Introductions from Prague!

Discussion in 'General Martial Arts Discussion' started by Nachi, Dec 25, 2014.

  1. Nachi

    Nachi Valued Member Supporter

    Hi everyone,
    my name is Martina, called Nachi by some of my friends. I'm a 24-year-old girl from the Czech Republic. I more or less accidentaly discovered the wonders of karate a little over a year ago and I'm still "enjoying" all the bruises appearing non-stop. It became my big passion.

    I practise Goju-Ryu Karate (under IOGKF) and recently passed the exam for 7th kyu. I have no other experience with martial arts, so I'm here mostly to learn new things (some recipe on how to possibly not get too beaten in kumite against big guys would be especially welcome :D)

    And also: please pardon the mistakes in my English as it's not my native language...

    And happy holidays!
     
  2. Frodocious

    Frodocious She who MUST be obeyed! Moderator Supporter

    Welcome to MAP, Martina/Nachi!

    Hope you had a great Christmas day. :)
     
  3. Simon

    Simon Administrator Admin Supporter MAP 2017 Koyo Award

    Welcome to MAP.

    Good to have you on-board.
     
  4. Fish Of Doom

    Fish Of Doom Will : Mind : Motion Supporter

    you need to be evil. you need to be REALLY, REALLY evil :evil: . also, as a last resort there's always the kamikaze jumping punch to the face, which is hilarious when it lands.
     
  5. Nachi

    Nachi Valued Member Supporter

    Thank you, Frodocious and Simon!

    Haha, good point! :D That's my problem, not evil enough. I just can't bring myself to be. Even while on the ground, when stuff like grabbing and pulling on man's weak parts was allowed (my sole advantage), I was just too kind to do it. Even though it could have saved me from having sensei grab my trachea (what an awful move!)
    Yay, kamikaze punch. I ought to try that!
     
    Last edited: Dec 26, 2014
  6. Fish Of Doom

    Fish Of Doom Will : Mind : Motion Supporter

    give in to the dark side!

    also, on a more productive note, you need to prevent the other person from doing what they want to do, and you need to do that before they do the same to you. bearing in mind that bigger people have a massive advantage over us shorties in that regard simply by virtue of sheer range, this requires EEEEEEEVIL. EVIL, I TELL YOU!
     
  7. Nachi

    Nachi Valued Member Supporter

    Right you are :D
    Yeaaah, I already found out how much of an advantage it is to just be "big". Not counting weight, they can always reach my head first... I'm supposedly quite strong for a girl, I've been called "Martin" more often than I'd like, at times I'm not treated as a girl (meaning I get to get a proper beating, especially when it comes to conditioning), but at the end of the day, I'm still one (and I am short).
    I'll have a perfect opportunity to test that evil theory tommorrow on a special kumite training with senseis and probably mostly other black belts. That is, if I can bring myself to really be evil. I'm also testing the sensei's "Just be faster" theory. :D
    Wish me luck!
     
    Last edited: Dec 26, 2014
  8. Mushroom

    Mushroom De-powered to come back better than before.

    Welcome Nachi!
     
  9. Nachi

    Nachi Valued Member Supporter

    Sooo, reporting back! I have gotten the message but I either am stupid and can't figure out how to reply to it, or I can't...

    I took your advise with the kamikaze punch. :D I tried it out while sparring with a sensei, who's over 2 meters tall (so I basically can't even reach his head without jumping or getting really close). He blocked it, but it amused him enough that he tried it on me in the next round :D That was a bit scary, even if he didn't put much strenght behing it... unlike my sensei sometimes, they were going easy on me.

