Johnlogic121

The phenomenon of shared dreams is real, but it is fairly rare. It starts to occur for people who have some degree of psychic ability, like those who already possess something like telepathy. I think some degree of telepathy is a prerequisite. I have occassionally had dreams in which my deceased father has visited me within a dream, but this is a little different than having a shared dream with someone that you could verify the experience with, and skeptics might feel that the experiences are just from my subconscious. I don't know of any way that you can consciously develop this ability but certain Mikko Buddhist texts talk about methods of buildng up lucid dreaming capabilities. The Mikko sect believes that dreams are either the same as or similiar to the Afterlife, so they try earnestly to control their dreams so that they don't get caught in nightmarish dreamscapes. Certain occult orders also have ideas about cultivating control over your dreams, and some consider dreams to be within "astral space," but I would advise people to avoid occult organizations. They frequently promise to share secret knowledge but end up controlling the interested person or destroying them. On a final note, if you can experience shared dreaming, the practical question is, what do you want to do with it? Other than being a novelty, I'm not sure what use you could make out of it. If you call your friend on the phone the next day and verify that you both had the same dream, the world still spins at the same speed and the sun still sets in the West. It would be cool, but it wouldn't change your life greatly. -JL

That's an excellant message post. It was a pleasure to read and very informative on the question that started the thread. The only thing that I could add is that modern Bujinkan Ninjutsu was even banned in certain Asian countries because the officials thought that the art of the Ninja would be teaching people how to do assassinations. That set of skills really isn't a part of the general Budo Taijutsu curriculum, even though some ancient Ninja did use stealth to annihilate single targets and thus avoid mass conflicts. I overheard a high level Bujinkan instructor named Phil LeGare talk about this banning problem, but I never got a chance to ask him about what country or countries were imposing the banning. Ninjutsu is common throughout most of the free world, however. -JL.

My Dad used to tell me that regular western boxing could be very effective against contemporary martial arts. Eastern boxing makes use of both the hands and the feet in various ways but the boxing that has developed in the West is hardly inferior. Gymnasiums that teach boxing skills usually have really good physical training to supplement the fighting skills they teach. Sometimes I think regular western boxing is overlooked in the martial arts world as a viable alternative because it seems so commonplace and it lacks exotic appeal. If boxing had spinning hook kicks to the head, it would look more cool that just blasting the other guy in the face with the hands. The thing is, those spinning kicks are hard to master compared to basic hand fighting skills. -JL.

All professional boxers spend some time learning training techniuqes from their coaches that can be used in variations of the clinch scenario, and most amateur boxers get exposed to similiar training tips. Certain boxers actually specialize in their ability to preform infighting and get the best benefit out of a clinching exchange. They say that the uppercut is the hardest punch in boxing to see, and it often emerges in clinching scenarios. One moment you may be wrestling with the other guy's arms, holding him tight, and in the instant he wrestles one of his arms free it slaps you in the jaw. Uppercuts to the body are difficult to dodge and wear a person down greatly. The primary protection from these attacks is to be so close that the punches are short and deliver less power. I think the majority of martial artists would try to back up or push the opponent away when in a clinch, but certain other martial artists do some of their most effective fighting work from the clinch by applying things like arm locks that can throw the opponent to the ground. Boxing doesn't allow head butts, but if you have a dojo that allows you to practice these with control, you can gain a useful fighting tool. Sometimes the best way to defend against a head butt is to duck so low that you can reverse the situation and use your forehead against the other guy's nose instead of vice versa. Boxers accidentally open up cuts on the other person's eyebrows sometimes with unintentional head butts in the clinching scenario. If you are not wearing boxing gloves, a very powerful attack is to swing your hand up and clap the opponent over the ear. This can not only rupture the ear drum but also cause bleeding from the ear in the process, so you should be careful to only use it with control when training with a partner as it is stronger than most people would expect. Another thing to try in the clinch is to dodge away from an opponent who raises his arm to hook punch you in the head, and while his arm is up, poke him with your fist in the armpit. Armpit shots are painful and very powerful, but you may have trouble doing this if you have bulky boxing gloves on. Martial artists can also use low level kicking attacks in a clinch like stomping on the other guy's foot or driving your knee into the middle front of his thigh muscle. This latter attack is powerfully stunning. Some Tae Kwon Do stylists even recommend using a crescant kick to the head when you are doing infighting, as the leg shooting up from the side usually comes as a big surprise and can knock the other guy in the temple or ear. You just have to be careful he doesn't drive his knee up into your groin when you do this, and balancing takes practice when he might push you at any moment, so you have to be fast. Good luck, -JL.

