Thank you for sharing.
i would hate to block peter aerts low kicks with my arm, im sure this would be excrutiating not to mention the fact i would then be punched in the face.
an old j ju jitsu instructor once told me and i quote ‘ill show u real ground techniques unlike that brazilian jiu jitsu’ then proceded to put one elbow into my solarplex from side control ‘with one arm and u cant move’ he said with a smile oh and his legs were out stiff and together he was more or less sitting on his ass …i didnt have the heart to sweep him he was such a nice man but his 5th dan wasnt a match for my bjj white belt (at the time).
the “old catch a fist with your palm” idea. obviously unless you Andre the giant you will fail
Once upon a time in a very special karate dojo, there existed an informal series of bunkai applications informally referred to as “stacking”. While the actual techniques varied, the reoccurring themes were 1) Stepping back into a cat stance, 2) Bringing both fists down to the hip bone of your rear leg, and 3) backfist.
The most common use for this motion, as presented in the kata seisan, was to grab an incoming punch out of mid-air, drag it down to your hip, and backfist their exposed face/bicep while they were off-balance and bent over.
You might already see some problems with this. Grabbing punches, taking all the weight off your front leg and then deliberately dragging them towards your leg as some virgin sacrifice to Shimabuku. You may take issue with the obvious strength-dependency of the technique, the fact that it involves dropping both hands, or the elaborate setup just to deliver a backfist.
These are all valid complaints. But what I didn’t tell you was that when I said “grab”, I didn’t literally mean “grab”. See, the name of the move comes from “stacking” our fists, so when the punch came in, we’d use our top fist to “rub” the incoming blow into our bottom fist. Isshin-Ryu does not fight force with force; we were actually told not to strike the incoming hand, but make a rubbing motion across the forearm to somehow redirect it to our waiting bottom fist, ready to snatch it like a venus flytrap. According to the principles of Isshin-Ryu, if we struck the hand the attacker would withdraw his arm, but if we rubbed it he wouldn’t know he hit anything and keep on going.
I think few techniques sum up the totality of “dead training” better than this move. Nothing else could more eloquently state the flawed mentality of “if he does X, then I’ll do Y”. I learned this at a Sherman Harrill seminar, where we were encourged to work our fundamentals and shy away from fancy techniques. This was meant to illustrate the direct, no-nonsense mentality of Isshin-Ryu.
Opponent steps in and throws a punch. Twist your hips and–this is key so pay attention–throw another punch that defeats his. There were a couple variations you could do on this. If you wanted to work inside, twist your shoulders and sink your hips. He can’t hit you!! Your body is now out of the way!! You’re now free to punch his chest, bicep, or anterior deltoid.
If you opt to work outside, you can throw a punch to the tricep or armpit, for while Isshin-Ryu had hooks, they were seldom used and, as mentioned in an earlier post, performed by keeping your arms perfectly straight until the last second, when you explosively snapped your elbow. It was recommended to instead throw an uppercut under the arm or across the shoulder and into the face. That way, after the fist connected, you could easily transition into a lunging elbow strike.
A special sidenote about “principles”: The rub I mentioned earlier was brought up several times, both at seminars and in class as one of the underlying key ideas of karate. When you touch a muscle lightly, it relaxes. That’s how massage works. When you strike a muscle harshly, it tenses. That’s how murder works.
BUT dot dot dot
What if you gave someone a light massage FOLLOWED BY a harsh strike? You could theoretically inflict double damage. And we were shown several techniques–most of which were just variations on stuff I’ve posted in this thread–that began with light massage and ended with total domination.
At a seminar, I was taught a series of techniques to be used if you were attacked while walking along hand in hand or arm in arm with your partner. Several of these basically involved using an irish whip type motion to ‘throw’ your partner towards the attacker. The idea was that your partner would then be able to pull of some fancy/unpredictable technique, or that between you you would confuse and ‘double team’ the attacker. I shit you not.
Unfortunately (for the sake of this thread), I couldn’t take it seriously enough to actually remember any of the details of the techniques to share with you all. But for a good while the entire room was filled with martial artists pretending to be each other’s girlfriends, and ‘tossing’ one another towards an oncoming attacker.
