Moderator: Bill Glasheen
As lads, many of us thought we should perform the block with just the ulnar. In fact, in conditioning, do we not use it to provide a bit of extra pain/testosterone to impress our partner in the dominance game that conditioning often becomes? Works on all of those new students! They cry in pain! Ha!
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So you perform your first punch in Dan kumite. Then he kicks you. You perform the down block like you thought it was right on a shin. You then realize why you do not block with just your ulnar in that situation. If you are especially lucky, you not only have quite the painful welt on your ulnar side of your forearm which makes practice a torture for the next week, you get the pleasure of having your partner bury his toe into your gut because you did not actually block/deflect his front kick.
Most, I think, learn this. Some do not and learn to hate Dan kumite. They then claim one should only block with the shins. Not a bad idea unless someone kicks your higher in the flanks--like that kick is designed. So you stop doing Dan kumite altogether.
Then you work with a 25ish Mastodon who learned shin conditioning from Yonamine and Shinjo and a few head injuries, and you realize that if you do not redirect the kick from you--on an opponent of that size--your are going to "eat" the kick every time unless your opponent is "merciful" and kicks away from you.
As for bad habits, nothing sends me into the stratosphere like people kicking really low in prearranged kumite such that everyone bends over to "block down" the kick. Bad habits all around.
"Spinoff" is the only way to survive some situations. You get a guy a foot taller than you, who can deliver a front kick, you will eat that if you stand in front of him.
Glenn wrote:I am well aware of all that Stevie, however what Kiyohide Shinjo is doing to the baseball bat does relate to this thread, and more importantly relates to the mindset development that hard-against-hard blocks/strikes with the ulna or radius are a pinnacle of Uechi training.
Glenn wrote:what are we to make of such demos and the mentality they can generate in practitioners of being able to take hard blocks without risk of breaking their arm?
Glenn wrote:The same could be said for blocking kicks with shins.
Glenn wrote:The guy in the video I posted is commenting on people actually recommending blocking a bat with an arm, and it is not difficult to see such a mentality coming out of tameshiwari.
Glenn wrote:As I have stated before I do not agree with this mentality or that demos and techniques/teachings are one and the same, but there more we harden our bodies the more risks we may take, or at the very least the more we may slip into relying on hardness over technique particularly in the heat of the moment. Think football where there has been considerable press about the increase in head injuries being at least partly due to a false sense of security from wearing a helmet causing players to take more risks. And as we have mentioned elsewhere, operant conditioning can play a role in this.
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