If you landed more kicks than he did, the judges will see this as favorable for you. His punching may have been impressive, especially in the last fifteen seconds as you said, but judges look at the overall performance for the whole match. If he was rushing to land pucnhes in the last fifteen seconds that this might even appear to be desperation, even if he was successful in hitting you. Making a spinning hook kick to the back of the neck is very impressive, congradulations. I think upper body movements have an advantage in kickboxing, since they usually enforce a rule that says you have to make a certain minimum number of high kicking attacks per round as a kickboxer or be disqualified. This rule preserves the sport from being dominated by boxers who won't ever kick. Many tournament competitiors suspect that something is sometimes a little fishy with the judging, as it is an imprecise opinion that occassionally in nothing more than a subjective value judgment. Even if the other guy landed more combinations, judges in tournaments tend to count single techniques as a full point counting as much as striking the other guy three times in a row. This is just the nature of the way scoring works; usually they separate the fighters after a point may have been scored so that the judges can confer and give their opinions, but sometimes people fight continuously and the judges give an opinion afterwards. When the offense of both fighters is close, a lot of judges will consider the quality of the defense, and kicks are generally more destructive than punches, so it sounds like your performance just impressed the judges the most. I would not say however that the kicker always wins. In self-defense, I would predict that the puncher has an advantage over the kicker. In tournaments, strong kicking skills are typically viewed as a sign of diligent skilled training whereas punching skills are considered more "commonplace" abilities. Good luck in your next fight, -JL.

I read that in older times, the sport of professional boxing was very different than it is today. People not only fought bare handed, but the sport incorporated a grappling and throwing element. The duration between rounds was not timed as it is today, and they called the end of the current round when the boxers got into a clinch where one of the boxers tossed the other guy to the ground. Martial artists who engage in throwing arts will agree that the hardest part of being thrown is standing up again if you have good breakfall skills, because standing up a hundred times an hour makes you really tired. Thus, bare knuckle boxers in the olden days used to toss their oppoents to the ground from out of a clinch to wear the other guy out. However, some of the best fighters were in such great physical condition that the Guiness Book of World Records records one boxing match that lasted over six hours. Many fights in those days lasted over an hour. With the innovation of modern boxing rules and modern gloves, boxing is almost a totally different sport. You aren't allowed to throw the other guy to the ground anymore and the boxing gloves protect the fists so well that you can actually hit harder, even though the force of the blows is distributed over a broader surface area. Thus modern boxing bouts seldom can go longer than twelve rounds, even though old fashioned boxing might have seventy-five rounds with somebody falling down at the end of each round. Would you like to see old fashioned boxing revived? Could this older sport have an influence on modern dramatized Wrestling or the UFC? Would training in old fashioned boxing be good for modern self-defense purposes? Does anyone see a similarity between this type of boxing and Chinese Shai Chaio, a grappling and wrestling art? Would modern audiences get too bored if they watched a fighting spectacle that lasted three hours? Just some thoughts, -JL.

Thanks, that "cotton hand" exercise is precisely the kind of thing I am looking for. I found a reference to another exercise in a book after I made the original post. In the exercise I found, a practitioner would face the rising sun at dawn and make a Dragon Claw hand facing the sun and tighten every part of the hand with dynamic tension training. Dynamic tension training tenses muscles that normally oppose each other at the same time, so it is a little unnatural and takes practice to learn, but everybody who tries it can condition their nervous system to do it successfully. When the muscles that normally oppose each other in the hand and fingers tighten in opposite directions, it forms a kind of isometric exercise. The hand is gradually opened and clsed under dynamic tension several times a minute, slowly, over the course of fifteen minutes until the sun rises. The exercise is repeated at sunset facing the setting sun. The timing of the exercise is supposed to take advantage of certin natural body rythyms in a person's Chi cycles to give the most advantagoues training to the hands, and the mental focus of the power sun's disk is supposed to help train the mental focus that is demanded by a firm Dragon Claw hand. People who do this exercise continue it for years as a daily ritual, and the daily exertion gradually strengthens the hand claw for slapping and raking attacks by working on the internal muscular structure of the hand rather than just conditioning the outside tissues by slapping an object like a clay brick. I just thought that was an intersting one so I thoguht I would take the time to describe it. I would be very curious if people could describe several more of these kinds of exercises. Thanks in advance, - JL.

