Well I thought both JC and Defender had good views on how to throw a punch.
Defender also lost his shit over a single line typed out by JC.
So, this is a pretty good conversation so far.
The move I'm having the most difficulty on is my jab. I have this tendency to move my elbow out on the second jab, weakening most of it's speed and power. Any suggestions besides keep my elbow in?
Well I thought both JC and Defender had good views on how to throw a punch.
Defender also lost his shit over a single line typed out by JC.
So, this is a pretty good conversation so far.
The move I'm having the most difficulty on is my jab. I have this tendency to move my elbow out on the second jab, weakening most of it's speed and power. Any suggestions besides keep my elbow in?
The problem with JC's post is that, as usual, he's talking shit about something he doesn't understand. Saying that karate punches are stiff is like saying that karate fighters do their fighting from the horse stance with both hands chambered at their waists.
Regarding the jab: Depending on what you mean, it's not necessarily wrong to put your elbow there.
Muay Thai guys seem not to like the elbow going out to the side. The reasoning I hear is for speed, although I wonder if raising the elbow like that also makes it harder to cover up the way they prefer. Western boxers frequently put the elbow out on purpose, preferring the slight power gain.
A visualization that can help is to imagine your hand going down a metal tube. Your hand should go straight down the tube and straight back as if no other path is possible. Practice on a heavybag with that visual. It helped me to correct the situation. Also, and I don't know how practiced you are, but make sure that your footwork and hip rotation is right.
Most people don't understand this timing, even pretty good fighters. If you throw two straight left punches followed by a straight right, how many beats should that take, counting the recovery? The answer is five. Left punch, reset, left punch, right punch, reset. The important thing is that the strike timing (ignoring the final recovery) is L_LR. Most people try to make it LLR, which is incorrect. Your two lefts should have a gap between them. If they don't, then at least one of them is an arm punch, because you require an extra count to recover your body rotation.
I reckon I could take Wook on. I'd just jump on his back, cling on, and go all chimpanzee on him.
And yeah, Wook, you've leaned out a shitload. I take it you're going low carb? How much cardio are you doing a week?
yeah, my diet is pretty low carb (during the week at least). eggs in the morning, tuna and salad at work, burger before the gym, shakes at night. the only high GI carbs I have are a bowl of white rice after the gym.
cardio, for the time being, is just biking to and from work. 4 miles round trip, so like 25-35 minutes a day.
I reckon I could take Wook on. I'd just jump on his back, cling on, and go all chimpanzee on him.
And yeah, Wook, you've leaned out a shitload. I take it you're going low carb? How much cardio are you doing a week?
yeah, my diet is pretty low carb (during the week at least). eggs in the morning, tuna and salad at work, burger before the gym, shakes at night. the only high GI carbs I have are a bowl of white rice after the gym.
cardio, for the time being, is just biking to and from work. 4 miles round trip, so like 25-35 minutes a day.
Right, right. I'm on a similar diet, actually. I also taper my carbs down as the day goes on, and just eat protein/fats around night time.
Dublo7 on
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JohnnyCacheStarting DefensePlace at the tableRegistered Userregular
edited January 2009
Whatsamatter defender? You got some shotokan poisoning there. Sorry D-money, Machida's a fluke.
Hey guys you know there is this country called Japan.
People there punch in a special JAPANESE way that's more Japanese and therefore more devastating.
They have JUDO which is throwing people around, something never invented in any other country.
The have the KATANA which TOTALLY cuts through EVERYTHING even GODS dude. Sweetest sword EVER.
What? They never won a war against an outside country with the katana? What? You saw a mural with a greek guy throwing another greek guy around before japan was even settled? What? The best punchers in the world are boxers? From plain old america and europe? that can't be right, it's not martial-artsy enough. Jack Dempsey? MUST BE JACK LEE. Muhammed Ali? CAN'T BE! MUHAMMED YAMASAKI MUST BE HIS REAL NAME. George Foreman? REALLY GEORGE WU OF THE WU STYLE CLAN? Fedor? Fuck this joke, Fedor might be reading. He's fucking Russian.
Defender, Joe Lewis' punches are so straight from western boxing - joe lewis in fact, like all elite fighters, is so cross trained he has no real style of record and anything he puts on the door is just an homage to his early experiences and his teachers.
You make it sound like the "forms" version of the karate blows are ideals you can't achieve in real combat - that's not true, particularly in the case of shotokan punching, of all things - you can absolutely attempt to fight as you're taught in forms, with static blocking, chambered punching, four count kicking, low stances - I've seen it attempted. The reason you discard that shit is not because you "have to" "round the techniques off" as some sort of concession to how sloppy a real fight gets, it's because the technique in kata are anachronistic, inferior, vestigial versions of those strikes that would get you killed in a fight.
