elbows_and_knees

yeah, but they were predominantly ground game guys. It's easy to tap from an arm bar. you can't tap if your arm is locked and breaking as I throw you. At one point in time, there were over 700 styles of jujutsu. As far as I know, most of them did not randori. I agree with this. I'm referring to the assumptions I pointed out earlier.

there should always be thought, but not anticipation. that thought is how you recognize openings. "hmm, he drops his hand when he punches," or "he puts a lot of weight on that front leg," detecting weaknesses is a thought process.

who are these "many"? how many are there? where did you get this statistic? There is a shred of truth here, but I can guarantee you, as a person who benches 300 and squats 415 that when I hit you, it hurts. execution is part of training. If you are training correctly, despite what your focus is, you know how to execute a technique. but we're not racing, we're fighting. Theoretically, slow and steady can win, but there is not even an opportunity for that to happen unless you've had so many fights that the adrenaline dump is easily controlled and fighting is a commonplace thing to you. simply waiting around for the "perfect opportunity" will get you killed. anyone who trains knows how to evade or block, parry, etc. the deciding factor is experience. are you talking about a streetfight??? This sounds like something I saw on hajime no ippo...

I always have either my extendable baton, my knife, my freeze spray or all three.

I've never heard or seen that - do you have a reference for it? yeah - they were ground fighters. I disagree that it would, for the very reasons you stated - all of those things are so far advanced compared to what they were like then that The only natural end-result is a better fighter. for the most part. Not all of the techniques are still known, however. A perfect example is yama arashi. four different people will show you four different ways, and those was are different from the way they are done in judo and aikido. Nobody is really sure what the original yama arashi was anymore. which is true, but I'm not the one making the assumptions - you are.

because of the representation that it gets in the media - high flying acrobatics. They don't go in depth about what capoeira really is.

I dunno, I don't get caught up in nostalgic views of the past anymore. speaking from a view of specificity though, the samurai would dominate standup, the wrestler would dominate the ground.... the samurai would have been inferior on the ground even then. Heck, we saw it when kano's guys were beating jjj guys in shiai. randori wasn't a big part of jjj at the time in most schools, because they taught crippling techniques and couldn't practice them safely. one of the best fighters I know is a karateka. Also, there is a kyokushin guy who is dominating in K-1. Any style is made for fighting other fighters. What's important isn't the style, but the training methods. No, I don't. but you are making assumptions of what will or won't end a fight. I'm merely posing the question of, it that fails, then what? IME, it's mainly a sweep or takedown that puts them on their front, not a throw. However, you are right about being able to modify a technique to drop them on their head instead of their back, and also about the throws with a locked joint. exactly. and with weapons, ki, kata, bunkai, basics, bag work, etc... when do classes really have time to fit in groundwork? gotcha.

part of the problem with teaching is that you lose training time. There are things you can do though, for example participating with the class during drills. when the class spars, alternate partners each round. make sure you get in the rotation. if the class is shadow boxing, do it with them, but at the front of the class so you can still see them all and make corrections. When doing mitt / pad drills, work in with the students. This and similar things not only give you a chance to train, but it gives you one on one time with each student during class. That should help them improve faster.

weight training can actually be quite specific. What lifts do you do now?

they used "peasant weapons" in okinawa, did they not? a bo would've been pretty common place. Or, an Oar. Even today, people walk around with canes and umbrellas.

my very first style was chun kuk do. Chuck Norris had a school in va beach where I grew up. the school is actually still there. that was when I was 6 though, and I'm 28 now, so needless to say, I don't remember all of the moves anymore.

I use them seperately when not training for a fight. on non lifting days, I do plyos. about 4 weeks out from the fight, I do them in conjunction with weights. So, for example, I would do a set of bench presses and immediately follow it with a set of plyometric pushups, creating a superset of the two. Prior to the fight, you want to raise your limit strength. As the fight gets closer, you want explosiveness. Lower the weight some and superset with plyos. Hope you dont mind me asking, but where did you learn this method from? Sounds good. I just like to check out my sources before I take something on. Thanks for sharing. I don't blame you. I am the same way. This came from a boxing coach named ross enamait. http://www.rosstraining.com/ http://www.rossboxing.com/

things started to get peaceful after tokugawa, when meiji was made emperor. Thanks.