My Sifu was always very particular about the precise imitation of the shout sounds used in class. If somebody goofed and made the wrong noise, they got the sternest lokks you could imagine. Most of the breathing in Mang Chaun comes from the upper abdomen rather than the lower abdomen, in imitation of the kind of breathing that runners sometimes use, because it is believed to help conserve your supply of air a little better and cultivate higher endurance. Also, people tend to naturally breathe a little higher in their chest when under exertion, and many Kung Fu styles feel that natural instincts should be reinforced rather than modfied under special training. When delivering power moves, the shouts we made came from the lower abdomen, as you wrote about. -JL.

What do you mean by a holistic approach to fighting? I'm curious as to your point of view on the issue. Thanks, -JL.

I think the reason why these specific exercises are utilized for the purposes of building endurance is that they focus on precisely the right muscular groups and when you do the motions at the proper speed they continuously exercise the associated muscles to give them no real rest. If you did most three step combinations over and over again, the moments of rest in between moving certain muscles would make the efficiency of the endurance exercise a little bit less, even though shadowboxing or regular forms performance can be used to test resistance to fatigue. These forms are suited to the kinds of muscle movements required for Mang Chaun Kung Fu and doing these forms for ten minutes can be a challenge for a beginner. As the muscles get tired, the precision of the movements suffers, and you can feel the burn in your body. I think doing alternate exercises might be a little easier and not provide the same kind of intensity to your endurance workout. The first routine with the Puma strikes works the shoulders and back almost as much as swimming, and the second routine really focuses even more on crucial back muscles. -JL.

I don't have a web link about the legality of carrying stones in your pocket for self-defense. I heard about it because I'm a government employee who works with an agency connected to the Defense Department. If you are a field geologist working on a formal scientific expedition, you can carry rock samples in a case with you, but you have to drop those samples off when you get back to the city. It seems that people have tried to use the trick of carrying a small rock many times before to use as a small throwing projectile. A kid with five stones can potentially throw them to harrass policemen, and policing the possession of stones is probably stronger in Iraq than it is in the United States, but kids in America do throw stones at policemen sometimes. Even the cavemen probably used small stones to harrass and harm their adversaries, and the ancient Greeks even had military units called "stone throwers" who would literally carry a bag of stones into battle and launch volleys against opposing troops with ordinary arm strength. Later, people started using slings to throw stones, and a person who is accurate with a sling really can kill somebody. Ancient units of slingers didn't need as much training for accuracy when they would get 60 to 100 men grouped together to aim their slings at an area and attack in a big volley. In modern times, you can purchase sling shots and specially made sling shot pellets that are very accurate and very powerful because the sling shots are made of specialized rubber materials that let you get tremendous force from ordinary arm strength. If you are really curious about the legality of possessing stones for throwing, you might be able to call the non-emergency number for the local sherriff's department and ask someone who might be kind enough to look into the matter for you to find the exact details. Police officers are always happy to serve and protect, and they prefer to serve than to protect because it is often safer. Good luck out there, -JL.

