JusticeZero

Yeah. *ing *un is having a titanic internal political battle, the details of which i'm hazy on, but the sides are so wound up in their civil war that they have tried to tear into or drag me, someone who doesn't even practice CMA, into their political screaming matches on more than one occasion.

I'm talking about the student getting the loud mouth, not the teacher.

Dunno, seems like general flexibility development, since all the stuff that you need for that stancework you'll need for other movements. I wish I had some students with your build though, it's hard to find people who already have perfect footwork to begin with.

Yeah, but generally, science classes won't make you do your math wrong and tend to badmouth your math teacher about how ignorant he is for thinking that 10-2=8 and not 7 like they teach in science class.

Small-circle jujutsu, anything with standup trapping from what i've heard. The LEO's i've spoken to note that while they end their altercations "on the ground" where they handcuff, the fight is over before then. "How often do you go to the ground?" "All the time, we have to cuff them." "How often do you go to the ground before you put the handcuffs on?" "Probably about 9% of the time." Usually the focus is on disarming and applying submissions to someone in a standing position, at which point the submitted attacker is moved to a position where handcuffs can be applied. This is just what i've gathered from talking with some LEO's and perusing a training manual or two.

Why should I study Bruce's concepts? There's nothing new in them. Classical stylists have been saying that stuff for quite awhile. It's just that you can't be expected to 'transcend style' if you don't have a style to begin with.

Yes, it can. Exercize right before bed and your energy level will be high. Try doing something to bring your energy level down, like standing or sitting meditation, so that you're cutting down on things that keep your energy level up.. some activity that forces you into inactivity for a bit and clears out the excess activity that will keep your mind racing. Don't know if that'll work completely but it's worth a try. You can also try getting up earlier and doing a little bit of physical stuff in the morning, lock your bedtime and waking time down across the week. Even if it's Saturday, you will wake up at the same time. Helps teach you to fall asleep when it's time to.

I don't know her age, but she's married and doesn't look teen-aged. I wish I could get another person into my class so that she wouldn't have to compare herself to me or someone who's been training for months.

One of my female students protests incessantly. 'noo, noo, noo, I can't, noo, noo this is not working, noo..' Won't freaking commit to kicks (I don't want to hurt you!), won't do new material without excessive amounts of prodding. I don't have a formal structure here to work with, and the class size is tiny (2 students) but it's really getting on my nerves and I haven't been able to get a change in behavior to stick. They're actually a good student once they are made to do the exercizes, i'm just tired of having to tell them to do ieach one three or four times before I can get any cooperation, and then have to listen to a litany of how bad of a student they are as a constant drone accompanying each repetition. Any suggestions?

OK, it's been asked before and no answer has been given... WHY *EXACTLY* DO YOU NEED TO ADD 30 POUNDS OF MASS? PLEASE answer in FULL DETAIL, with supporting explanations of why those reasons are important.

I'd rather not have Bruce brought into this, since from all i've seen and read, he was a prodigy who discovered for himself over the course of 20 years a list of principles.. However, any of his teachers could have told him the whole list had he not been acting like the worst student in the world and bailing out of their classes once he'd picked up a distorted and superficial understanding of a handful of things in their art. If you can go to another teacher and learn things that enrich your core practice in ways that do not interfere with your core of movement, I am all for it. If you're going to flake out and go picking techniques up that damage your core then you're going to rapidly find your instructor displeased by the idea of cross-training, and might even find yourself removed from the class. These sorts of things might include, to name a few: -Snippets of footwork from the other art overriding your stances so that loads of extra time must be spent correcting you to not move like the other art -Power generation disrupted by 'well in the other class we do it THIS way..' -Inheriting arrogant and not necessarily supported 'well, we'd just do thisandthisandthis and demolish you' ideas from the other class (such as shooting for takedowns when the instructor is trying to demonstrate controlled speed techniques slow enough so you can learn how it goes)

I don't really approve of this. This is the male equivalent to anorexia we're talking about here, and just as likely to land one in the hospital with permanent health problems. By the way, women tend to prefer the more compact and bishy build rather than the obscenely malproportioned action figure build you're trying for anyways.

