elbows_and_knees

sure, but you have to be careful of your surroundings when you do that - you don't wanna get kicked in the head by someone else.

both.

these knucks are legal everywhere, at least in the US. they are designed differently from brass. they are designed to tear, not crush, and they are glass, not brass. There is no law restricting them here. If you can carry a kubotan, I'd imagine you could carry these.

from a pugilist perspective, power. the windmill comes all the way from kansas, giving it plenty of time to build momentum. Combined with full body torque, it can create a pretty powerful strike. sure. But if you and I fight and eeryone who attended went to either your school or mine (challenge matches were usually not public) then of course, my classmates won't tell anyone I suck, and I assume yours wouldn't say that about you. So then everyone who hears about it hears biased accounts...

sure it does. But in the grand scheme of things, can he REALLY fight, or is he just better than other unskilled drunks. It merely makes him the best of the worst. Similarly, if you have a bunch of guys training, but none of them have ever had a fight, you have fighting that looks sloppy, like the vid I posted. the best of those guys would still be the best of the worst, even though they fought to the death. Since we only hear about these guys second hand, we really can't assume how well they fought. wouldn't attend what events? challenge matches? they weren't local events that everyone looked forward to, they just happened for various reasons. that fight happened in macau in 1954. including biu jee and the weapons forms, I think there are 6. you learned all three in 2.5 months?? Taiji is very much a fighting art. all of the "internal" styles have a fighting side, but taiji, yang in particular, is practiced by the majority of people for its health benefits. Gongyi, however, was trained in the fighting side - heck, he was the GRANDSON of the FOUNDER of wu style taiji, which along with chen style is known for it's fighting. the windmilling is seen in several longfist type boxing styles. you can see it in northern longfist, choy lay fut, hop gar and various other styles.

The guys are REAL ninjas

exactly. spring steel and other wushu grade steel are lighter for competition reasons. I wouldn't reccomend fighting with those. That said, not all chinese weapons bend. My old sifu has an 80lb kwan dao.

Large? the kubotan is small and fits on a keychain. Not all of them are metal, so they will bypass a detector. Heck, I walk around with knucks in my pocket that are made of bulletproof glass - they are undetectable as well. The simple stick shaped kubotan is used as a hard device for striking an assailant. I pratcice similar techniques with my tactical flashlight for use on my job should I need to. There is also a version of the kubotan that has protrusions which extend through the spaces in your knuckles when you make a fist, like spikes. I prefer my knucks, but there are uses for the kubotan.

in general, century equipment sucks. As far as bob goes, it sucks too. However, I will say that bob is AWESOME for training uppercuts and hooks, as you have a realistic surface to train them on. They are far superior to heavy bags in that respect, but fall seriously behind in all others.

the old chinese training methodology involved few forms or none. They, like I mention a lot, trained via drilling and conditioning. the forms that were used were trainined for a specific reason, a la qigong development in taiji, or to train a specific body mechanic intrinsic to the style. My karate teacher, who was japanese, only taught two kata - taikyoku shodan and sanchin. He knew all of them and helped me with them, as I was also training shotokan alsewhere, but he himself only taught two to his students. The first was because he thought it was great for teaching footowork and hip rotation, and the second for internal development. Back to the topic though, as time went on, people cross trained, adding new forms to what they already knew, some styles became extinct and people added those forms to their own in order to retain some knowledge of the extinct style, etc. What we ended up with are styles today that have 20 + forms. Perhaps the same is true with japanese kata.

it's kind of ironic that you would bring them up as your idea of great fighters while in a discussion about the uselessness of kata. Neither wrestling nor boxing have kata. Drilling, conditioning and sparring.

perhaps. But the thing about these fights is that SOMEONE has to win. If you see to untrained drunks fighting in a bar, one must win, no? If drunk A beats drunk B, did he REALLY know his stuff, or did he just win that fight? Look at the fight I posted with gongyi. Those two masters looked clueless. But eventually someone would've won, if it were a streetfight. (this fight was sanctioned and was considered a draw.) As you agree, good fighters have never been part of the mainstream. Given that, then what is the liklihood that all of the masters were good fighters? Once again, I'm not saying that none of them were, but I don't think there were as many as we would like to think there were. pankration. for all practical purposes, it was wrestling and boxing.

There is throwing in them, I don't dispute that. But the kata only teaches part of the mechanics of the throw. It doesn't teach you how to off balance, which is the most detrimental part. judo is like that as well. I know about 100 different throws and variations. Of them, I have about 8 that I use regularly (one for each direction) and three of those eight that are my bread and butter. But in order to teach, progess, etc. I have to learn all of the other throws, though I will likely never use them in shiai.

No confusion at all. That is an inborn train that is of different intensities in different individuals, and has been repressed by all due to the nature of the civilized societies that we live in, hence the my reference to learning it. The soccermom example isn't killer instinct at all. It's adherence to our most simple, basic instinct. The need to eat. Unless she's killing half dead survivors, then that is not killer instinct.

bozteppe vs cheung I've seen longer versions of this fight though. THIS is what kung fu should look like: any of those guys woulda roasted both keyfu and gongyi.