The idea that you train, train train a certain way and then discard it to really train for the ring is your time and money flushed. If you're going to discard chambered, driving punching and four count kicks in favor of ballistic punching and linear and hammering kicks, why not do so at the beginning of your fight training? I mean, barring any cultural love of kata or perceived pressure to preserve the historical form for posterity.
This baggage is why the great hand technique coaches in the game right now aren't karate fighters. This baggage is the reason "if you want to learn to punch, go take karate" is poor blanket advice - because if Zom walks down the street into the nearest shotokan establishment, he'll be c-step-reverse-punching-thats-good-people-now-it's-kata-time for probably six months before he sees a sparring class or a fight team practice. Then he'll have to choose how to divide his time between practical and traditional practice and classes.
That said, I understand full well that yes, karate schools - in fact ANY martial arts schools worth the name - train in more fluid, more modern technique, and many fighters from many schools are skilled and well rounded and do not bear the stereotypical marks of their stated style.
I'm also aware (painfully so, after the live local show I just got back from) that there are many, many MMA fighters with a game built on wrestling and shabby arm punches. Rather then calling me an idiot in a spectacular discharge of vaginal sand, you should have used this counter-stereotype as a delightful rejoinder.
Moving on to your minimal and contrived disagreement over how to throw a punch:
I didn't say for him to lean off his axis. I said what many people fail to realize - that a punch is all about weight transference. That if you slow a good punch down, you see that weight hit the target and it looks almost like you're leaning on the guy. No, you don't lean out over your front foot on purpose, that would be a ridiculous exaggeration of what I'm talking about - I'm trying to articulate the shift from back foot to front.
Any punch but an uppercut involves transferring weight downard and outward - as you say, gravity, torque, and momentum - putting body weight behind your quickly moving knuckles - and it's usually done by moving weight from foot to foot. This is the "leaning" motion I'm talking about. It seems like this was clear to everyone not burdened with a head full of shotokan. (which sucks, by the way, defender).
If there's no weight behind them, you're slapping (wing chun) and if there's too much, you over-penetrate (karate sucks, lol).
As for gloves, you should learn to punch with no or thin gloves, and then add work with competition gloves - and you should ignore them inasmuch as you can when punching. Altering your offense technique because of your gloves is power sabatoge, and it's bad for self defense when you aren't wearing a glove. The exception I'll give for that is the jab - any glove at all makes a jab safer, and a full boxing glove extends the range of a jab for a point slightly.
I like your points about timing, though, and I think everything you posted about torque;momentum;etc echoes exactly what I said, it sounds like we agree on the substantial mechanics of how to throw a punch, and you're really making something out of nothing in an extremely petty and douche-y way because I made fun of your pet martial art (Which sucks)in a one-line crack, and stole some of your precious, precious expert thunder.
Hmmm, all this Karate talk makes me want to watch UFC.
UFC is the new WWE, right?
I was just talking to knob about how there should be more shit-talk and table smashes in MMA. At an MMA event. Where we got coarse looks for comparing it to wrestling, by MMA "Fans" who proceeded to engage in MMA Fan Annoying Behaviors 1 and 2 - "holler 'STANDEMUP' repeatedly starting immediately after any takedown" and "Hoot 'knees knees knees knees' at top volume during any clinch."
Anybody know of some decent routines to do with those chest expander things? I haven't got access to weights for the next week or so and joining a gym is sadly not an option at the minute.
Someone deleted my post yesterday about the pure and utter awesomeness that is my roommate. Well, im back yet again to tell you about him. As you all well know, I love the cock, LOVE IT. Sometimes I try to spy on him, but due to his natural cleverness he usually foils my plans. Just one peek, thats all I want, just one. Because as you all well know, again, I love the cock. My love for the cock started at an early age, in the womb perhaps. I think, along with the rest of my family that my love for the cock is genetic. Whom passed the cock loving genes to me you ask, well, my mother of course. I know that she to want my roommates cock. Sometimes I hear her moaning, from my roommates room. At first is was weird, but the smile on her face after......is well priceless.
Someone deleted my post yesterday about the pure and utter awesomeness that is my roommate. Well, im back yet again to tell you about him. As you all well know, I love the cock, LOVE IT. Sometimes I try to spy on him, but due to his natural cleverness he usually foils my plans. Just one peek, thats all I want, just one. Because as you all well know, again, I love the cock. My love for the cock started at an early age, in the womb perhaps. I think, along with the rest of my family that my love for the cock is genetic. Whom passed the cock loving genes to me you ask, well, my mother of course. I know that she to want my roommates cock. Sometimes I hear her moaning, from my roommates room. At first is was weird, but the smile on her face after......is well priceless.
squats and milk
It doesn't sound like that's the kind of S & M they're going for . . . .
JohnnyCacheStarting DefensePlace at the tableRegistered Userregular
edited January 2009
C steps actually do have a place - setting up certain kicks - but c footwork is actually, IMO, a sort of dancified version of real footwork - real footwork in a say a 4-count, you bring your back foot up with your jab, drive your front foot with your cross, correct your front foot with your hook, then bring your back foot up again into home position with your second right. If you take that and do it one thousand times without actually punching anything, it can sort of devolve into a c-step.
