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Thread: Martial arts discussion thread

  1. #301
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bartrim View Post
    About to go to my first lesson of "black belt club" which is an additional class for "students above the rank of orange belt who are serious about progressing to black belt. Class focuses on weapons and pressure points"

    ...

    Should be fun... or painful.
    how about painfully fun?

  2. #302
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    I resumed training this week for the first time in months... so... painful! XO

  3. #303
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    Quote Originally Posted by GoktimusPrime View Post
    I resumed training this week for the first time in months... so... painful! XO
    Have you found a new school or are you still at the same one you were at last time we spoke? I recall you weren't to happy with the instructor there.
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  4. #304
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    I've been looking, but haven't found any better schools - so still sticking with my current one atm. The problem is that the majority of students there only learning for health and relaxation and not as a fighting/self defence style, there's only me and one other guy in the whole class who view it as a fighting form, and the other guy's happy to just learn for health/relaxation because he already has a black belt in Karate so he's not actively looking for learning a new fighting style. Although both he and I sometimes talk about how we can apply the techniques we're learning for fighting. This week a new guy came along who's had previous experience in other martial arts -- and I had an interesting discussion with him after class, and I'm trying to drag along another friend to come along who's also interested in learning for self defence.

    The problem is that the vast majority of students at the school aren't interested in studying it for self defence, so people like me are a tiny minority in the school and the instructor has said that she can't change her teaching just to suit one student... which is perfectly understandable. But another problem is that - and my instructor has recently finally admitted this to everyone - she doesn't even know all the fight apps herself (and as I've explained to you, even when she does try to explain it, the explanations are questionable at best)... like this week she tried to explain the fighting app for Brush Knee and told us that the lower hand is used to block. I thought to myself, "You gotta be kidding me," and I chimed up and said, "I'd say that would probably be used to drag an incoming punch down so you can use the other hand for a palm strike." -- the instructor neither confirmed nor denied my explanation. But if you look at this photo sequence you can see that I was right.

    Anyway, I'm still going to the same school. The techniques they teach are correct, even if the instructor doesn't necessarily know how to teach us how to use them. So I'm sticking with this mob unless I can find anything better around my area.

    Sometimes we have special events where teachers from other branches come along who know more about the apps than my branch instructor - and that can be helpful for me. Unfortunately they don't happen very often. I've yet to meet the head instructor (the head branch is too far away for me to attend on a regular basis).

  5. #305
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    Earlier this week I watched an episode of "Kill Arman" -- I know it's an old series now and it's probably a repeat, but I'd never heard of this series before let alone seen it.

    For those who don't know, the series revolves around this tailor or fashion designer who has absolute zero experience in martial arts - and they fly him around the world where he has to train with 10 different masters in 10 different martial arts and get the tar kicked out of him! So with some trepidation I went and saw this week's ep... and it was actually pretty interesting, a lot more interesting than I expected.

    I thought it would be like almost every other show about martial arts where they just show the typical commercialised modern competition/sport stuff -- but they actually show both and focus on the traditional (well, at least this week's ep did). In this week's ep, Arman travelled to China to learn Shaolin Kung Fu. They showed the Shaolin temple and all the stuff that the monks^acrobats there do, but they quickly pointed out that all this fancy flying stuntwork is NOT real Shaolin Kung Fu and is basically just acrobatic/gymnastic performances designed to attract tourists.

    So Arman had to go outside of the Shaolin temple and find an obscure out of the way school where they still taught supposedly authentic Shaolin Kung Fu! This place was so remote it had NO hot water and I don't think the toilets even had running water! (good old drop-boxes!) -- so it was interesting seeing him go through the gruelling training of Shaolin Kung Fu.

    But the show wanted Arman to get beat up - but because traditional martial arts is so potentially lethal, it's not suitable for competition (this is true). So they had to get a student at the school who'd also learnt a modern competition martial art -- in this case a Sanda fighter -- and they pitted him against Arman. The Sanda fighter held himself back and predictably kicked the tar out of Arman (not surprising because Arman only trained for 3 days).

    Next episode Arman travels to Cambodia to study^get beaten up in the Cambodian martial art of Bokator. I've never heard of this style, so it'll be interesting to watch.