I was one of those. the guy I trained with was born and raised in japan and only taught a few kata - even though he knew all of the shotokan kata and actually helped me with them, as I was also training karate under someone else at the time - he himself only taught taikyoku shodan and sanchin. everything else was drilling and sparring.

no doubt. IMO, they are still inferior on the ground to a wrestler, for example, but we are talking about untrained attackers, yes, this is fine. No, it doesn't. Having the "principles" in the kata does nothing for you on the ground. you have to train the ground game to get good at it, and I'd bet money that most karate schools don't do that. I know that the ones I've trained at / been in contact with don't do it with enough frequency to be good at it. And striking from the ground won't always cut it. However, you have aroused my curiousity - you say you don't need much to be able to defend yourself - what do you think you need? there's the assumption again... completely disabled or slightly vulnerable. 1. there is an assumption that you will be able to clinch the guy off your entry 2. that you are able to throw him japanese throws, unlike chinese, tend to put someone on their back. that will not disable them unless their head bounces off of the ground pretty hard, or unless they try to catch their fall with their arm or something. Any other type of injury is incidental. Chinese throws aim to throw you on your head. With those, it's a safer assumption (yet still an assumption) that the attacker is disabled. you are re-inventing the wheel here. principles don't translate to applications unless you know how to apply them. I can teach anyone how to do juji gatame within 10 mins, but until they actually try to apply it, they will not know. It's like what jeff speakman's teacher said in "the perfect weapon": "I have shown you the dragon, but you have not seen him" I realize that. But as I said before, principles are useless if you can't apply them. you can train kata all day and still not be able to fight with them. even bunkai - unless you are actively training and drilling applications on a regular basis, the principles in kata mean nothing. This is why a kata will not help you with groundfighting.

after the meiji / tokugawa (always forget which, that's why I put both) there was a time of peace. Samurai were not needed anymore. MA were taught mainly for fitness and for preservation of the art. That was the end of jutsu and the beginning of do. The wartime styles were considered koryu - classical martial arts. peacetime arts were more for enhancing your way of life, hence the term do.

you know he's referring to au, even though it's not a cartwheel.... but I dunno if angola guys do au....

maybe. But that is an unsafe assumption. I know many trained MA who have gotten owned by untrained guys with either more fighting experience, more serious mindset, or both.

I was actually referring to karate. but even in jjj, the focus is standup. and that is a really bad idea. There is a japanese saying - ichi go; ichi-e - one encounter, one chance. But, realistically, it doesn't work that way. if your one chance - in this case, the ability to end it with one strike - fails and you DO go to the ground, then what? that really doesn't mean much though... I mean, In principle, I can use muay thai and formulate weapons usage. But realistically, I wouldn't be very good with a weapon if I did. that's interesting - I'll look into that book. from the japanese? aren't the main japanese styles - wado, shito, etc. all karate-do? I know they may (like wado) have jujutsu influence, but it's still a do.

there can be. that depends on the pacing of the two fighters. someone used to 2 min rounds may attack at a faster pace, because he knows he's only got two rounds to bring it. training today is about sport specificity - be as close to the event as possible. If it calls for 2 min rounds, train for 2, not three.

yes. The tang soo do school I attended as a kid did not teach ground grappling, however they do today.

I disagree. you will not find ground work in any pure japanese style that I know of. you won't find ground grappling in most chinese styles either, other than dog boxing. ground striking, but not ground grappling. And I'd wager that it's not in a lot of okinawan karate either, considering the chinese influence. while it is true that karate was a peasant art, it's all they had when defending the invading samurai. Notice their weapon sets are peasant tools - nunchaku were used to shuck rice. tonfa were mill handles. Benches, Oars, etc. They fashioned weapons out of what they could. kata are a catalog of techniques. the aforementioned kata are what is left of those styles. kung fu is notorious for this. a master would learn a form from someone and keep it in his system to keep the style alive. Look at all of the forms in longfist. many of them are forms from now extinct styles. Also, forms make it easy to catalog a style's techniques. Yes, there is more to it than that, but I wouldn't say the the form IS the style, more that the form is the essence of the style. once again, a kata is a catalog of the style. Why use multiple catalogs if I can get all I need into one? However, I disagree that kata teach you how to deal with any situation. show me groundwork in any of the heian katas... this is true. historically, it was a do anyway. just like judo. Any art created after the meiji / tokugawa eras are considered do and not jutsu. shotokan therefore is a do, regardless of what is taught in it. It is taught in some. But assuming that it is not, then there are NO karate schools today who teach the art of which you speak, as there is no single style that is still taught in the exact manner that it was all of those years ago.

how could you see it? seriously. If I throw a spearhand, how do you know it's a jujutsu spearhand, and not a karate or kung fu spearhand?

not necessarily forgotten, but likely not passed on to students for various reasons, which resulted in much of the ignorance to these techniques that you see today. For example, funakoshi taught karate in the kodokan - you know he had to have trained judo while he was there - but shotokan is notorious for not teaching throws. what? The concept of mma has only been around since about 1995. And regardless of how long its been here, okinawan karate has always taught its grappling side... Not true. It's not taught because they didn't put it in the system. Judo teaches morote gari, which is a double leg. Not only that, but one of the most common street techniques you see is a tackle. Technically, a tackle and a double leg are drastically different, but in principle, they are the same.

I haven't read this thread yet, so this may have already been said, but jujutsu is the proper romanization. that is really the only difference. jiu jitsu is not the correct spelling, however, it was a spelling adopted when GJJ was coined. Now, technique wise, there is a vast difference. jjj is more standup oriented, while bjj is ground oriented. The stand up of bjj involves more throws and takedowns - to get the opponent down quickly - and not strikes and standing locks, as seen in jjj.