I said marital arts, not marital aids...
you've already paid the batman and left the building.
Kicks to the head are dangerous in an actual self defense situation, leaves you exposed and off balance for too long, knees and groins are much better targets.Even kicks above the knee can be questionable, especially if you are shorter than your opponent. It makes my hair stand on end when I hear some self-defence advice given to women: "Just kick him in the nuts!", because:
Kicks to the head are dangerous in an actual self defense situation, leaves you exposed and off balance for too long, knees and groins are much better targets.
Aikido has no immediate application as a self defence thing (largely, depends on style, aiki-budo, for instance, will take your head off)
but it's so much fun and surprisingly good for cardio. Lots and lots of rolling and throwing, though. Be prepared.
Excellent opportunity to show you an old time favourite:
(Neither of these gentlemen is me, by the way.)
Kicks to the head are dangerous in an actual self defense situation, leaves you exposed and off balance for too long, knees and groins are much better targets.
Well, it wasn't for 'self defence' purposes (although learning to kick properly at the shin was). The only way to properly win sparring matches and to get to senior student level is to be able to kick at head height. Taekwondo literally means 'the way of the foot and hand'. Our teacher was very strict on not applying absolutely everything we learned at TKD to be used in a self-defence situation. Common sense > blue belt techniques.
If you want a solid no nonsense self defense system I recommend you find a gun
Equilibrium is basically a fan fiction crossover of 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and The Matrix. It's just so stupid and fun it's glorious.
[video]
(Apologies for the voice over in this video)
That sounds a bit negative, considering the movies involved.
[video]
(Apologies for the voice over in this video)
The one girl they show in this as a fast archer is shooting giant carpets, is hardly accurate because of that fact, and yeah I could draw and shoot as fast if I didn't have to worry about actually aiming.
1) Men learn early in boyhood that a blow to their genitals hurts a lot. Typically they have very well-established defensive reflex actions.
2) Only a small turn of their body, or step into your attack, will let them take the blow on their leg, and probably body-check you off balance.
3) A kick to the groin is well within "grabbing range", leaving you vulnerable to a throw.
Bruce Lee stated that someone who'd trained for a couple years in boxing and wrestling could take on any Eastern martial arts practitioner in a no-holds fight and beat them.
Today, my wife learned that it's not "Rathburt's tail", it's "grasp birds tail".The picturesque (and often variable) names of some taiji (tai-chi) forms can be a bit of a barrier to new students, but your wife's shifu should really have provided a written sheet or chart.
[...]Irimi-Nage. I'm just not very good with Irimi. The omote versions are okay, but the left ura is soooo bad.
What I'm doing above as uke is a chest level punch, and my partner (3rd Dan) will soon hug my head to his shoulder, turn his hips, and throw me to the floor.
[...]
The official purpose of the MCMAP and similar unarmed combat training from other branches and armed forces is A) PT and B)Instilling aggression. Actually using it to fight is somewhere around G, because they figure that if you're in a military situation and you're unarmed, you're pretty much fucked anyway.
I also did a couple years in the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program (you couldn't guess right?) which is jokingly referred to as "Semper Fu". Unfortunately I find MCMAP to be extremely lacking in actual hand to hand combat training like the old Lion system, while you can learn some fighting stuff here, it's mostly an excuse for hazing and extremely brutal PT, least in my area.
Horse cavalry and Horse archers have proven quite damaging to massed rank ANYTHING. Including crossbowmen and archers.Yes indeed, but I was speaking of cultural identification rather than commenting on the effectiveness of cavalry or horse archers. Mounted steppe peoples were a constant pressure on China for thousands of years. Sometimes they conquered us (Mongols, Manchu), sometimes we conquered them (Han, Qing), often it went back and forth for centuries. But it is beyond the scope of this thread to discuss the combined arms tactics with which China's armies faced peoples who were, on average, much better horsemen than we were.
(http://i.imgur.com/ApSSeXz.gif)The imbecile in the beige coat is an example of the reason I don't generally tell people that I practice a martial art; idiots want to "try it on". What was he thinking? And however much he deserved it, that head-kick would not qualify as self-defence in Australia, and the soldier (I assume) could find himself in serious trouble. :-(