Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Martial comfort zones

It seems I'm not the only one looking to get away from the heavily sport-influenced Asian martial arts. Linoge, who is primarily responsible for getting me into following gunblogs, has started up Krav Maga, and is noting the sizeable differences from your typical Asian martial art, as they're taught in the USA.

http://www.wallsofthecity.net/2014/03/paradigm-shift.html shifting from one style of martial art to another is a significant difference if you aren't expecting it. It was a fun experience when I sparred with a friend who was trained more in kickboxing. Completely different arrangements of pads, the allowance of leg kicks and head punches, and grappling all made for an eye opening experience. Had I only collected pure Taekwondo to fight with, I would have been at a significant disadvantage. Luckily, the school at which I learned was VERY traditional, and has much less of an element of "tournament use only" about it, and comes with a side of hopkido and other such things. The sparring was always very gentle with lots of restrictions, but they were all restrictions only for safety purposes, rather than "this doesn't count for anything in tournaments so we're not going to do anything with it ever."

Linoge talks more about some of the more real world training with Krav Maga here, about a fun game of monkey in the middle.


There's a good looking Krav Maga school here in town, but it's on completely the opposite end of town from where I am now, and is probably about 45-60 minutes drive away. There's one vaguely close by, supposedly, but it's a mixed school with no functioning webpage.

No comments:

Post a Comment