Archive for the 'martial arts' Category

I have been reading with interest when martial artists are equated with being a modern day warrior. Say you are walking through a dark alley on the way to your favorite watering hole. All of a sudden you hear a noise behind you and see a couple of menicaning thugs approaching fast from behind!

What would you do? Does the fact that you are a 2nd dan black belt mean that you have mentally prepared for this moment? What is a marital artist in the context of our society. Here is what used to be thought of as warriors from Versus TV.

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Do you remember the last cool martial arts movie stunt you saw! I know there have been some digital animation or such to “enhance” some stunts but there seems to be a trend toward pushing the human body to new limits!

I just figured out that Extreme Martal Arts (XMA) exists as does newer iterations called Tricking. Both of these activities are not what one could call martial arts (read fighting arts) because they seem to focus more on showmanship and totally disregard self-defense and fighting. Still there are martial arts woven into these activities as well as the more traditional martial arts iterations of fighting stunts.

In this post I will briefly review Tricking, XMA and martial arts stunts and speak of the advantages and disadvantages to these disciplines. Here is a video of Pataman Gym Time Trickingschule Berlin for your perusal.

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One issue more than any other separate the various martial arts training. How much contact does your martial art (read karate, boxing, MMA, Muay Thai) train with and compete? Some might view this as a measure of machismo! I mean if you spar all the time with non-contact and then get into a real fight – how prepared will you be?

I am going to review three types of commonly used contact rules and some of the types of competitions you will find these contests. Before we start I would like to make my frame of reference clear. I have come from a semi-traditional point of view in my training. I have taken some Goju Ru and Chito Ru karate as a kid in Jr. high school and then some Lima Lama karate in high school but settled on Tracy’s karate teaching Kenpo karate in high school.

The style of kenpo I studied came from Japan (the Yoshida clan) through, James Mitose, William Chow, Ed Parker, Al Tracy/Ray Klingenburg,  and Richard Willett my instructor. I was taught some formalities as well as kata, self-defense techniques, and basics as part of my curriculum. To get us into the mood for this discussion, I found this video of the Village People with their hit, Macho Man.

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As I was growing up in the 60′s and 70′s I remember seeing some musicians that could do karate! Elvis comes to mind but as much as I loved karate in movies, I loved to see karate done well with music.

In this post I will review the Karate Hottie’s appearance in Megadeth’s music video. I found this cool band, The Living End, doing a music video call Rising Sun. I found an original video clip of Carl Douglass performing Kung Fu Fighting and of course what music video review would be complete without the Karate Kid (Sweep the Leg music video). Here is Megadeth with the Karate Hottie!

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Have you noticed the amount of martial arts related videos that do not seem to be related to fighting? I won’t show the extreme examples here but if you have been on youtube, you can find a lot of videos of bikini clad women demonstrating karate moves.

Now I do not believe that is necessarily a problem because what if it is nice day out and the girls live in a warm climate? Who am I to say how one should practice their martial art? That being said, I do think the demonstrators in the videos ought to actually know some martial arts!

In this post we will look at how sex appeal might help or hurt overall martial arts. First I’d like to show one funny video I found of how the presence of women in the dojo might seemingly affect some males. 

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Have you watched a martial arts match and wondered why their stances looked different than what you were taught? Have you noticed that boxers fight in more of a forward facing stance and karateka seem to be more sideways? Should a karateka ever turn into a forward stance?

In this post I’ll talk about some of the different stances and the reasons behind them. First off the rules you are fighting with are important. I mean if all targets are open then a boxing stance is ripe for kicks to the groin. If a karateka is fighting a boxer and is inside the distance – he had better be facing forward! Why? Because if he is sideways on the inside – any ol hook will take him out! Here is an example of a karate fighting stance.

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When I used to fight tournaments and have to get into fights at the bar (in my capacity as the bouncer), my favorite punch was my counter or lunge punch! Imagine if you will, an attacker rushing you. He already has the advantage of speed and power (speed and mass equal power)! You have a split second to formulate a plan and put it into action! What do you do? Well the answer for me has often involved using my counter punch!

In this post I will compare and contrast reverse and right cross punches from Boxing, Muay Thai and Karate. I will note similarities and differences and how one might use one to their advantage. I will also relate  one instance where three counter punches helped me when I was attacked by six guys when I first started working at the bar. But first lets look at a boxing right cross.

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