Whatsamatter defender? You got some shotokan poisoning there. Sorry D-money, Machida's a fluke.
Actually, the karate I practice is an American system, so while I'm somewhat familiar with Shotokan, I'm not defending it out of love for my personal system. So I guess Joe Lewis is a "fluke" too, right? Mas Oyama was probably a big pussy. Fumio Demura's a bitch. These guys are all shitty fighters because they trained in Japan, which is a mystical land where super-rigid movements somehow work really well in combat.
Hey guys you know there is this country called Japan.
People there punch in a special JAPANESE way that's more Japanese and therefore more devastating.
You're sitting here saying that "karate punches" are somehow "stiff" in a way that makes them bad, yet you have no problem attacking the idea that karate punches are refined and are therefore good. Karate, like every other martial art ever, is fluid and dynamic in actual application.
You have failed to separate the training drills from the actual fighting. I could go to a military training program and go "Look at all these bald faggots making beds to absurdly exacting standards. I hope the next war we get into will be won by good maid service!"
Defender, Joe Lewis' punches are so straight from western boxing - joe lewis in fact, like all elite fighters, is so cross trained he has no real style of record and anything he puts on the door is just an homage to his early experiences and his teachers.
Do you know Joe Lewis? How do you know that he's not at his core a karate fighter? I suspect that you don't know him. Incidentally, Lewis' sole criticism of karate fighters is that they tend to leave their heads on the line. He has no criticism of the way they punch. The highest ranking person (under him) in his own martial art is a pure karate man.
You make it sound like the "forms" version of the karate blows are ideals you can't achieve in real combat - that's not true, particularly in the case of shotokan punching, of all things - they're anachronistic, inferior, vestigial versions of those strikes that would get you killed in a fight. The idea that you train, train train a certain way and then discard it to really train for the ring is your time and money flushed. If you're going to discard chambered, driving punching and four count kicks in favor of ballistic punching and linear and hammering kicks, why not do so at the beginning of your fight training? I mean, barring any cultural love of kata or perceived pressure to preserve the historical form for posterity.
It's not as quick a route, but for someone who's in for a long time, it's a better route in the end. The reason that karate uses full-length moves and four-count chambered kicks is because learning the formal version allows the skilled practitioner to fire long OR short versions of the technique while ensuring that the correct angles will be achieved upon impact.
Also, the chambered punch from horse stance and all that stuff IS just a drill. There are probably some people who think you actually fight that way, but those people are pretty much definitively not well-trained in karate (or any other system).
This baggage is why the great hand technique coaches in the game right now aren't karate fighters. This baggage is the reason "if you want to learn to punch, go take karate" is poor blanket advice - because if Zom walks down the street into the nearest shotokan establishment, he'll be c-step-reverse-punching-thats-good-people-now-it's-kata-time for probably six months before he sees a sparring class or a fight team practice. Then he'll have to choose how to divide his time between practical and traditional practice and classes.
When people ask me where to train, in public threads here or by PM/IM/etc., I invariably encourage them to ensure that they are going to do some sparring if there isn't a health reason preventing it. Every karate student I ever taught was told on pretty much a weekly basis "when you get your yellow belt, buy some gloves and come in to spar." I have also noticed over the years that the people who start to forsake the old "c-step, block, punch, kick, punch" stuff start to get worse at sparring for two reasons. One, because they lose the stamina conditioning that hard training provides. Two, because the basics training coordinates the body much better than hitting a bag, so they end up losing speed/timing and developing little telegraphs and suboptimal lines of travel. (I do not advocate cutting out hitting targets like bags, but there are some benefits that are better gained through striking air.)
Any punch but an uppercut involves transferring weight downard and outward - as you say, gravity, torque, and momentum - putting body weight behind your quickly moving knuckles - and it's usually done by moving weight from foot to foot. This is the "leaning" motion I'm talking about. It seems like this was clear to everyone not burdened with a head full of shotokan. (which sucks, by the way, defender).
"Shifting" and "leaning" are different terms. There's a famous tower in Pisa. It leans. It does not shift. Please learn some terminology.
As for gloves, you should learn to punch with no or thin gloves, and then add work with competition gloves - and you should ignore them inasmuch as you can when punching. Altering your offense technique because of your gloves is power sabatoge, and it's bad for self defense when you aren't wearing a glove. The exception I'll give for that is the jab - any glove at all makes a jab safer, and a full boxing glove extends the range of a jab for a point slightly.
I like your points about timing, though, and I think everything you posted about torque;momentum;etc echoes exactly what I said, it sounds like we agree on the substantial mechanics of how to throw a punch, and you're really making something out of nothing in an extremely petty and douche-y way because I made fun of your pet martial art (Which sucks)in a one-line crack, and stole some of your precious, precious expert thunder.
