ShoriKid

Time flashes by when you gt a little older, so, lets see... I earned my second dan after over a decade of hard work. It's not that I've ever chased rank, but it was nice to be twested and found ready by the group of instructors who I respect in both ability and character. As Pittbull said, we're in a smaller place, which hurts in some ways. But, I guess we'll all get better at doing stand up and rolling in a much more confined space. My conditioning is getting much better, despite taking a hit lately with the lack of time to work on it while working on the house. I've improved some of my transitions while on the ground and gotten a few things into my head about not panicing. Stand up wise, I want to get in and shake out the kinks more than I've had the chance to lately. Pretty good year all in all.

Depends. Like DWx said, on the young black belt. But, for me, what they are teaching matters just as much. I would have a hard time taking instruction on self defense from a 13 y/o who had managed to get a pair of stripes on a black belt.

Not as big a transition as striking to grappling, but still a transition.

Well, I found the site entertaining! It reminded me of some of the challenges you would find on sites when the net was still young and there were fewer users. Seemed more ligetimate to call people out over the internet back then. But if you break down the challenge, you can see that no one is going to take it, or if they do, be accepted. They only want "international masters", so you have to travel from outside the country before they will consider the fight. They don't want to involve a "money aspect", meaning it's on your dime. They only want masters from "Japanese" styles and they are asking for "ligetimate masters", which means they can disqualify anyone they don't want to consider a master. It's a hollow challenge and when no one answers, they will declare themselves the ultimate style of karate. In the whole other debate, you can go one of two ways. Either if your not training with firearms, body armor and squad tactics your not a martial artist because your not training in relavent arts of war. Or, you can say that if your training in an art with a martial origin, no matter the reason your there, your a martial artist. That's what the words have come to mean in the preasent day and age. Fighters wanting to get better at unarmed fighting will seek out the places they need to train in order to sharpen their tools. But, they will sharpen their tools no matter where they are or who they are training with. That is a matter of individual drive and little else. If you want to say one style is superiour to another, go to the style vs. style forum and be prepaired for open critque. Because you name a style and it has holes in it that do not prepare a fighter for the full realm of fighting. Its about what we bring to the table when we train for whatever reason.

Eliminating head punches takes out a lot of slipping and trapping. You can off angle on body shots. Try working your jab with a 45 degree step solo both forward and back. Do it with striking pads with a partner. Then have someone yelling at you to cut your angles . Seriously, next time you go out to spar, concentrate on just your angles and closing the gap. Don't worry about anything else, just those angles. And have that person on the sides reminding you, because if your like me, you get caught up in the moment and forget to work the new things.

Joesteph Presses against the throat work well too. Again, they are hard things to push with instead of hitting in most cases. I've used them in the clinch when doing free sparing. And we've all used some of them during technique work. I usually angle in and then hook down. So, it starts as a spear and then turns into a hook or a claw. Tiger claw type attacks are more for hooking and gripping "meat". A bicept, a tricept or the neck. Something like that where your getting a handle on things. Fu Man With the time and dedication of the casual martial artist, these are bad choices for strikes to use. If you are working hard and want to add the more exotic strikes to your bag of tricks, you have to work at them. My advice would be pick one or two you like and can see the most use out of with your style(both personal and trained). Then condition the tools and practice with them in application. Not looking to employ them as primary weapons, but where you can fit them in as an addition to what you were already doing.

A lot of the strikes are situational and require a lot of hand conditioning that most people aren't willing to undergo. Tallgeese, the strike made with the back of the wrist I've always heard called the "ox jaw". Cranes Beak is make, if I understand it correctly, with the tips of all the fingers gathered in a bunch. Imagin trying to pick up a BB with the tips of all of your fingers and that cluster is what your striking with. The spear hand I've used to push in on soft tissue more than strike. Fingers stacked and you can put a lot of preasure into the neck, grion, dig under the ribs etc. For striking....too much conditioning for my tastes. I've seen breaks down with finger tips, but I don't want to try them. The strikes mentioned can be trained and may come in useful to increase flexibility of striking. I don't think most of them are more damaging than a punch or a knife hand/palm heel. However, when your in close and trapping or doing standing grappling, you might be out of position to punch and something like the ox jaw or a pushing spear hand into and behind the collar bone can come in handy.

