Bluish Coder: martialarts

Mt Vic Dojo Open Day - Kyokushin Karate, BJJ, Judo and Yoga

2006-06-07T19:55:00+12:00

The Mt Vic Dojo is having an open day on Sunday 11th June. The day includes demonstrations, free classes, t-shirts and discounts to be won. All the styles that hve their home at the Mt Vic Dojo will be there. These being:

A poster with details is here (very high quality pdf).

If you're at all curious about any of these great activities go along and have a look. It'll be well worth your while. The dojo is at Level 2, 25 Home St, Wellington, behind City Nissan, next door to Spec-R .

Jack Dempsey

2006-04-25T01:25:00+12:00

Jack Dempsey was a famous boxer early in the 20th century. Today I got in the mail a DVD on Jack Dempsey's style of boxing made available by Kirk Lawson on rec.martial-arts.

The DVD is a garage training session led by Ken Pfrenger, a western martial arts instructor. Ken's 'western martial arts' interest covers early bare knuckle boxing, Irish Collar and Elbow wrestling and stickplay and Cornish Close Hugg wrestling amongst other things. Based on his knowledge of Dempsey and Dempsey's book and fights he led a session on some of his techniques and tactics. This is what appears on the DVD.

Some interesting stuff covered, including: * Stance * Center line theory and parrying * The Jolt * Trigger Step * Shoulder Whirl * The Surge, upper cut and shovel hook * Feinting and drawing the punch * The Double Shift * The Corkscrew * The Cross * The Inside Triple * The Outside Triple

As you can see early boxing had its own vernicular seperate from modern boxing. Even 'The Cross' is a different punch being much more like an overhand right.

The DVD is about 45 minutes of material - raw and relatively unpolished - but containing very interesting and useful content to the enthusiast of boxing's history and great fighters. Well worth the low price Kirk is selling them for.

It is interesting to compare the differences style of the early 20th century of boxing versus modern boxing. Dempsey advocated punching with the bottom three knuckles of the fist (vs modern boxing's top two) and many punches are done with a vertical fist.

The Jolt is a lead hand punch different from the modern Jab. The fist is vertical and the power is obtained from a drop step into the opponent.

Many of the punches derive power by rapidly rotating the shoulders, concentrating on bringing back fast the non punching shoulder and thrusting forward the punching shoulder - creating a rotational torque which pushes out the punching hand. This movement being called the 'shoulder whirl'. Described in Dempsey's book, Championship Fighting, as:

One shoulder whips forward while the other whips back. Muscles of the shoulders, back, stomach, legs co-operate in achieving the whirl. Also, the process is assisted by shifting the weight from one leg to the other. You need concern yourself only with the shoulder motions. Nature will supervise the assisting muscles and movements.

...

MAKE CERTAIN THAT YOUR SHOULDERS ARE DRIVING THE PUNCHES; THAT THE PUNCHES ARE NOT PULLING THE SHOULDERS.

According to the DVD Dempsey advocated a open hand position. Rather than keeping the hands in close to the head, protecting the chin. creating a shield like say Peek-a-boo boxing style or Rodney King's Crazy Monkey, they were kept more apart to create a target for the opponent and thus draw his punches to a known point. Parrying the punch then being as simple as a downward parry motion to bat the punch away or a stop-catch with the rear hand followed by a lead hand punch or jolt.

There's some nice coverage of the shovel hook to the body and the upper cut. The delivery style for the shovel hook being to keep the drop down from the knees, keep the elbow of the hooking hand close (or attached to) the hip and torquing with the hips to drive the punch. No movement of the hand or arm away from the hip.

Some nice links to Dempsey in action:

Dempsey vs Bill Tate (Youtube)
Jack Dempsey Highlight (Google Video)
Jack Dempsey vs Jess Willard (125MB .mpg file, big download but great fight, originally from here)
Web archive of some of Dempsey's book, Championship Fighting. If anyone has a copy of this book they'd be willing to part with or lend out let me know.

The video of Dempsey vs Willard linked above shows some obvious differences in rules compared to modern boxing. When a boxer is knocked down they get a ten count but the opponent can stand right over them and immediately hit them when they get up. There is no neutral corner rule. In this fight Willard is knocked down seven times in the first round.

Rodney King's Crazy Monkey - Non Attribute Based Boxing

2006-02-25T20:22:00+13:00

With a group of fellow martial artists I've been working on training Rodney King's Crazy Monkey standup fighting method and have been finding it very useful.

Rodney King is the creator of a fighting method known as as 'Crazy Monkey' or non attribute based boxing.

The approach CM takes is to teach a primarily defence based system so that a person can gain confidence in their standup fighting to know they won't get hurt and from their launch an effective attack.

The 'non attribute' label is to differentiate between other boxing styles where to be effective takes a fairly long time as you need to become highly skilled and develop excellent attributes to be able to apply the technqiues without getting hit.

CM really becomes useful at the close range where your opponent can 'fire all guns' and you are in most danger of getting hit. It involves keeping the hands up high, on top of the head, and using arm and body movement to block and deflect the incoming punches using the forearms. By not getting hit you gain more confidence at that range to be able to fire back without getting hit, escape out to a longer range or to close to the clinch to take the fight to the ground. There's more to it than that of course but that's the basic idea.

So far I've found it to have greatly improved my confidence in handling an attack at that range. It's similar to learning grappling. I found that grappling improved my confidence in knowing that if the fight went to the ground I had more options, or I could take it to the ground if I was struggling standing. Rodney King's system has provided a similar confidence in me for the close range of standup in knowing that I can survive the flurry of attacks at that range and choose to fight back or change - making it my choice rather than the opponent forcing the choice upon me.

While I'm still a beginner at learning this stuff and still getting knocked around on occasion, I'm certainly doing better than in the past where I had no response whatsoever for this range. Hopefully as I continue to train it things will get even better.

If you're studying a martial art for self defence purposes I think it's very important to train at the different ranges. And specialist styles like BJJ to cover the ground work and CM for the close range standing make good options for covering those areas.

In the traditional martial art I do I've found that senior belts can sometimes be not very confident in the ranges we don't cover and even just a little training in the other areas can give a huge help. I encourage them to go out and try the specialist schools for doing this, for example the Grappling Studio in Wellington which does BJJ is excellent.

But for Rodney King's stuff there's no training center in NZ (that I'm aware of) so the options have been primarily DVD's in the past. This is what I've been working off. His Streetboxing and Sparring 101 DVD's are very good.

Recently Rodney has started a website, mymalife.com, which contains downloadable videos and information covering all you need to know about CM as well as a forum for discussing it. Registration for the forum is free and Rodney posts there giving lots of advice. Some of the information is available as free downloads but paid membership is required for the instructional videos. There's a wealth of information there and so far it's been very worth it.

Kempo Bushido Ryu

2005-12-10T00:56:00+13:00

Around 1977 I started Kempo Bushido Ryu, a style of Karate, when I was aged about seven. The subject of Kempo came up on a forum I frequent recently so I thought I'd embarrass myself by posting a couple of 'home movies' of me doing kata from back then:

kempo1.mpg (~3MB)
kempo2.mpg (~2.5MB)

These were originally filmed with 'super 8' reel-to-reel film, transferred to VHS a number of years later, and then transferred to the PC, so the quality is not great.

It must be the time of year or something - Last year, just before christmas I posted more 'super 8' from about the same time frame of me on the Bounty to the Pitcairn News blog. Or maybe because it was my birthday today so felt like reminiscing :-)