    I haven't managed to become really evil, as I have trouble trying to really hurt people - like attempting chokes etc. But I'm learning! I friend who has experience with thai box, jiu jitsu and some cage fighting decided to teach me some joint locks and other ways to win especially when it comes to ground fight. So we're practicing a little after training. It will take some time, though, before I'll be able to use them effectively. The only thing it has improved so far is predicting what the opponent is trying to do and struggling for a bit longer or refusing to tap out until the last moment or (rarely) until prooving their technique not effective enough :) ...and making use of my flexibility, which appears to be rather useful :)
     
  10. Fish Of Doom

    Fish Of Doom Will : Mind : Motion Supporter

    haha! well you don't need to go and try to hurt people, but you do need to learn to spot opportunites and be ruthless in tsking advantage of them (more so than the other guy/girl at least). by having more reach, others will take less time to do watever it is they want to do, so you ned to start doing your stuff before they start theirs, and preferably in a way that forces them to stop doing whatever they're doing, and/or provokes a predictable reaction that you can take advantage of (which you must do, in turn, as soon as you see the opportunity).

    a dumb example, for the sake of argument (not necessarily one that will work, but one that illustrates the concept): generally it's much easier to hit an unguarded area than it is one that is closed off by posture and guard, so if you convince the opponent to guard one place, you can attack another. using the example of the jumping punch, by itself it's not a high percentage technique by any means, but it's much easier to land if your opponent is waiting for a low attack (which they usually will against shorties like us, hence when it does land it's a barrel of laughs), so if you convincingly seem to be about to attack low (say, by apparently staring at where you pretend to want to attack, like newbies tend to do), a mere twitch could cause a reaction out of a jumpy opponent, ideallytl towards the low line, upon which you punch them in the face :D. conversely, you can convince an opponent that THAT is what you're going to do (example, your sensei already saw you doing it, so he might expect it to happen again), and make them flinch upwards. then instead of a jump punch, you get really close and uppercut them in the liver :p.

    in any case, it's vital that the opponent's moves be a reaction to YOUR movement and posture, rather than yours being a reaction to theirs. that way, you can to a degree predict and control how they move, and plan accordingly one or two steps ahead to completely shut down their game plan (the extracurricular grappling training might help as it's massively based on positioning, transitions and setting up things that make the opponent vulnerable, and the grappling itself works by shutting down what the opponent wants to do, which is why pure strikers cry themselves to sleep every night thinking about bjj, judo and wrestling peeps :p)
     
  11. FunnyBadger

    FunnyBadger I love food :)

    Your not stupid or anything your just new to it all. These things take years of practice to get down. Spotting and seizing opportunities is like any skill it needs to be developed over time. If you keep on at it and try things a few times you will soon develop you own methods and find your go to techniques.

    The fact that your sparring against higher belts and trying things out means your giving your self every opportunity to learn and progress :)
     
  12. Fish Of Doom

    Fish Of Doom Will : Mind : Motion Supporter

    also, re: just get faster: "speed" in martial arts is not only a function of sheer physical speed (although that does help). it's also (i would say primarily) a function of timing, positioning and relaxation. the more relaxed you are, and the less you telegraph your moves, and the better your timing and positioning are, the harder it'll be to notice whatever you're doing and react to it, and it'll take less time for the move to happen, so it'll seem a lot faster. these are also attributes much easier to develop, and with more potential to develop them, than actual physical speed, which doesn't change all that much with training.
     
  13. Nachi

    Nachi Valued Member Supporter

    Oh, thank you for such a lenghty answer! :) Needless to say, I'm not very experienced with sparring. I probably tend to do all these mistakes you pointed out :D I will keep your advise in mind.

    Also by "really hurting people" I didn't mean like I'd actually wanted to hurt someone. It's more like I'm afraid I could hurt them or just make them uncomfortable and I'm not very comfortable with even that :D Like, for example, sensei often alters his guard in a way that his stomach is exposed, or simple tells us to punch him or strike him with an elbow when he stands behind us in order for him to see how well we can hit. And if we do it half heartedly, we only get scolded :) I'm pretty sure I won't hurt him like that, but still feel a little uncomfortable attacking when he's not defending. Hopefully you get my point. It's slowly getting better, though, now I have more trouble with chokes, joint locks etc. and I don't know how much strenght I can or can't put into them (I can probably put in a lot of strenght, but I'm still afraid). I'll just have to keep practising that.

