by a bare knuckle than by a 16 oz glove. Please also note that while the force experienced by the face in the case of the fist rebounding might be greater, that force is at the level of the surface - your bone and skin and facial muscles. Wheras with the gloves transferring the force, the force is delivered at a speed that allows the strike to move the full head. This is similar to the difference between a kick that sets the heavy bag to swinging, and the kick that folds the bag in without swinging it much. This means that the force is being applied inertially to the BRAIN, rather than simply bouncing back from the SKELETON. My skeleton can take quite a bit of abuse. My brain I would prefer not to.

It's a good idea to know the name that others will recognize the move by, and you need -a- name for it.

Generally kenjutsu and any of the jujutsu family.

Gloves allow a boxer to use full power without risking injuring their own hand, and to strike more often to the head. It also adds more mass to the punch; furthermore, the texture of the glove allows the force of the blow to sink into the target fully, rather than rebounding back into the striker's hand. What they DO do is make the strikes look less "bloody", and make the match much more "exciting" because more strikes fly and a knockout (which is, by definition, brain damage) is far more likely. It lets the boxer haul off with strikes that would shatter the bones of their hand without fear for themself, hit with extra mass, and put the full force of the impact into the soft tissue of the target's head.

Sure, you can get a black belt. It'll be useless, you won't have any ability worth mentioning, but you can get a black belt. It's just a fashion accessory.