It's not about my pet martial art. In fact, Shotokan is the easiest-to-criticize form of karate I've ever seen. I also practice a wide range of martial arts and have no specific country or continent of preference, although most of what I study does come from somewhere or other in Asia. Then again, a lot of it is heavily altered by Americans, even to the point of having American founders due to the systems being changed significantly enough to warrant it.
The problem I have with your method of approach is that you throw out entire categories of martial arts (there are a shitload of arts that have "karate" in the name, it's not just Shotokan) based on some bizarre concept that I guess people from Japan have such different physical bodies that they have different basic principles of motion. Or they're just all retarded and can't fight. Both of these display an ignorance of the arts beyond the beginner material.
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JohnnyCacheStarting DefensePlace at the tableRegistered Userregular
edited January 2009
Don't worry about "power" per se, especially when you don't have a bag. Work on form and footwork, work on resetting well and work on your off hand position. Work defensive things - your bob and weave, your wing block, and your thai shield - into your shadowboxing. get into habits like varying things with a combo and a cover, a combo and a sprawl, a combo and a combo.
i had the biggest failure today ever. My squats went well, but I learned the hard way about putting on way too much weight and the rest of my workout went downhill, culminating with some polite man saving me from near death during my last bench press set.
I was so embarrassed I decided to come home and tell internet strangers about it! Everyone has to start somewhere right? So do you guys have any equally bad first time at the gym experiences? Or first time doing free weight exercise experiences?
C steps actually do have a place - setting up certain kicks - but c footwork is actually, IMO, a sort of dancified version of real footwork - real footwork in a say a 4-count, you bring your back foot up with your jab, drive your front foot with your cross, correct your front foot with your hook, then bring your back foot up again into home position with your second right. If you take that and do it one thousand times without actually punching anything, it can sort of devolve into a c-step.
See, this is the kind of thing. Bring your back foot up with a jab? You should be advancing your front foot. If you want to bring your back foot up, you have to bring it so far up that it becomes the front foot, which means you've switched sides.
The C-step drills also teach proper distancing of feet. A lot of fighters who just get in the ring gain skill at first and are then limited by their footwork. They shorten or lengthen stances inappropriately, they don't reset cleanly, and they're out of position to follow up.
JohnnyCacheStarting DefensePlace at the tableRegistered Userregular
edited January 2009
Defender:
Your military example is extremely stupid - there are reasons for military behavioral standards beyond simple discipline - the military method is about creating identical units that perform the same and have the same requirements, and while barracks discipline isn't related to combat directly, it's still a useful life skill with an organizational purpose, not a completely useless faux-punching drill that could be dropped and replaced by drilling with more modern strikes.
In other words, WHY ARE YOU DOING A DRILL IF THE DRILL DOESN'T APPLY TO ANYTHING? THAT IS STUPID.
WHY ARE YOU HOLDING UP C-STEP TRAINING AS HARD CARDIO YOU SILLY GIT
WHY CANT YOU CONVINCE ANYONE IN THAI BOXING OR MMA TO USE A 4 COUNT CHAMBER IF IT IS SUPERIOR
WHY DO ELITE FIGHTERS WORK WITH TARGETS AND MITS FOR THE MAJORITY OF THEIR TRAINING INSTEAD OF DOING LINE DRILLS LIKE A KARATE SCHOOL
WHY DO THEY SPEND THE REST OF THEIR TIME SHADOWBOXING INSTEAD OF DOING LINE DRILLS LIKE A KARATE SCHOOL
WHAT'S BETTER CARDIO, LINE DRILLS OR LIVE PRACTICE
WHAT'S BETTER CARIDO, KATA OR ANYTHING NOT INVOLVING SITTING.
RE "Discarding all of karate" defender, that's a giant Nerdy McNerd SUPER DEFENSIVE bullshit strawman that could only come from such a debate nerd as you - I made one little winking joke about karate and disputed it was THE BEST WAY TO LEARN PUNCHING. That isn't discarding punching as a whole or denying the skill of everyone ever born in, or trained in the effective, yet still over-rated and over-mysticized, combat styles of japan.
Defender, sheesh, dude, it was a one line crack. Given that there's NO MECHANICAL DISAGREEMENT BETWEEN US ABOUT HOW TO THROW A PUNCH, I really don't see the need for further textwall ITT.
Short Version: Get the fuck over it you GIANT NERD. Also, karate sucks.
C steps actually do have a place - setting up certain kicks - but c footwork is actually, IMO, a sort of dancified version of real footwork - real footwork in a say a 4-count, you bring your back foot up with your jab, drive your front foot with your cross, correct your front foot with your hook, then bring your back foot up again into home position with your second right. If you take that and do it one thousand times without actually punching anything, it can sort of devolve into a c-step.