    It's more difficult against opponents that are basically all men and all more experienced, especially when sweeps and ground fighting is allowed. Though that's also just an excuse of course :) The few more serious sparring rounds when we went girl against girl, even with the other ones doing karate for much longer, I usually won holding the opponent down so she couldn't move till the end of the round or gave up without me having to try any nasty techniques, which was a relief - I tend to hesitate and then get beaten myself because of that. That said, we don't spar that often, so my experience is limited and when we do have a sparring session, men are prevalent...

    Thank you for the advises! I understand what you mean and will keep it in mind. And will have to practise... and practise again and again - in order to do what you wrote especially in the last paragraph. Predicting the opponent's action is something I can't do very well, especially if I'm uder a half-surprise attack or/and the opponent knows what he's doing while I have no idea :eek: :D By half-surprise I mean, for example: I criticise a technique we're practising, when I feel it won't work in that situation or they don't hold me tight enough or whatever - so I'm told to try escaping it or withstanding it. And if I'm right and the technique doesn't work, I'm thrown to the ground by the next one and choked or somehow forced to submit in order to see that if one doesn't work, the next one will... :mad: And it's amazing to see how different people totally have this same way of teaching stuff :D

    Yeah, I would love to be able to get better at both stand-up and ground fighting. In goju-ryu there are a lot of techniques for both, which is great. Some of the grappling we learned is very similar to what my friend knows from jiu jitsu.
     
  14. Nachi

    Nachi Valued Member Supporter

    Right you are :) I don't think I'm too slow when it comes to physical speed. I have more trouble with the speed of my (adequate) reactions to attacks. I usually try to protect my belly so I fail to protect my head (very clever, I know) and vice versa....
     
  15. Fish Of Doom

    Fish Of Doom Will : Mind : Motion Supporter

    well, see above: if you guard one area, it's easy to leave another unprotected. you know you don't guard your head, so you know it's likely that attacks will go there. you can use that to your advantage. look at the kata as well, not for literally using the movements in them, but for the concepts that they teach. goju-ryu kata in particular tend to have many instances of covering high or low and immediately inverting the movement to cover the area just made vulnerable. in the gekisai you have the elbow, low block, gyakuzuki sequence (front and roundhouse elbows can double as defensive techniques), and in the more advanced ones (dunno which you've learned so far though) it becomes more ubiquitous, with kata like seipai, sanseiru, kururunfa, etc all having high-low or low-high sequences, both purely defensive and mixed defensive and offensive, that one can learn from and use to groove motor patterns (which ultimately must then be tempered in freeform drilling and sparring, because what matters isn't how well you can reproduce a fixed sequence, but how well you apply the principles within them to an unscripted scenario determined by the relative actions and positioning of you and your opponent).
     
  16. Nachi

    Nachi Valued Member Supporter

    Hmm, that's a good point. I didn't think much of that. The problem with that particular sequence in gekisai is that in order to get close enough to your opponent to use your elbow, you first need to stun them somehow - in this case with a kick to the groin. I don't think that's easily applicable in class and I'd rather not get that close to my opponent who can easily use an elbow too, when I don't cause him a lot of pain first. Though it probably can be altered somehow.
    So far I've learned the two Gekisai and now working on making my Saifa look like an actual Saifa :) And Sanchin, but that's a bit different. The more advanced ones I've only seen demonstrated but know nothing about.
    Have you/are you doing goju-ryu as well? Or does your style has similar kata? Or are you simply that knowledgeable about the other styles?

    The pretending to have an opening is a good idea. But somehow, I always end up being to slow with bloking the head strike. Next time I'll try this method of "leading" the attack there (or somewhere else, perhaps, I don't enjoy the headshots very much :D).
     
