JusticeZero

This is pretty art-specific, but the best situation for us is to inspire them to attack first in a way and time I chose.

Have you done research into what arts are in your area yet?

The only issue I can see is if it included an eternity of "I won't teach you more until you are high enough rank."

um.. yeah, it works. Now mind you, I don't get in fights, because I am no longer in high school. I know that others I know have found them to be functional. One young kid I know, I briefly taught how to do a basic vertical fist. He later got in a stupid and meaningless fight. One punch, fight over. He doesn't get in many dumb fights anymore. Other people in my family include my stepbrother, who used Judo to completely incapacitate an attacker (and he hasn't even trained in it in years), and another relative, if I recall correctly, pretty much made a fool out of some tough (who was upset about a girl and wanted to get even or something equally inane) with one or two moves out of Yang style Taiji. An old teacher of mine was in a fight or two with Capoeira - won.

Karategirl06, I hereby pronounce you the Dark Mistress of Thread Necromancy.. 90 minutes here, but we often end up running a few minutes over. It's just not enough. My instructor's classes were two and a half hours long, and he was always running short on time.

If nothing else you can mirror them while calling out the exercizes to start. Then they can see the movement. Make some sort of gesture to accomodate everything.

Well, I don't consider slowly clubbing an attacker to be very effective. I generally think of a kick or punch as an "opener" or a "setup", but it's nothing I could picture basing a fight around. I'd rather do something effective instead that ends with the attacker being dropped on the ground and in some way having a capacity to continue to fight disabled, rather than just randomly clubbing them with my foot or hand as they remain in their offensive structure and a continuing threat.

OK, here's how I see it: I agree with the new teacher. In fact, he might be being on the generous side giving you green - well, green is possibly a general proficiency" grade, so who knows. I don't care if you're a high-muckety muck in the system of Master Soanso. I'm not teaching Master Soanso's system. If you're in my class I expect you to learn the way we do it, because Master Soanso is doing a totally different art (changing ryu is not a small thing) and you're here to learn how to move like -my- master moves. Probably you can learn fast as you adjust and get to where you were with Master Soanso.. but I don't know what qualifications Soanso had for his upper ranks, I only know what ours are. So even if you snapped in perfectly, you might be higher or lower ranked in -my- lineage, I don't know yet. Since I do NOT know what you would be ranked if you'd started in my school, and you do NOT know how to do things the way WE do them yet (even if it might be airly subtle in a lot of ways) i'd feel best if I just bumped you down to a level I know that you can perform at no matter HOW strange of a situation might have happenned, and let you rise to where you fit in the lineage I teach as you adjust, rather than have you be a puzzling anomaly in my class that I have to beware of until you adjust.

Personally, I do my splits against a wall. Lie on my back almost sitting on the wall and open my legs out, using gravity to pull and a gentle push against the wall to stop. This is because I can't really stretch in "normal" splits because i'm too afraid i'll slip and fall through, injuring myself. Against a wall I can control much better. Then I turn sideways to do front splits on each side using the wall instead of the floor - that's a bit harder to adjust right, but it removes the fear that keeps me tightened up. I also do leg raises where I slowly lift the leg and extend it as high as I can and hold, then lower - those are for increasing the range I can USE - and gentle stretch-kicks (don't push these! If you push them hard you WILL hurt yourself - you just want to do them to get the range out.) at the beginning of the stretching routine, after you finish training.

OK, here's the thing: It isn't that the movements don't make sense out of context to me, it's that we have to learn a certain sense of timing at the same time and that needs a second person. It's much like how it's a real pain to learn how to do throws without a partner to throw. This has to do with a fundamental principle of timing in the art which flows through everything. The smallest unit of drill is #1 attacks; #2 defends and transitions into an attack; #1 transitions into a defense. Often there's some more interesting steps afterward, but those are usually more advanced movements. Generally the attacks and defenses don't match from one side to the other. In order to accomplish being able to perform training the stuff correctly, since we don't do that much recycling of drills, they have to know a certain number of movements that are basics. As you said about your physics class, "Don't try to understand it, just memorize it." I gave them a list of those basics Tuesday. There are 3-4 movements on that list she hasn't attempted yet. I can knock those out more slowly, if i'm careful with putting drills together. I've just been having trouble getting through a day's material, no matter how little it may seem to be. Class structure is fairly similar to: 15m - singing/music 15m - warmup (ginga w midlevel kicks and escapes), au down the room x4, role down the room x10, queda de rins dives down the room x2) 50m - drills/new material, sometimes capped with a few minutes of roda time 10m - cooldown stretching

Stand on a chair. Jump off and land on your back. That's what the "graceful, non-destructive" moves feel like.

Don't have people push you, the "hurts" is muscle being torn, and henceforth growing back shorter and with less potential to be stretched. A partner can't feel you hit the end of your safe range.

Another thing is that there will always be people who will be taught something that's fallen into disrepair, then go out and learn what they need to polish it up into something effective and vital. There will always be people working quietly off out of the spotlight "keeping it real". The main thing we lack is the risk of people coming in and testing the skills of the people in the class.

