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.

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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)!

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I saw this on the news not to long ago and decided to find out more about it. I have kind of a closet interest in ballet because at one time I wanted to be a dancer. I thought that karate and ballet might be the perfect combination but as probably happens so many times – I had to chose one over the other (I could only afford to take karate lessons, not both).

Practitioners of ballet have to be in superb condition to make all of the moves look easy. That is kind of like fighting because one should not telegraph a move by grunting during a the initial execution of a kick. Now as much as I like good form during kicks and punches, I am more concerned with the application, meaning does the kick actually connect. Watch this video for the overview of Balete (TM) the new fitness craze in LA.

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I have been watching some Olympics off and on during the last week an even caught some fighting! I was watching some wrestling the other morning before work and I saw this guy (Adam Wheeler) from Lancaster, CA win the Bronze metal! That was cool as I understand because it is the only wrestling win for the U.S. so far. I reviewed a match a while back where a girl beat a boy to win the title. I can only guess that the Olympics is every wrestlers dream. This picture of a 3rd century B.C. Pankratiasten fight was taken by Matthias Kabel.

 I will review the fighting sports that are in the Olympics and how they might be applied to self defense situations. I will also touch on why my favorite sport, karate is not in the Olympics. Let me say in this day and age of mixed martial arts, each of these Olympic fighting sports are important components of many great fighters! Even though there are so many rules (which you need in an effort to make things truly fair), the true competitors still excel!

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I found a some stories about kid abduction attempts and how they got away. The common thread (as I suspected) was the girls and boys did not calmly go along with the abductors! They ran, fought back and escaped with their wits! I have long been an advocate for teaching children the basics on how to avoid bad situations and what to do if they have to fight back.  

I will start out with a video from Erin Weed of GirlsFightBack.org. Erin became an advocate for women after her friend was killed. I think this will set the right tone for this serious topic. I will then talk about the news story’s I found and comment on each. I will follow up with some good tips for children in similar situations so you can hopefully give your children some tips! Here is an Fox News interview with Erin Weed.

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Many of you have heard me talk about self defense and some strategies you can use. But what would you do if armed robbers broke in while you were taking a shower? Well one Bronx boy reasoned he could not fight them and dove out the window to go for help here!

Often times when bad stuff happens, you don’t really have a chance to think things out so doing whatever it takes to have the best result is important! In this case there were armed men doing a home invasion robbery (where the crooks take over a family to get whatever they want). If you have multiple family members around, you generally cannot fight armed men easily without someone (maybe your family) getting hurt. In a situation like this – going for help is the smarter thing to do!

I am going to discuss what to do when robbers attempt to invade your home and give a couple of real life stories that happened to my wife! Here is a Las Vegas police force video on some precautionary measures you can take to minimize your risk.

Click here to Watch the Las Vegas Police Home Invasion Video (sorry they are not allowing embedding videos for some reason).

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Every parents worst nightmare happened to me a couple of months back – My oldest son called me to tell me my youngest son had just been mugged! He did not have many details other than my son was walking for exercise (as he often does) and these three guys jumped him! I was also told he was bruised but ok.

Let me tell you I had so many emotions running through my head but I was also trying to use my experience to tell my oldest son that the police should handle the matter. I felt like hunting for some street toughs but that could rapidly digress into something I would end up regretting. I’m happy to say I opted for finding some more information. More on my son’s situation in a minute but while searching robbery youtube videos, I found this of some courageous beauty school women that took matters into their own hands to deal some hurt to a robber.

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A Well now I have just been reviewing mixed martial arts and happened to find this video of a rising MMA star, “Killer Willard,” the Boxing Kangaroo teaching his trainers the fine points of Outback Kangaroo kicks and punches. The funny thing about this to me (other than a giant rat-like boxer) was the kangaroo was actually pretty good. I had to try and work this video in somewhere and it seemed to fit nicely with MMA

I watched the International Fight League (IFL) on TV last night and was entertained by the heavyweight match featuring Roy Nelson vs. Brad Imes. I did not know either fighter but heard that Imes used to play football and was in the WEC and UFC. I was expecting the chubby (ok - fat) Roy "Big Country" Nelson, 6' 1", to be dodging punches from the 6' 7" Imes. Take a gander at this fight - I think you will enjoy this.

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