Uechi-Ryu.com

Hahahahaha!!!! I believe it!! And actually a good idea! I think in #2 of that series it looked like the same happened there..

Loren W. Christensen, a Vietnam veteran, retired police officer, and life-long martial artist. Loren is a guy with a tremendous amount of street experience and one who has lived through the changing martial arts culture in the United States.

Karate tournaments in the 1960s were rough affairs, hard contact, serious injuries, and ugly racial incidents. The latter being part of the times.

Karate tournaments in the 1960s were rough affairs, hard contact, serious injuries, and ugly racial incidents. The latter being part of the times.

As I mentioned, tournaments in the 1960s were often brutal bloodbaths that sometimes erupted into racial violence, brawls in the crowd, and serious injury.

Read the old karate magazines for accounts of those events.

Tournaments have now evolved to a new place.

Kata competition often looks like a gymnastic floor exercise with a punch here, a cartwheel kick there, and don't forget somersaults. Some people enjoy this and train hard to perfect their forms. That's fine, but they need to keep in mind that it has nothing to do to real fighting.

In sparring competition you might see a few techniques that are explosive, fast and strong, but there are far more “bunny taps,” techniques that would leave a street assailant laughing his head off as he removed the head of the one who used them.

Sadly, bunny taps and sloppy techniques are awarded points, thus leaving the fighter with the false belief that his skill is effective.

Let’s switch gears. You and Lt .Col. Dave Grossman wrote a book titled On Combat, which I understand is now required reading in places like the U.S. National War College. Among many other things, you discuss what happens to warriors in a fight when their heart rates reach certain levels. Could you comment on that?

LC: We devote many pages to this important subject but in brief, it’s about training correctly for the street.

Over 2,500 years ago General Brasidas of Sparta said, “Fear makes men forget, and skill that cannot fight is useless.”

In a heart-pounding situation, the loss of your fine-motor control and near vision makes it mandatory that you drill on those things that seem simple when you’re calm and collected. In other words, basics.

Think of those cold mornings when your fingers aren’t working. That is vasoconstriction caused by the cold, but it can also happen when you’re under adrenaline-induced stress.

Say an assailant is threatening you as he moves into your comfort zone. Your heart accelerates to around 115 beats per minute (bpm) where many people begin to experience a loss of fine-motor control.

Around 145 bpm, the average person begins to lose complex motor control.

When it climbs to around 175 bpm and beyond, the effects of vasoconstriction on your body can become catastrophic.

The blood pumps from your heart through your arteries, but just before entering your capillaries, it constricts.

By the way, the accelerated heart rate you get from cardiovascular training like jogging and fun sparring isn’t the same as a fear- and adrenaline-induced accelerated heart rate.

At low levels of vasoconstriction, the little capillaries shut down, causing some loss of fine-motor control.

As the vasoconstriction becomes more intense, the blood flow to the complex motor muscles begins to shut down. It’s common to lose your peripheral vision, that is, you get tunnel vision.

The more stressed you become, the narrower the tunnel you’re looking through, so narrow you wont’ be able to see the assailant’s buddies.

You’ll lose depth perception, meaning that the assailant looks closer than he really is, and you’ll lose your near vision, meaning you’ll have trouble seeing close things.

You literally become so scared you can’t see straight.

Above 175bpm, your techniques pretty much deteriorate. You can run but you will probably fall down a lot.

Can you apply fancy hand techniques?

Nope. Do a tornado kick? Not even. Most likely you will just latch onto your assailant and hang on as the two of you bang off walls.