See, this is the kind of thing. Bring your back foot up with a jab? You should be advancing your front foot. If you want to bring your back foot up, you have to bring it so far up that it becomes the front foot, which means you've switched sides.
The C-step drills also teach proper distancing of feet. A lot of fighters who just get in the ring gain skill at first and are then limited by their footwork. They shorten or lengthen stances inappropriately, they don't reset cleanly, and they're out of position to follow up.
No, you absolutely bring your back foot to your front for optimum range on a jab and optimum setup for a power right. You can advance only your front foot, or neither foot, but that's done when fencing with semi-sincere jabs, and sometimes when you fear a shoot - but when you're ready to close distance and hit the guy, you bring your back foot up. Your range with any blow is measured from your rearmost point of balance, you have to bring that up to get all your range.
I don't understand how that could be interpreted to mean "penis."
Also JC would like to inform you that Wing Chun is useless slap-fighting that doesn't work.
YES defender. ANY joke or stereotype is A SERIOUS UNIVERSAL STATEMENT. ALL BLONDES REALLY ARE DUMB. AMERICANS ARE RUDE WHEN ABROAD. THE FRENCH ARE RUDE AT HOME. WEARING PINK IS FOR FAGS AND RAPPERS ONLY. CAB DRIVERS ARE ALL FROM OTHER COUNTRIES, STANDUP COMICS CAN'T PROGRAM THEIR VCRS
JC, your questions at the top of this page are stupid.
Why should you do a drill which isn't applied in it's exact execution? Because it provides a base which emphasizes the concepts which are being taught. You don't, as an example, have to check all your mirrors every time you drive, however you train doing so such that you have the proper form when things are not ideal (you are in a friends car).
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JohnnyCacheStarting DefensePlace at the tableRegistered Userregular
I don't understand how that could be interpreted to mean "penis."
Also JC would like to inform you that Wing Chun is useless slap-fighting that doesn't work.
JC would be horribly wrong, and I'd invite him to get into a "slap-fight" with some of the students in my class. With hilarious, broken bone results.
See, this is something I call Mongo's fallacy.
Mongo weighs 250 pounds and stands 6'6" He believes in a martial art consisting of arm punches, light slaps, bad language, and shoving. If an average person trains in that martial art, and another average sized person says "that's a dumb martial art" average guy number one can say "OH YEAH? GO TELL IT TO MONGO!"
(or maybe mongo's a natural athlete or has great cardio. Bruce lee's version of Mongo was to have speed no one could match that allowed him to build a unique stop-hitting game. Eddie Bravo's version of Mongo is to say "If all your joints bend 360 degrees you can't be tapped and you can get a sub from anywhere, just do that")
I don't understand how that could be interpreted to mean "penis."
Also JC would like to inform you that Wing Chun is useless slap-fighting that doesn't work.
YES defender. ANY joke or stereotype is A SERIOUS UNIVERSAL STATEMENT. ALL BLONDES REALLY ARE DUMB. AMERICANS ARE RUDE WHEN ABROAD. THE FRENCH ARE RUDE AT HOME. WEARING PINK IS FOR FAGS AND RAPPERS ONLY. CAB DRIVERS ARE ALL FROM OTHER COUNTRIES, STANDUP COMICS CAN'T PROGRAM THEIR VCRS
JC, you are applying a whole lot to your fallacy argument there that is not necessarily present in the real situation.
The techniques in the system are valid not because someone is strong or sizable (some students are), but because the techniques use physics (leverage, vectors, velocity, etc.) and physiology (where to strike, structure of your body in relation to your opponents, etc.) for their effectiveness. Which is why the system is actually really good for people like myself. I'm shit-tiny and my straight punches won't ever be enough, by themselves, to take down someone the size of, say, Knob. If I can apply the laws of physics and physiology to my techniques then I will be able to negate the size difference.
YES defender. ANY joke or stereotype is A SERIOUS UNIVERSAL STATEMENT. ALL BLONDES REALLY ARE DUMB. AMERICANS ARE RUDE WHEN ABROAD. THE FRENCH ARE RUDE AT HOME. WEARING PINK IS FOR FAGS AND RAPPERS ONLY. CAB DRIVERS ARE ALL FROM OTHER COUNTRIES, STANDUP COMICS CAN'T PROGRAM THEIR VCRS
these are all universal truths.
This, coming directly after your out-of-hand dismissal of karate is really, REALLY fucking ironic, you know.
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Defender also lost his shit over a single line typed out by JC.
So, this is a pretty good conversation so far.
The move I'm having the most difficulty on is my jab. I have this tendency to move my elbow out on the second jab, weakening most of it's speed and power. Any suggestions besides keep my elbow in?
The problem with JC's post is that, as usual, he's talking shit about something he doesn't understand. Saying that karate punches are stiff is like saying that karate fighters do their fighting from the horse stance with both hands chambered at their waists.
