One of the reasons I got into karate as a kid was to learn how to do amazing things with my body as all things physical interested me. I liked climbing, fighting, riding a unicycle as well as hang gliding and scuba diving. Karate was just one more outlet to push my body to new heights.
I have found some activities that are not necessarily thought of as having anything to do with the martial arts but can be used to improve ones own strength, coordination and timing thereby improving your own martial art. I wrote a post on my other website (http://leananmean.com) about the fitness benefits of pole dancing here.
As you might know I try to find interesting material for this website that I can weave into karate, self-defense, conditioning, or general martial arts stories. In this post I will speak of fun conditioning exercises that one can do to help some facets of your overall martial art! I found this interesting (although a beginning foray) karate application of pole dancing.
Imagine that you grew up in the 60’s (some of you did) and your dad used to watch boxing! Boxing was an ideal martial art (even though it was not widely thought of as martial arts) because anyone could learn the basics and then defend themselves against a larger attacker! What you might be thinking? Don’t you mean karate? Well karate was in its infancy in the 60’s but boxing had a large audience.
If one knew how to jab, right cross and hook – he could take almost anyone bigger that was just trying to tear your head off and make them look silly! Karate kicked like girls did so it was not too popular with some men at first. Later when pioneers like Bill Wallace, Joe Lewis, Ron Marchini, and Chuck Norris started to make the sport of karate more popular there was still a dominant question at the time, what was better, karate or boxing?
In this post I will attempt to answer that question somewhat but before I do I will go into some history and note the differences between the two martial arts. Here is a video I found of the debate between boxing and MMA for some of the issues. MMA as many of you know is the most popular form of striking and submission sport that is watched today.
Carano vs. Cyborg is one of the fights I am waiting to see but for now I found a video game with Gina as Natasha. The game is called Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 and has a web page here. According to Wikipeda’s page here, the game is set in an alternate universe where Albert Einstein has been removed (so no nukes).
Carano seems to be good for the part as she was already bigger than life as Crush in the American Gladiator TV series. This is a short post about Gina Carano’s recent history and role in this video game. I found this video promotion for the game.
Imagine you are a 15 year-old girl, after just getting your allowance on a mid-summers day, walking over to your friends house. On the way you suddenly notice a guy opening a car door and running up to you! What do you do? This is one of the defining moments in any one’s life – how they will respond to danger. I wrote a post about this here, that describes what feelings a person might have and how do deal with the fight or flight response.
In this post I am going to tell you about four recent stories of girls having to fight or run away to safety! I have noticed Internet chatter about karate instructors recommending to just kick the guy in the nuts and the girl will be safe! What? I would like to say that no matter how good I or any other blogger out there is, we cannot teach fighting skills over the Internet.
The only thing I hope for is to somewhat explore an issue or two in any one post! This means that if I say a girl should gouge the eyes out and try to run away – I am not saying that is all that it will take to get away! Who really knows? It depends on how badly the attacker (the bad guy) gets hurt or surprised. If you really want to know how to escape an attacker – go take a self-defense class at a minimum! With that caviot, here is a picture I found a funny photo on flickr of a scary guy attacking a girl (he is not really a bad guy)!
Back when I was a kid and had discovered karate on TV, I thought a black belt in karate could beat up any bad guy! I remember seeing shows like the Wild Wild West where Robert Conrad was able to fight his way out of many sticky situations because of his karate training (although karate had not made it to the United States yet – this TV series was set in the 1800’s).
As a boy I had to either learn how to fight or be one of the ones that gave away his lunch money. This started in the sixth grade but I was able to eventually get to the point where I stuck up for myself. Now I understand that girls are every bit as tough as boys. I will admit that I do not really understand the dynamics of girl on girl bulling but boys are simple – the bully will pick on anyone that is afraid of him!
In this post I will talk about some reasons why you should learn martial arts of some kind. I do not think the type of martial art is so important as actully starting the lessons! I wrote a post on how to pick a martial arts school here. Learning is generally an evolving process. I as a young man thought differently than I as a middle aged man. I will talk about this process, some expected goals, achieved goals and the importaint lessons I’ve learned from taking martial arts. Here is a video about one lesson Kwai Chang Caine (played by David Carradine) learned in the Kung Fu TV series.
I was just getting used to watching the Elite XC fights on CBS as well as watching the WEC on Versus TV but the Elite XC league did not last long. I found out the fighters moved to Showtime under Strikeforce so I signed up for a Showtime deal from my local cable company! The first fight I found was the Shamrock vs. Diaz show that also hosted the Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos vs. Hitomi Akano fight!
To be sure the CBS Elite XC fights were kind of a let down as the competition did not seem up to other organization’s standards; still it was free so I watched. I found Gina Carano really stole the show! The fight I was waiting for was Carano vs. Cyborg but the fights fizzled on CBS. I am going to talk about women MMA fighters today and review the Cyborg vs. Akano and Shamrock vs. Diaz matches. Let watch the first video.
What do you think it takes to be a good martial artist? Do you need knock out power? Do you need a mean karate yell? How about striking fear into the hearts of thugs of the world!!!? Well maybe but have you considered some the of attributes of the softer and many will argue the important parts of the martial arts? What am I talking about? Well flexibility, agility and coordination!
Can you throw a kick 7′ high? How about do a spinning heel hook kick or how about do a triple wheel kick to the groin, stomach and face without putting your foot down? These are examples of flexibility, agility, and coordination you might need in normal karate moves. In this post I will talk about these points as well as different emphasis’s of martial arts. One size does not fit all and luckily the martial and dance arts includes hard and soft styles that can contribute to ones fitness and fighting ability. This first video is of Namaste Yoga as seen on Fitness TV.
I have been reviewing photos for use with this post and I was amazed by the number of high-kicks that people upload. I saw pictures of two people sparring where both where trying to kick right next to each other – kicking each other in the head! My first reaction is why? I mean the easiest way to win when one person kicks high is to take a half-step back or to the side and kick the groin! That is still a legal kick in most point karate matches.
One of my former students, Jim Martinez, had a knack for scoop-kicking my nuts whenever I would throw a high kick on him while sparring. It got to the point that I really started questioning the effectiveness of high kicks! More on this later but in this post I am going to explore some low kicking options, how to throw them and the probable results. I will of course talk about low kicking in self defense. I found this photo on Flickr here that seems to demonstrate a low side thrust kick to the knee or shin.
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