JusticeZero

Sources i've heard from often agree that it's vulgarity of some sort. Not a word you'd want to use in Japan. Quick searching for where didn't find the original source, only a discussion or two. http://www.martialtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11852

*shrugs* It's a favorite among police officers, i've heard. It can be very effective if you can find a teacher who isn't "fluffy cloud".

*shrugs* As far as i'm concerned, if they say "I can't hit you!", hit them until they change their mind. However, some teachers might frown at this. (I wouldn't; I consider refusal to engage with another student in training, where they are trying to learn and need to be engaged, to be VERY disrespectful, and when i'm teaching, I don't allow it.)

I don't train to fight like a prizefighter, I don't base my fighting on submissions and bludgeoning my opponent down. I train with movements where I do things like get my opponent's thigh locked between my leg while elbowing them, then suddenly throw my whole weight at the ground to leverage their knee sideways with the gravity. The taiji guys I worked with study to catch someone's arm and step into an elbow break. Those aren't things that show up much in prizefighting, which is much like sparring, a deceptively unrealistic drill. I can walk through those type of movements in training, but I have to practice them in full too so I can get the dynamics right. I can't really use a live training partner for such an attack.

I haven't given up, but she can't see the 'before' and 'after' on herself to see that she's doing a technique pretty well at the end of class rather thannot knowing it at all, but she CAN see that she's getting her feet mixed up trying to learn it while the other person in the class is working on fine-tuning balance, distance and accuracy as opposed to simply performing the technique at all. So I get complaints about being a 'bad student' and such. I did talk to her about it. I was responded to that the complaints were cultural (Right, but I need you to do the things I ask without having to be convinced to, or it takes time from class and screws up my ability to keep order.) and sometimes she didn't want to do a thing (see above, and that I can't run a class if the precedent is set that the exercizes are to be taken as "suggestions".)

Aikido as taught by Ueshiba contained 'Atemi' - strikes. They were used to set up techniques, mainly. Since then, overzealous and over-pacifistic students have in many cases removed the atemi, seeing them as counter to the philosophy -whether on not they were needed-. Ueshiba's art was not aggressive, but it contained "aggressive" techniques. Aikido draws from a Zen background, philosophically, and in Zen, in the proper state of mind you can do certain things that would seem "aggressive" without being aggressive your self, for instance, if you are calm and empty of thought, and you are attacked and respond with a killing blow with your sword, spiritually, the killing blow from the sword is seperate from you and you didn't do it, it was the universe doing it. (This gets misused, obviously, by overzealous pacifists trying to avoid responsibility for their violent and angry impulses rather than becoming comfortable with them)

I've also been told by one woman that when at the gym, she can't work on the heavy bag because she instantly gets swarmed with guys trying to chat her up. So I don't think that that's going to be terribly crippling. The guys I know don't generally care much for females who act incapable.

*shrugs* All the taiji people I know do sparring, paired self-defense drills, practice on a locking pole (name?) and such.

Depends on whether their training included any training on tricks like that. Some Karate classes disdain tricks, and 20 years won't teach you to do a 720. Some classes love tricks and you'll be busting out crazy stuff like that almost immediately. There's a wide range in between.

It looked like the Aikido i've seen. There's a number of schools of Aikido - they all, to my understanding, try to capture the art as they were taught it, but they are like 'snapshots' of the founder at different stages. Though I will note that a lot of modern Aikido schools have gotten entirely too wishy-washy with the "no aggression" thing, and I wouldn't want to train around them. You need to posess and acknowledge some amount of 'aggression', even if it is minor, or else you run the danger of becoming passive-aggressive dancers. I don't want to train with anyone who doesn't acknowledge the violence inherent in what they do, because from experience I have learned that the people studying the most extremely peaceful of arts are the most angry, violent, and abusive people in the martial arts - they don't 'own' that aspect of themselves or their art, so it's always a steady string of 'I had to protect the other students from your aggression, so I threw you down two flights of stairs.' 'I didn't kick you full force between the legs. Your chi forced me to do it as part of the karmic balance.' 'There was a nail sticking up out of the floor in the exact place where I made sure to throw you? It looked like it had been pried up? How odd. It must be the universe trying to teach you something about your hostility.'

*cough* Remember that i'm not a fan of flipping and spinning through the air, nor have I been taught them, nor has anyone I studied with... note my art listed under my name. =) Capoeira isn't about the flips and wacky stunts. If you like to do stunts, more power to you. But it's something you specifically train for, not something you gain just from practice in general.

Er... it depends, I expect.. i've seen people who've never been to a karate class in their life learn to do a a 540 and a butterfly, and I've known people who've done ten years of karate and think the idea of doing such a stunt to be absurd.

heh. he does seem to love the groin kicks, doesn't he?