Regarding the jab: Depending on what you mean, it's not necessarily wrong to put your elbow there.
Muay Thai guys seem not to like the elbow going out to the side. The reasoning I hear is for speed, although I wonder if raising the elbow like that also makes it harder to cover up the way they prefer. Western boxers frequently put the elbow out on purpose, preferring the slight power gain.
A visualization that can help is to imagine your hand going down a metal tube. Your hand should go straight down the tube and straight back as if no other path is possible. Practice on a heavybag with that visual. It helped me to correct the situation. Also, and I don't know how practiced you are, but make sure that your footwork and hip rotation is right.
Most people don't understand this timing, even pretty good fighters. If you throw two straight left punches followed by a straight right, how many beats should that take, counting the recovery? The answer is five. Left punch, reset, left punch, right punch, reset. The important thing is that the strike timing (ignoring the final recovery) is L_LR. Most people try to make it LLR, which is incorrect. Your two lefts should have a gap between them. If they don't, then at least one of them is an arm punch, because you require an extra count to recover your body rotation.
yeah, my diet is pretty low carb (during the week at least). eggs in the morning, tuna and salad at work, burger before the gym, shakes at night. the only high GI carbs I have are a bowl of white rice after the gym.
cardio, for the time being, is just biking to and from work. 4 miles round trip, so like 25-35 minutes a day.
Hey guys you know there is this country called Japan.
People there punch in a special JAPANESE way that's more Japanese and therefore more devastating.
They have JUDO which is throwing people around, something never invented in any other country.
The have the KATANA which TOTALLY cuts through EVERYTHING even GODS dude. Sweetest sword EVER.
What? They never won a war against an outside country with the katana? What? You saw a mural with a greek guy throwing another greek guy around before japan was even settled? What? The best punchers in the world are boxers? From plain old america and europe? that can't be right, it's not martial-artsy enough. Jack Dempsey? MUST BE JACK LEE. Muhammed Ali? CAN'T BE! MUHAMMED YAMASAKI MUST BE HIS REAL NAME. George Foreman? REALLY GEORGE WU OF THE WU STYLE CLAN? Fedor? Fuck this joke, Fedor might be reading. He's fucking Russian.
Defender, Joe Lewis' punches are so straight from western boxing - joe lewis in fact, like all elite fighters, is so cross trained he has no real style of record and anything he puts on the door is just an homage to his early experiences and his teachers.
You make it sound like the "forms" version of the karate blows are ideals you can't achieve in real combat - that's not true, particularly in the case of shotokan punching, of all things - you can absolutely attempt to fight as you're taught in forms, with static blocking, chambered punching, four count kicking, low stances - I've seen it attempted. The reason you discard that shit is not because you "have to" "round the techniques off" as some sort of concession to how sloppy a real fight gets, it's because the technique in kata are anachronistic, inferior, vestigial versions of those strikes that would get you killed in a fight.
The idea that you train, train train a certain way and then discard it to really train for the ring is your time and money flushed. If you're going to discard chambered, driving punching and four count kicks in favor of ballistic punching and linear and hammering kicks, why not do so at the beginning of your fight training? I mean, barring any cultural love of kata or perceived pressure to preserve the historical form for posterity.
This baggage is why the great hand technique coaches in the game right now aren't karate fighters. This baggage is the reason "if you want to learn to punch, go take karate" is poor blanket advice - because if Zom walks down the street into the nearest shotokan establishment, he'll be c-step-reverse-punching-thats-good-people-now-it's-kata-time for probably six months before he sees a sparring class or a fight team practice. Then he'll have to choose how to divide his time between practical and traditional practice and classes.
That said, I understand full well that yes, karate schools - in fact ANY martial arts schools worth the name - train in more fluid, more modern technique, and many fighters from many schools are skilled and well rounded and do not bear the stereotypical marks of their stated style.
I'm also aware (painfully so, after the live local show I just got back from) that there are many, many MMA fighters with a game built on wrestling and shabby arm punches. Rather then calling me an idiot in a spectacular discharge of vaginal sand, you should have used this counter-stereotype as a delightful rejoinder.
Moving on to your minimal and contrived disagreement over how to throw a punch:
I didn't say for him to lean off his axis. I said what many people fail to realize - that a punch is all about weight transference. That if you slow a good punch down, you see that weight hit the target and it looks almost like you're leaning on the guy. No, you don't lean out over your front foot on purpose, that would be a ridiculous exaggeration of what I'm talking about - I'm trying to articulate the shift from back foot to front.
Any punch but an uppercut involves transferring weight downard and outward - as you say, gravity, torque, and momentum - putting body weight behind your quickly moving knuckles - and it's usually done by moving weight from foot to foot. This is the "leaning" motion I'm talking about. It seems like this was clear to everyone not burdened with a head full of shotokan. (which sucks, by the way, defender).