  6. #306
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    In black belt club last night we focused on Arnis... which fell into the painfully fun category. Some sore pressure points this morning.
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  7. #307
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    Talking to my sensei yesterday and he slipped up... I may be double grading next month
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  8. #308
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    Just watched some GKR video on youtube as I am still learning about why it has such a bad rep (I am learning very quickly) but how in the world can you have non contact sparring? How do they judge who gets the point if noone makes contact? Also the company also has the appearance of a pyramid scheme... I thought those were illegal.
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  9. #309
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    Maybe they judge on technique and if you make "close enough" hits?? <shrugs> I don't know...

    There are some martial arts schools which don't have ANY kind of physical contact (like mine! ) -- but some purport to teach their students how to attack with their mystical "chi energy." You know when you're playing make believe, and you pretend of have powers like Force Push etc. -- that's what these guys do, only that to them, it's not make believe! And the instructor charges his students money for membership and lessons where he claims to demonstrate using these mystical powers on his students!

    I know a guy who told me about one such school he witnessed. During the lesson the teacher would use Energy Attacks to repel his students. He'd make a gesture, and the opposing student would 'fly' back and fall over. Whenever he asked any of the students if they could do such moves, they would say, "Oh no, it takes years and years to develop this technique!" -- and when he asked the teacher if he could demonstrate an energy push on him, he said, "Oh no, I might accidentally injure or kill you. My students have been trained to withstand my attacks." (so... how did they survive the initial training when they were beginners?)

    Even if we were to assume that these techniques are real... it takes like a lifetime to develop it apparently. In the mean time you're spending thousands of dollars on membership, lesson fees, gradings etc. -- wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a can of mace or a taser? Or take up jogging so if you do see an attack coming from long distance you can leg it!

    The entire point of learning hand-to-hand self defence is because IRL an attack that you're going to need to defend yourself against is going to be one that you couldn't run away from (because running away is always your first option!) -- like say someone unexpectedly grabs you from behind. Force push? You'll both fly over wouldn't you? (and if he has you in something like a bear hug, then you can't lift your hands up to do the magic gesture...)

    Imagine one of these Chi Energy fighters against a BJJ fighter. *sigh* If you go back and look at the history of these non contact "Chi attack" schools, they came from this period where snobby aristocrats watched soldiers and peasants doing cool martial arts moves and taking down opponents... and they wanted to be able to do the same thing, but they didn't want to you know... break a sweat or get physical! So they invented the religious concept of Chi (re: Daoism) and created this martial art where they can supposedly use The Force^Chi to fight and take down opponents just like those awesome Shaolin Monks... only that they don't need to get hot and sweaty in training!

    So... non-contact sparring has its roots in upper class aristocrats. But of course, back in those days most of those people would never interact with commoners (if anyone attacked them it was up to their bodyguards who actually trained in sweat and blood to defend them! (then the aristocrat would probably take the credit)). But nowadays seeing regular folks train in non-contact with the intention of learning self defence is more disappointing, because of course, if these people DO ever get attacked IRL... odds won't be favourable for them.

    As for a pyramid scheme... I'm not sure. A pyramid scheme is meant to be an "unsustainable business model," yet commercially speaking GKR is extremely successful considering that it's like the single most commonly practised martial arts style in Australia. There are many martial arts schools like this in Australia and around the world -- absolute commercial successes, but teaching questionable self defence techniques. These questionable schools are often referred as "McDojos" (i.e. commercial success over quality) and their arts are sometimes called "Bullshido."

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial..._arts_industry
    Asian martial arts experienced a surge of popularity in the west during the 1970s, and the rising demand resulted in numerous low quality or fraudulent schools. Fueled by fictional depictions in martial arts movies, this led to the "ninja craze" of the 1980s United States.[23] The rank system introduced for judo in the 1880s proved commercially viable, and "colored belt" systems were adopted in many martial arts degree mills (also known as "McDojos"; parodied in Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode "Martial Arts", June 2010).
    http://mcdojo-faq.tripod.com/

    I find that the best martial arts schools tend to be rather obscure. Even in that "Kill Arman" episode in China, when he went to the Shaolin Temple it was all McDojo Bullshido rubbish... the only way he could learn authentic Shaolin Kung Fu was to go to this obscure out of the way school which also doubled as an orphanage and had no running water! I knew a guy who did something similar -- he trained in this small village in the middle of nowhere in rural China where nobody spoke a word of English and children would gather round pointing and laughing at him because they'd never seen a white man before! But boy did he learn to kick some serious butt while he was there!

  10. #310
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    OMG thanks for that Goki. I had a great laugh at that.
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