tallgeese covered the posture pretty well. Footwork to set and control the distance is another key thing. If your working circular footwork and cutting in with angles instead of closing straight at the center line, you are cutting off some of their weapons. With 'reaching' or 'slapping down', there is a difference between the two. Reaching has you extending your guard more than a few inches and isn't done with a clear tactic in mind. "slapping down' or trapping as tallgeese is talking about, is done close to your guard, "leads" the direction of a strike and is meant to set something up to follow. Most people reaching seem to reach and black and then just reset. They haven't gained any tactical advantage. Someone trapping a strike is usually setting something up. Sort of why retreating more than a step, or without an angle or cover is bad. Sure, you can quickly move back out of reach of the oponent, but your right back where you started as far as the fight is concerned. You have to re-engage, reclose the distance and set back up to counter. Sometimes you don't have a choice but to retreat because of preasure in order to gain that slpit second to regroup.

Tallgeese is dead on with what he's saying. Doing frog leaps are a good, no equipment polymetric leg work as well. Bag work will build the power. Just make sure to get your technique down first. One of the things to check on your hip rotation is to make sure that your supporting foot is turned fully out, or nearly point 45 degrees away from what your kicking. If your foot is not at least turned 90 degrees, your cutting off your hips. Not getting full rotation is robbing you of a lot of power. Last thing to mention, and it's secondary, but it helps put the extra little bit on the round kick once you've got it down is to work the abs. If you don't, your just kicking with the legs instead of involving the whole body. Bag work for round kicks will help build the abs, but supplimenting your work out by hitting the abs too is never a bad thing. Working on the hook kick is about hip flexibility and using some body tilt to get the right angle. I use it with an angled advancing step to set it up and then think of trying to kick my own butt. Sounds weird, helps me though.

I think you can do it 100% bushido_man. Heck, it's what we're doing, though I don't know if it's really all of that different than what we've done before. It's just more a collection of all of the senior student's training and experiences than a single set style. We still do our kata and work on their application with an eye toward what works. But, we spar continuously, do pad and mit work in rounds and use the full range of attacks when sparring. It's a very good mixture, and I'm happy with what's come out of it. With the ground fighting we incorperate, with the wrestling background two of us bring in for our take downs and take down defense, we can employ our stand up traditions with less worry about the ground.

If it were as effect as the claim, it would be the only thing taught to any western, elite unit would train in. Law enforcement wouldn't be trained in the system because of the limitations of what they can do during the course of apprehension(striking a suspect can often opens up legal issues). If there were any truely universally effective martial art, that worked 90% of the time, then it owuld A)be the only one still trained in by anyone seeking practical martial ability, B)would have been figured out many years ago. I know I would want to train in the style. Who wouldn't.

Weather/time premitting-a run Stretch warm up Technique drills or partner work Rounds on mitts/shield move on to one or two of the following kata ground work sparring weapons drills(use/defense)

Don't worry about theeyes. Like others have said, they won't hurt you, and a good fighter can try to lead your attention with them almost like a fient. My first instructor taught us to look at the "golden triangle". From a point between the eyes to the tip of each shoulder. Look "at" that broad area, which gets your perifial{gahh...I can't spell} vision going. You see little bits of movement that way.

Done a seminar with Leon Jay, son of Wally Jay. Gokor Chivichyan had Manny Gamburyan were together at another seminar I went too. That's about it. Hard to get to famous people in MA from Tennessee.

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For me it has always meantto enter into a fight as if you only get one technique And, in that one technique, you have to finish the fight, so it must be perfectly exicuted, on target and maximum power meant to end the fight. If you are so blessed as to get a follow up, that is the last technique you'll have the chance to use. So, I feel it's a level of commitment in fighting, but also a level of commitment in training, where maximum effort and focus is put into everything you do as it may be the last thing you do.