Mm.. no, 6,000 sounds about right for what you're asking to do, from what i've heard. If 6,000 sounds out of line it's because what you're trying to do is out of line - which is what people have been trying to say. It's exactly like how a girl wanting to lose 50 pounds in a short period of time would be told to reduce their intake to an absurd level - it's equally unhealthy but if you need to get that amount of change that's what you need. And the point has been brought up that it's not clear what the need is. It certainly isn't for health reasons.

I've often seen below teaching level students be asked to, say, run a group of beginning students through a basic drill while the advanced students are given instruction by the teacher.

Well, if they are of a rank that has to teach sometimes, and his mom is just starting at a low level, then mom will be in a group that they will have to be teaching and enforcing order on. Suck it up. It's a specific setting.

I hate that whole "Grand Ultimate" thing too, actually. It sounds so amazing, but it's a translation which is TECHNICALLY correct - but the meaning is totally different, because the words have multiple meanings, and the translation didn't hit the most commonly used one. The main thing to note on "Grand Ultimate" is that the word "Ultimate" in this case is not translated with the definition of "best", but rather with the less often used in English definition of "the endpoint", like the tips of a pole. I think that there is something similar going on with the word "Grand" as well.

I had this whole post written up, then I noted that your style was listed as taiji. I don't know. Exercise your ability to walk on the balls of your feet. You should be doing foot exercizes in addition to the arch support anyhow, since the doctor i've talked to about flat-footedness basically described the support as a minor supplement to your regimen of foot exercize.

I don't know, i've heard of some of the things the advanced taiji students at a school I have some relations with have been doing, and they sounded like things that would make for capable combatants. Maybe not sportfighters, but I would not especially want to have to fight them. They were doing quite a bit more than just doing forms. Of course, it wouldn't be apparent from just stopping into the school and taking a class or two.

Preparation to attack?

Yes, it's normal. Yes it's just because it's work. You adapt to it after a couple weeks.

Why, exactly, do you "have to" build that much muscle mass?? Isn't that kind've like a girl saying she "has to" lose 40 pounds in less than three months to get down to under 100 pounds? (at which point she looks like a sick and underfed skeleton) I mean, you can add muscle mass in a few ways, but a lot of it is pretty pointless. Raw muscle mass is neither attractive nor the important part of anything as a rule. Building strength I can understand. Building stamina I can understand. Developing specific muscles for specific reasons I can understand. But just "to gain weight"? Maybe there's actually a specific reason you have that i'm missing, but i'd have to know what it is.

First, i've seen some Goju practitioners demonstrate some very fluid mobility with those "still strong" stances. Second, the human body hasn't changed all that much over the past few hundred years. Certainly not enough to think that movements are incompatible. I mean, heck, when boxing was bareknuckle and done with much less restrictive rules, they kept their hands at rib level. They only brought the hands up in response to MASSIVE PADDING ON THE HANDS which both turned the hands into these vast shields, and allowed them to strike to the head much more powerfully and efficiently to do much more destructive permanent damage to the head, more regularly, unbound by the limitations of the structure of the hands or the need to protect anything else. So what exactly is "modern" about bringing the hands up? Basically it's a ghost adaptation to a rule IN ANOTHER SPORT that made said sport far more dangerous and deadly and required adaptation using the unrealistic equipment they worked with.

Um.. no. If you needed to know how to do any of that before taking the class, it would be a pretty stupid and pointless class, wouldn't it? I would be curious what lineage you're looking at - only certain branches of Capoeira even do things like highly acrobatic backflips and such; out of four lines I have interacted with, only one was particularly "tricky", and two actively distrusted tricks. I have to distinguish 'highly acrobatic' from 'low acrobatic' here - we spend time on our hands and rolling over and such, but we keep our weight on the ground and make sure we can change the movements in the middle - when you see someone flying through the air, they're committed and I was always taught to blast them out of the air; get under their landing site or put some spin on them so they land badly. Mine does some inverted and such movements, and I prefer people to never have done a cartwheel or backflip before joining, because we have movements which look similar which are not the same in major ways, and it's frustrating to spend weeks trying to help teach people not to cartwheel.

If all you do is forms, you can't fight. Good taiji teachers do things other than just forms, at least with the students who have progressed far enough to have absorbed the principles in the forms to some degree. I'm not a big believer in sparring, though, because it's so highly unrealistic while appearing realistic.

*shrugs* I like mixing in triangles, myself.