If there's no weight behind them, you're slapping (wing chun) and if there's too much, you over-penetrate (karate sucks, lol).
As for gloves, you should learn to punch with no or thin gloves, and then add work with competition gloves - and you should ignore them inasmuch as you can when punching. Altering your offense technique because of your gloves is power sabatoge, and it's bad for self defense when you aren't wearing a glove. The exception I'll give for that is the jab - any glove at all makes a jab safer, and a full boxing glove extends the range of a jab for a point slightly.
I like your points about timing, though, and I think everything you posted about torque;momentum;etc echoes exactly what I said, it sounds like we agree on the substantial mechanics of how to throw a punch, and you're really making something out of nothing in an extremely petty and douche-y way because I made fun of your pet martial art (Which sucks)in a one-line crack, and stole some of your precious, precious expert thunder.
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UFC is the new WWE, right?
I was just talking to knob about how there should be more shit-talk and table smashes in MMA. At an MMA event. Where we got coarse looks for comparing it to wrestling, by MMA "Fans" who proceeded to engage in MMA Fan Annoying Behaviors 1 and 2 - "holler 'STANDEMUP' repeatedly starting immediately after any takedown" and "Hoot 'knees knees knees knees' at top volume during any clinch."
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Now we wait for long rebuttal.
I trained with just wrapping for a week and every day my knuckles were bleeding and my hands killing me.
squats and milk
what
?
It doesn't sound like that's the kind of S & M they're going for . . . .
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i always thought it was strange how, in karate, we learned the 'basics' which had nothing to do with how we fought in sparring.
I host a podcast about movies.
I'm training in my room right now and it's hard for me to tell if my punches are packing power without a bag.
Actually, the karate I practice is an American system, so while I'm somewhat familiar with Shotokan, I'm not defending it out of love for my personal system. So I guess Joe Lewis is a "fluke" too, right? Mas Oyama was probably a big pussy. Fumio Demura's a bitch. These guys are all shitty fighters because they trained in Japan, which is a mystical land where super-rigid movements somehow work really well in combat.
You're sitting here saying that "karate punches" are somehow "stiff" in a way that makes them bad, yet you have no problem attacking the idea that karate punches are refined and are therefore good. Karate, like every other martial art ever, is fluid and dynamic in actual application.
You have failed to separate the training drills from the actual fighting. I could go to a military training program and go "Look at all these bald faggots making beds to absurdly exacting standards. I hope the next war we get into will be won by good maid service!"
Do you know Joe Lewis? How do you know that he's not at his core a karate fighter? I suspect that you don't know him. Incidentally, Lewis' sole criticism of karate fighters is that they tend to leave their heads on the line. He has no criticism of the way they punch. The highest ranking person (under him) in his own martial art is a pure karate man.
It's not as quick a route, but for someone who's in for a long time, it's a better route in the end. The reason that karate uses full-length moves and four-count chambered kicks is because learning the formal version allows the skilled practitioner to fire long OR short versions of the technique while ensuring that the correct angles will be achieved upon impact.
Also, the chambered punch from horse stance and all that stuff IS just a drill. There are probably some people who think you actually fight that way, but those people are pretty much definitively not well-trained in karate (or any other system).
When people ask me where to train, in public threads here or by PM/IM/etc., I invariably encourage them to ensure that they are going to do some sparring if there isn't a health reason preventing it. Every karate student I ever taught was told on pretty much a weekly basis "when you get your yellow belt, buy some gloves and come in to spar." I have also noticed over the years that the people who start to forsake the old "c-step, block, punch, kick, punch" stuff start to get worse at sparring for two reasons. One, because they lose the stamina conditioning that hard training provides. Two, because the basics training coordinates the body much better than hitting a bag, so they end up losing speed/timing and developing little telegraphs and suboptimal lines of travel. (I do not advocate cutting out hitting targets like bags, but there are some benefits that are better gained through striking air.)
"Shifting" and "leaning" are different terms. There's a famous tower in Pisa. It leans. It does not shift. Please learn some terminology.
It's not about my pet martial art. In fact, Shotokan is the easiest-to-criticize form of karate I've ever seen. I also practice a wide range of martial arts and have no specific country or continent of preference, although most of what I study does come from somewhere or other in Asia. Then again, a lot of it is heavily altered by Americans, even to the point of having American founders due to the systems being changed significantly enough to warrant it.
The problem I have with your method of approach is that you throw out entire categories of martial arts (there are a shitload of arts that have "karate" in the name, it's not just Shotokan) based on some bizarre concept that I guess people from Japan have such different physical bodies that they have different basic principles of motion. Or they're just all retarded and can't fight. Both of these display an ignorance of the arts beyond the beginner material.
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I was so embarrassed I decided to come home and tell internet strangers about it! Everyone has to start somewhere right? So do you guys have any equally bad first time at the gym experiences? Or first time doing free weight exercise experiences?