There's also the dynamics of how the force rebounds from the elasticity of the target, and most people seem to increase the force and dynamics of their blows in that and increasing mass by striking with more concentrated use of the torso rather than a hand in isolation.

Well, the main issue i'm having right now is that I need her to have basic familiarity with how to do the core movements of the art. Alot of them don't make as much sense in isolation (eg. defenses) and even those which can be done are harder to make work without someone else to make the technique relevant to a paired situation. I'd say we've gone through about 3/4 of the core, and as I said, after that i'm not as worried about stalling, as then I can put together a single compound, and they can obsess over one aspect of it as much as they want; most of the material will be review and enhancement of old material, assembled and combined differently. In essence, i'm trying to "teach the first form" so that we can work on the details in a looser fashion. Well, we don't do forms, but the principle is the same. 'We'll work on X, and i'm going to cover Z with the other guy. Then we're going to drill, you'll do what we've been doing on X.. when the other person does Z, do Y then X and they'll respond with Q. Then ginga across and repeat.' If they both know Q-Z, it works.

Well, just keep practicing them until you CAN perform them. The 'armchair' stuff you can just call research into how you are going to develop your skill next. 'You can use X to accomplish that.' 'Can you do X?' 'Not yet, but I learned the best ways to develop X, and I work on it twenty minutes a day.'

If the guy is a foot away with the gun, you're in a pretty good situation. Against someone with a gun in that near of a range, i'm pretty confident in my ability to defend against the weapon. I also know that I CANNOT defend against the weapon if I have to start by drawing a weapon of my own.

Right, the thing is that your muscles are in essence two types of muscle operating in the same place. One generates a lot of power over a short time period, the other generates a lower level of power but can do it for a long time. It's assumed you want to develop power in the former, but the exercize is structured to use low power for a long time.

What exactly is a "hard gainer" and why are people so obsessed with gaining mass? Mass is simply the most useless thing to focus on gaining in that entire field of practice.

Two women; one with visually striking injuries that have until that point been hidden from view of witnesses sliding in to a chair at a crowded restauraunt to block me in before opening up with screaming accusations and a makeshift weapon grabbed from the environment; the other an accomplice 'coming to her defense' with a folding knife. First, knock down the table or chair to get space, asking loudly what happenned to her, for someone to call the police, who she is, 'leave me alone', and retreat from the one with the knife, try to get an obstacle in between, and break for a door. Preferably an exit, because the police will not take your side in such a case.

Right, but a lot of people decide that the chamber is pointless and omit it, and they never learn the structure it's supposed to develop, so their kicks stay sloppy.

Pistol training, fencing, archery, sling training, axe throwing...

As a rule, the tendency is that she's not comfortable with her skill level on the technique, wants to slow down, and is working on coordination, but the flipside is that there's a certain amount of material I -need- to get through early in the class so that we can have a foundation to go back and work on the other material again in a more coherent way. We -need- to cover the four most common basic escapes (which are all building blocks for all other movements); the six most common kicks and cabecada (all of which are a movement fundamental); ginga, negaca, negativa, and role (stance); au and queda de rins (falling). That's eighteen things there, of varying complexity. This is the core. Everything relates to those things. I'm trying to cover 2-3 movements each 90 minute class, plus one song and basic drills, putting the movements learned over the day into one paired drill. For instance, one kick, one escape, then by the end of the class be paired off using the escape to evade the new kick. And we'll stall while trying to do the new kick, i'll pick up frustration at having to move on and pick up the escape because they aren't satisfied with the kick, they want to just do more reps of the kick and analyze it to death, but parts of the kick aren't going to completely make sense until I can show it in the context of the paired exercize, and I need to teach the escape that we'll be using to evade the kick. It -feels- like perfectionism to me. I'm trying to keep the pace down, but on the other hand, I need to finish out those fundamentals so we can start doing more compound combining of the fundamentals because the senior student has a hard time grasping a movement unless it is in a context of other movements, and the longer i'm stuck on single movements, the more frustrated I feel at not being able to accomodate his needs too, as i've been focusing a lot on getting her through everything, and he's paying to show up too. I don't mind the slowdown once we're doing composite exercises, because it will be more interactive than just throwing many reps of one kick with no context.

I prefer to see kicks chambered, because without chambering you're usually having to drag through some pretty lousy and vulnerable angles, and the kick itself tends to be slop. Some kicks are made not to use a chamber, and these hit hard, but they are nonetheless a different kick. The chambered kicks from the karatekas I have practiced and traded notes with seem to hit significantly harder than the identical kick with the chamber removed, and the kicker keeps their root better.

Personally I wouldn't recommend any of it, unless you're using it for something like a blue suit drill where you're supposed to be knocking the opponent into next week with full power, zero "control" strikes. Seems like pads end up resulting in no net change in injuries - you're padded, so you don't bother protecting yourself.