In kickboxing competitions, they sometimes get a competitior who is only mildly trained in kicking and whose primary expertise is at conventional boxing. To preserve the sport of kickboxing as a sport in which the legs are used to kick above the waist, most kickboxing competitions require that each competitior make a minimum of eight attempts to kick his opponent above the waist. Before this was a rule, boxers would dodge around kicks and come to such close range that they would pummel the kickboxer relentlessly with all the force they could muster. Since boxers only work on their hands, they have a natural advantage in close range over kickboxers who split their training time between hands and feet. Boxers are also skilled at getting a good outcome from a clinch, also. So kickboxers tend to have a disadvantage against pure boxers when they cannot keep the other person away with their high kicks. However, if the kickboxers can use low kicks to the legs, they usually tire the boxers out so badly that the boxers can hardly stand, and boxers are typically quite unready to defend their legs from determined low kicking assaults. Boxing is surviving as a sport even with the emergence of the Ultimate fighting Championship contests. Do you think kickboxing will become more popular? Should more kickboxing tournaments allow kicks to the knees and the thighs to give them some edge over people who focus on boxing training methods? Would spectators prefer to see more of the low kicks like we see in the UFC in pure striking contests? How do these events effect the way people tend to train as martial artists? -JL

Teaching kids can be a challenge sometimes. A few kids have behavioral problems, and some children have attention deficit disorder or hyperactivity. In simpler terms, some kids just misbehave and goof off in a karate class. They enter the dojo before bowing in and try to sidekick their classmates and pull the hair of the prettiest girl and punch everybody and so on and so on. How do you deal with misbehaving kids? This is a very open ended question, since the specific behavior can be as simple as not paying attention when giving instructions or as bad as actually fighting with other people inside or outside of class as a bully. Do any instructors have horror stories they can share? Does anybody have a helpful advice for keeping the undisciplined ones under control? How do you tell an earnestly concerned parent that 'little Johnny' is just plain disruptive? Have you every been forced to expel somebody under ten from the dojo? What if repeated words of correction seem to get no response from a kid who just wants attention, even if it is attention from being bad? Thanks, -JL

Wado-ryu karate is not a style that I have taken, but I did meet some people who trained in it several years ago. The prefix "wa" of wado-ryu is a sound that means "harmony," and the "do" suffix implies that it is an "art form of harmony" in some form or another. "Wa" in the martial arts generally is associated with emotional harmony specifically, like the calm that a person feels inside when meditating. Wado-ryu is considered one of the major traditional styles, so its fighting should be very combat applicable. Training of the mind for emotional courage when fighting is a regular element of this style I think. Most Japanese martial arts have ten junior ranks before black belt and the belts have every color of the rainbow with the highest ranks under black (usually brown) using striped belts. Different schools have different levels for each of the colors, so you would have to check with a Wado-ryu student or instructor to learn the order sequence of the colors. Thus, saying you are a "red belt" in the martial arts can be either impressive or dissappointing depending on whether or not a red belt is high in your particular martial art. Most karate schools based on Japanese curriculums require a student to train for five years to become a black belt, but some of the older traditional styles will require a full ten years. It is unusual to reach a black belt in less time than three years unless you 1) train in a Korean art like Tae Kwon Do, where becoming a black belt takes less time, sometimes only two years; or 2) you get private lessons where every move you make can be individually monitored and corrected as you go through everything step by step. In private lessons, you can make very rapid progress, but may still desire time to reinforce those skills afterwards so you build up experience. I hope this helps you. Take care, -JL.

Gichin Funakoshi, the man who is called the Father of Modern Karate, is recorded as saying that that if you don't train continuously to keep your skills "hot" they will quickly turn "cold." In other words, if you take a vacation or are forced to discontinue training for a certain legnth of time, then the quality of you karate performance goes down dramatically. People say you never fully forget how to ride a bicycle, but karate has a hundred skills in its skill set that are equally as challenging as riding a bicycle, and karate ability really does diminish if you leave it alone. Nevertheless, some older people who have given up active training can still fight well if they are called upon to defend themselves. Does anybody know of a standard formula for how rapidly your skills diminish if you stop continuous training? Knowing such a formula would be handy if someone is considering a long vacation or moving to a new area where they might be out of active karate classes for at least six months. Does staying away from class for six months take away as much as a year of your ability, if you have put about five years in? How does staying away from class effect someone's flexibility? Does anybody have experience with being away from class for a long time? How long would you have to train to get back in shape if you have been out for three months? Would the dojo you train in allow you to keep the same rank if you forget key parts to certain kata forms? If so, how would you make up the lost time? Thanks, -JL