See, this is the kind of thing. Bring your back foot up with a jab? You should be advancing your front foot. If you want to bring your back foot up, you have to bring it so far up that it becomes the front foot, which means you've switched sides.
The C-step drills also teach proper distancing of feet. A lot of fighters who just get in the ring gain skill at first and are then limited by their footwork. They shorten or lengthen stances inappropriately, they don't reset cleanly, and they're out of position to follow up.
Wing Chun flavoured with Ancestral White Crane.
Your military example is extremely stupid - there are reasons for military behavioral standards beyond simple discipline - the military method is about creating identical units that perform the same and have the same requirements, and while barracks discipline isn't related to combat directly, it's still a useful life skill with an organizational purpose, not a completely useless faux-punching drill that could be dropped and replaced by drilling with more modern strikes.
In other words, WHY ARE YOU DOING A DRILL IF THE DRILL DOESN'T APPLY TO ANYTHING? THAT IS STUPID.
WHY ARE YOU HOLDING UP C-STEP TRAINING AS HARD CARDIO YOU SILLY GIT
WHY CANT YOU CONVINCE ANYONE IN THAI BOXING OR MMA TO USE A 4 COUNT CHAMBER IF IT IS SUPERIOR
WHY DO ELITE FIGHTERS WORK WITH TARGETS AND MITS FOR THE MAJORITY OF THEIR TRAINING INSTEAD OF DOING LINE DRILLS LIKE A KARATE SCHOOL
WHY DO THEY SPEND THE REST OF THEIR TIME SHADOWBOXING INSTEAD OF DOING LINE DRILLS LIKE A KARATE SCHOOL
WHAT'S BETTER CARDIO, LINE DRILLS OR LIVE PRACTICE
WHAT'S BETTER CARIDO, KATA OR ANYTHING NOT INVOLVING SITTING.
RE "Discarding all of karate" defender, that's a giant Nerdy McNerd SUPER DEFENSIVE bullshit strawman that could only come from such a debate nerd as you - I made one little winking joke about karate and disputed it was THE BEST WAY TO LEARN PUNCHING. That isn't discarding punching as a whole or denying the skill of everyone ever born in, or trained in the effective, yet still over-rated and over-mysticized, combat styles of japan.
Defender, sheesh, dude, it was a one line crack. Given that there's NO MECHANICAL DISAGREEMENT BETWEEN US ABOUT HOW TO THROW A PUNCH, I really don't see the need for further textwall ITT.
Short Version: Get the fuck over it you GIANT NERD. Also, karate sucks.
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I don't understand how that could be interpreted to mean "penis."
Also JC would like to inform you that Wing Chun is useless slap-fighting that doesn't work.
No, you absolutely bring your back foot to your front for optimum range on a jab and optimum setup for a power right. You can advance only your front foot, or neither foot, but that's done when fencing with semi-sincere jabs, and sometimes when you fear a shoot - but when you're ready to close distance and hit the guy, you bring your back foot up. Your range with any blow is measured from your rearmost point of balance, you have to bring that up to get all your range.
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YES defender. ANY joke or stereotype is A SERIOUS UNIVERSAL STATEMENT. ALL BLONDES REALLY ARE DUMB. AMERICANS ARE RUDE WHEN ABROAD. THE FRENCH ARE RUDE AT HOME. WEARING PINK IS FOR FAGS AND RAPPERS ONLY. CAB DRIVERS ARE ALL FROM OTHER COUNTRIES, STANDUP COMICS CAN'T PROGRAM THEIR VCRS
these are all universal truths.
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Why should you do a drill which isn't applied in it's exact execution? Because it provides a base which emphasizes the concepts which are being taught. You don't, as an example, have to check all your mirrors every time you drive, however you train doing so such that you have the proper form when things are not ideal (you are in a friends car).
See, this is something I call Mongo's fallacy.
Mongo weighs 250 pounds and stands 6'6" He believes in a martial art consisting of arm punches, light slaps, bad language, and shoving. If an average person trains in that martial art, and another average sized person says "that's a dumb martial art" average guy number one can say "OH YEAH? GO TELL IT TO MONGO!"
(or maybe mongo's a natural athlete or has great cardio. Bruce lee's version of Mongo was to have speed no one could match that allowed him to build a unique stop-hitting game. Eddie Bravo's version of Mongo is to say "If all your joints bend 360 degrees you can't be tapped and you can get a sub from anywhere, just do that")
I host a podcast about movies.
The techniques in the system are valid not because someone is strong or sizable (some students are), but because the techniques use physics (leverage, vectors, velocity, etc.) and physiology (where to strike, structure of your body in relation to your opponents, etc.) for their effectiveness. Which is why the system is actually really good for people like myself. I'm shit-tiny and my straight punches won't ever be enough, by themselves, to take down someone the size of, say, Knob. If I can apply the laws of physics and physiology to my techniques then I will be able to negate the size difference.
It's science!