Fortunately, one of the other instructors got a bit uncomfortable about all of this and took the trouble to point out that it would probably be a better/more responsible idea to push your partner away from the meanie aggressive attacker.
somebody on here tried to tell me to take people seriously on here.
My TKMS instructor kept aluminum filings in his pocket at all times… I never saw him do it, but I heard many stories about him blinding people with the shit…
This was the same man that taught me a so called ‘hand shake’ technique where you start out in a basic handshake then twist your body counter clockwise while kneeling down on your outside knee… you twist all the way to 360 degrees while kneeling… your “opponent” has only one choice at this time… He can either allow his wrist, and other parts of his arm/shoulder, to break… or… he can flip and brake-fall, or tap tap I guess…
What I always wondered was why… why would you do this to someone that was extending you the common courtesy and comaraderie of offering to shake your hand?!.. <<Brutal>>
Kata… or as they call it in TKD … Pum za -_-
I like kata myself, but I liked it in Wado where we’d do the same one 18 times in row non-stop (did I mention the cardboard on the canvas covering the barf?), or in Kyokushin, where they tend to burn through them on the way to pad work and sparring.
That said, the stupidest technique I’ve ever had to endure was a bb leading us in “Walking Through the Wheat.” Some half-baked bullshit! Some semi-Oriental meditation crapola! Some of these idiot black belts think that they are fucking bodhidharma reincarnated. I’ve notice that NONE of the Japanese or Okinawan or Philipino or Chinese or Hawaiian black belts I’ve worked out under or with EVER came up with the bullshit that the idiot mainland haoles think up. None of the fools meditate or have any claim to anything other than some moronic notion that spreading their egoistical baloney will somehow “help” the suckers in their classes.
“Walking Through the Wheat” consisted of going down the mats with big steps in line, as slowly as you could move. What the hell it was supposed to teach is beyond me.
Thank God I have enough status (or maybe they just put up with me) that I can go to the back of the room and practice by myself until the class makes some sort of sense again.
I know exactly what move you’re talking about, and I hold it as firm evidence Isshin Ryu both has and actively practice heel hooks. I’ve also used the giant throw in Wansu as proof karate has judo.
A standing heel hook with both opponents on their feet and the target foot way out in front??? I think that makes it even worse than I thought when I posted.
My old kai had “judo” in its name, but I swear it consisted mainly of falling practice, limited tumbling, and yeah that Wansu pro wrestling throw. I don’t think I ever saw a throw in matches, and I got scolded once for using an osoto gari during sparring. (I learned it somewhere else.)
Me too. Hell, I got in shit for grabbing an incoming punch and turning it into a joint lock.
Then I got in shit for using an elbow. Granted, it was to the head, but I didn’t hurt the guy. Much. :eusa_whis
Dunno if this has been mentioned before, but when I was a teenager and did krotty for a year, there was this thing called a side snap kick - yoko geri keage if I remember rightly. I can’t describe it very well, but it was just basically flipping your foot up to the side. Would never do anything more than tickle someone.
Through massive repetition, I became really good with the side snap kick. In hindsight, it became an invaluable training tool when I open sparred later when through massive repetition I became really good at being thrown by the kicking leg and hopping away on the other one afterwards.
have I mentioned the Karate-tale, that the normal punch (tsuki) does not intend to actually punch the opponent, but to punch beside the head and hurt him with the snapping of the inside of your elbow (this was not Shotokan, but “Koryu Uchinadi”, the traditional traditional Karate)?
And I always thought, a punch was for punching…
On the other hand, there was this really nasty technique on Human Weapon where you’d basically slam your wrist bone into the very soft, somewhat vulnerable side of someone’s neck at high velocity. Not as d34dly as they claim I’m sure, but still probably very very unpleasant.
You are saying that McCarthy said that? I’ve read a bunch of his stuff and never seen that.
In my old “kickboxing” (read: repackaged TKD) class, we practiced quite thoroughly how to do a rear leg roundhouse, spin completely around, and deliver a leaping 360 roundhouse as high as possible. We also worked on the 360 axe kick and even once a jumping 360 axe kick.