  17. Fish Of Doom

    Fish Of Doom Will : Mind : Motion Supporter

    use the elbow to cover your head when it's being punched ;) (that should induce a change of target, probably lower, which you'd ideally know is coming, so you can parry it while attacking, represented in the kata by gedan-barai + gyaku-zuki). also, what technique precedes the elbow in gekisai?

    plus, remember what i said about using the principles from the kata rather than the literal movements. the latter can be used as a starting point for drilling, but there's a lot of ways for somoene to attack you, and a lot of ways for you to prevent them from doing so, so in the long run your training has to move towards the former to be applicable to many situations.

    i've not done proper goju-ryu myself, but i do ****o-ryu, which has all if the classical goju kata and one version of the gekisai template in it (the foudner of ****o was a bit of a kata collector and preserver, so we have a lot of bloat there, with a minimum of 40-something kata depending on the lineage, up to a bit over 60 or so). i've also been around long enough to have picked up a few things from outside ****o-ryu here and there, but i've only ever formally trained it and a bit of shotokan.
     
  18. StrikingDragon

    StrikingDragon Valued Member

    Nice to meet you! I suggest biting and lots of it if you are struggling :p Works for me...
     
  19. Nachi

    Nachi Valued Member Supporter

    Ah, sorry, I misunderstood. That's a much better idea :)
    I just returned from the dojo. Today we did a very brief and just light sparring at the end and while thinking of all your advises, I still couldn't protect my nose... Luckily the punch was light :) Unfortunately most punches I get are straight and if I'm not mistaken the elbow as a block works better for strikes from the side. We happened to practise that today, too. Of course, I don't need to do precisely what's in the kata and I can block differently. I just need to get faster reactions first.

    The technique before elbow is mae geri - in the kata. In bunkai it's kin geri -> elbow -> uraken -> gedan barai and gyaku zuki.

    I see. Well, that's a LOT of kata. :eek: It must take forever to learn them all. Is there even time to practise anything else? :D In our system there are 12 and I think it takes a lot of time to properly learn just those (and the bunkai).
    How many kata do you know so far?

    Thank you! :D Haha, yeah, can't say I never resorted to that. I did once, but we're usually allowed to do that only in defense and at that time I really didn't see any other way out of the grip :D
     
  20. Fish Of Doom

    Fish Of Doom Will : Mind : Motion Supporter

    i don't even remember how many kata i know :p (nor do i rememer how many i've forgotten :p). between ****o, shotokan and the various kung fu forms i know i'm pretty sure i once knew more than 40. as to how to find time... i often ponder that myself :p (i personally consider it an issue of serious bloating within the style, and not being an instructor i only train the ones that interest me, although i fully support the learning of as many as possible by teachers in order to preserve them).

    and yes, elbow parries are more effective against circular strikes, but the concept is there: covering your head and immediately re-covering the area you just vacated. back to the example of training that sequence from gekisai dai ichi: the basic gedan barai starts with crossed hands, raising the blocking hand to then bring it down. in gekisai your arm is alerady high due to the elbow, so you bring it inwards to prepare the low block. drill the sequence a bit, and when you do the grdan barai, visualize that a punch is coming straight at your face, in fact, not just that, imagine it actually hitting you full force and doing damage. now, that's not a very nice thing, so you have be like "lol nope" and bat it the hell out of the way. now your arm is up with the elbow technique (as it would be with your kamae-te in sparring), so it's the closest thing to your face and to the offending limb, thus the closest available shield you have. drag that shield inwards so that you hammerfist or forearm block the punch away from your face. this leaves you open below on that side, so the gedan barai has to immediately fill that space. could be a block to another attack, could itself be an attack (groin shot for example), could be dragging the opponent's arm down to unbalance him or open him up, or could simply be covering up to remove the easy target that your ribs were for about half a second. then you punch him in the face :D
     

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