Well, Judo -is- in essence a form of wrestling.. Jujutsu was to a large extent just the term for the wrestling, etc. arts of Japan. Judo and Aikido both spring from that root, with different focus; Judo was developed by removing the high damage (joint-breaking, groin-striking, eye-gouging, knee-popping, etc) techniques to allow for more realistic free-sparring, where Aikido focused on a certain dynamic of blending movement and defense. The wrestling common to Euro-Americans is similar not because it has a similar root but because there's really only so many effective ways to approach similar problems, and any group of would-be grapplers will eventually stumble across some form of all the grappling basics. It too is filtered down to focus on specific rules and scenarios by it's rules. I think that Judo is a common thing in the training mix, but for such matches, "pure" Judo or Aikido tends to be a mismatch to the rules and objectives of the game. It's not that they're ineffective, it's that they don't score, and everyone in such a venue is going to know how to mitigate their attacks. Everyone in the UFC knows how to breakfall, and they're on a smooth and not especially punishing surface. In the wild, most people don't know how to fall, and they're over cement and rough ground.

It hurts like heck. They turn with the attack and turn it into a balance throw that drops the attacker on the ground pretty forcibly, sometimes in interesting pretzel locks. The ground doesn't have to worry about conditioning it's striking surfaces or rooting. It's like a Judo guy I talked to once said: "Sure, we strike. We strike you with the ground." It's fairly esoteric in that they are supposed to be learning to blend force and use the attacker's inertia and balance to throw, rather than their personal strength; as such, it takes more time to master because you have to get good at feeling through the other person rather than just powering through movements. Most techniques seem to be based on snatching an attack and controlling it while using it as an anchor for a throw. The "grab the punching wrist" thing tends to be where it gets difficult and sketchy for a lot of people, especially as they don't teach the attacks they are learning to respond to.

OK, here's the issue: You actually have two kinds of muscle fiber. You have "Slow twitch" fibers and "Fast twitch" muscle fibers. Slow twitch fibers are specialized for relatively slow movements done over a long period of time, like running long distances and the like. They can operate for a long time without tiring, but they are simply unable to move very fast or suddenly. Fast twitch fibers are specialized for fast movements, such as those involved with punching, kicking, or sprinting. They can respond very fast and generate a lot of power, but they tire rapidly because they're designed for peak power, not endurance. If you do an exercize where you are moving relatively slowly for a long period of time, you are giving your slow-twitch muscle fibers a workout and developing lots of strength in them, but your fast-twitch fibers aren't being worked much, if at all, and are not being strengthened. If you then try to do movements calling upon the "explosive power" of your fast twitch fibers, you will find that they are relatively weak, not having been exercized, and the "boom" just won't be there. Your slow twitch is ready to rock and roll with lots of strength to kick slooowly (force equals mass times velocity) and for hours on end, but that isn't what you wanted, is it?

First, EVERYONE gets picked on when you're 15. Second, 30 pounds of muscle will make you look worse, not better. Just focus on building strength and stamina and you'll add some definition, girls love a slender guy with compact (not big) muscles.

Still haven't gotten that far, but one solution I have seen is to move classes outdoors. ___ in the park, and so on.

No, but it can and sometimes does, and I don't feel surprised that some teachers would be edgy at best over the topic, likely as a result. I have a hard enough time keeping people from turning their toes out in ginga without having another teacher harping at them to turn their toes out for a back or bow stance.

Hello. New is fine. Tell us something about you? What you do, stuff like that?

Well, if it's slow speed then you will be building slow twitch, not fast twitch, which means that by definition it won't develop "explosive" anything.

heh. we don't have forms. The main worry is just that all the best drills are paired. You have to learn how to flow with an attack and set up for a counter, and most people can't hold the other person in their mind - we usually use a chair, but there are none in my room, and it only works for some things. I'm a bit dismayed at the idea of having to buy and carry foldup chairs into class every day for a class held in a school.

The important point was the time limit. 500 in 15 minutes means you have to do 33.3 per minute, or one avery 1.8 seconds. How slow is that? Can you do that speed and stay in slow twitch? Or will you have to interval?

Not that i've seen, no, not from males anyways. Maybe the girls will thumb their noses, but that doesn't seem to take much. I've heard that just having a reasonable amount of muscle in the arms is enough to get treated badly - not like 'weightlifter amazon', like 'does pushups regularly and can lift weights big enough not to be left on the floor like a toy'.

Go talk to the teachers, talk to the students. Also recognize that big well decorated school often means substandard instructors. Anything should work really, but the best teacher will trump all.