If the student hasn't commited to a contract, then I wouldn't expect them to pay for a month of class where they did not attend. I've paid monthly dues and been able to make only 1 class that month due to work or school taking over. I didn't enjoy thinking about using up what little extra money I had to get a single night at the dojo. In this case, no, I wouldn't expect a student to pay tuition for a month where they are not training at all. I sure wouldn't. If this is a dedicated student, who loves the martial arts, but like many adults, has life commitments that don't allow them to train every night, work something out with them. I might not go as far as to go for a night by night pay set up, but something done on a weekly basis might work best. They obviously have no trouble paying, and are going to pay, as demonstrated by their willingness to pay for months when they are not even able to train at all. So, I don't think you have to worry on being stiffed for dues owed. This person clearly loves to train, it's just that they aren't in a job with convienent hours, and they aren't a kid with a flexible schedual that they control. I'd do what I could to encourage them to be there, and not stiffing them with dues for time they aren't in training could help. To take ironsifu's McDonalds analogy and run with it. Charging dues when the student isn't there is like the manager adding 2 big macs and a shake to your bill when you ordered fries and a cheese burger. You don't get the big macs or shake, and if you ask he says its for yesterday's meal, when you skipped lunch to run and pay the bills. This guy isn't sampling at the buffet after paying for the ribs. He's being charges for salad and a dessert when all he got to eat was the steak. I see where your coming from ironsifu on wanting only dedicated and serious students. However, if your dealing with adults, not all of them have good jobs with predictable hours. Heck, I just got out of one last year where my hours/shifts changed day to day, week to week and I never knew when I went in when I was going to get to leave or if I'd even catch a lunch break. Cases like the one Tiger1962 brings up though are where knowing your student is the best case, and it sounds like your school is one where you would know your students, and could work something out with one who was trying and life was just fighting them.

Switching gears from range to range is one of the things that catches more people than anything else. I work with people who are way better than I am on the ground, or better standing up. However, when the ranges are mixed, I can come out on top. Not saying I'm great in the transition, I'm not, but I seem to find openings as I go from one range to the other. Switching stances doesn't really constitute a transitional change. That's just a shift in tactics to force a change in motion or targets. Useful, but not the same.

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We've trained for them. Like tallgese, coming upward, like a ram, as you look to escape a body lock, or as your applying it for part of the lift for the throw. That's aimed at hitting more along the chin with the top about hair-line level. The nose is a common target, but the orbitals are good too. Not only do they break rather easily, you can inflict a good cut on the cheek or eye area that can help really impair the attacker's vission. So long as you make contact with a point on the head above your own eye brow level you should be fine during a headbutt.

I'm with all the others here really. With out seeing what your doing it's hard to say what could give you more power. Could be intent, or lack there of. Being to tense and tight. If it's a matter of physical technique, I'd start with the stance. Nothing is able to generate power if it's not properly anchored. A springy flex in the knees, active hips and a torso locked into the lower body as well. When in doubt, ask your sensei. Or ask on of the senior students in the class to help you with generating more power on your strikes. They are there and know what your doing right and wrong and how it should be corrected for your school.

I would feel safest going for a "flying" triangle. I want a flying knee bar in my arsenal. A lot. -glances Pitbull's way- I've seen a sub from a flying armbar that also scored a KO as well though. The shock value of the "flying" tech is great.

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I have done my homework, for a good while at that. By some accounts, the dirrect decention of Naihanchi falls from Soken Matsumora Motobu was also a student under Soken "Bushi" Matsumora, Kasoku Matsumora and a few other Okinawan notables. While Motobu was one of Itosu's students, he was not the most famous other than Funakoshi, at least not to me. I would rank Mubani, Kyan and Chibana as well ahead of the rough and tumble Motobu in fame. Other bits of history, such as the rough character of Motobu leading to his expulsion under Itosu. Then there is the writing of Motobu himself. On page 20 Okinawan Kempo he lists the "styles or kata which have been used in Ryu Kyu from ancient days.." "Sanchin, Jo-Ju-Shi-Ho, Seisan, Seiunchin, Ippakku-Re-Hachi, Naihanchi(Ichidan, Nidan, Sandan), Passai, Chinto, Chinte(bamboo-yari spear style_, Wanshu, Rohai and Kusanku." Further down the page he mentions the "Pinan(5 katas) the modern time warrior Mr. Itosu orginated.." Why attribute all of the other katas that he knew(7 of which are found in Matsubayashi Ryu) of as ancient in origin, while the Pinan he attributes specifically to Itosu? If the Naihanchi kata, as he knew them, were the work of Itosu why not give him credit there as well? Did he hold them to be the modified versions that Itosu taught, or a more orthidox version he's learned from Matsumora?

So, your saying saying the only difference between the Okinawan Naihanchi and the Japanese Tekki is the way the kata is broken up? Do you see any difference between the Okinawan Pinans ad the Japanese Heians? I've done both the Matsubayashi Ryu Naihanchi and JKA Tekki, and there is a world of difference between them. Footwork, the stance, the techniques and the timing are different. Naihanchi, at least the version I was taught, is a closed stance, with tight step overs, the hands are tighter to the body and the techniques are different. The timing is a whole differnt matter in and of itself.