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kids and martial arts?

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shardian:

--- Quote from: ChadTower on November 06, 2009, 09:58:41 am ---
--- Quote from: Hoopz on November 06, 2009, 09:53:58 am ---I found bird poop on my pants after football practice in middle school.  Little bastard got me right on my calf when I was running.

--- End quote ---


You grow up right on the ocean, wandering around commercial wharves in a fishing town, and you get seagull crap on you all the time.  Hats and raincoats.  Just part of going where you know the seagulls are.

--- End quote ---

I'd happily embrace seagull crap if that meant I could have grown up oceanside. All of you coastal folks are lucky bastiges.
BTW, I leave tommorrow for the beach. It will be my first time ever being at the beach in the off-season. Even though it will only be in the 70's all week, I am super excited. And yeah, I'm getting out in the water no matter what.

ChadTower:

--- Quote from: pinballjim on November 06, 2009, 10:02:37 am ---That must be in new england or something.  If you went wandering around the Texas shrimping towns in a hat and raincoat you'd faint from a heat stroke.

--- End quote ---


Nova Scotia, it's not quite as necessary in the MA fishing towns.  You still get crapped on but up in NS the seagulls will circle above an incoming boat by the hundreds.

Shardian, it really depends on where you are.  There isn't much recreational use in southern NS beyond going out on boats a couple months a year.  No swimming, few beaches, frigid water and monster riptides.  There is a lot of recreational use in MA but it's nothing like you see on TV with people surfing and walking around in string bikinis.

ChadTower:

--- Quote from: pinballjim on November 06, 2009, 10:49:23 am ---Water's a little murky in Texas but it's warmer.  Looking at booking a cottage for this weekend.  $70 a night, little steep but hey.

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$70 a night here is a good deal for a rathole motel room.

shmokes:
The water's still perfect here.  No seagulls to speak of either.  I'll maybe see 20 total after spending a few hours at the beach.  Miami's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.  But it has its moments.   

Grasshopper:

--- Quote from: saint on November 05, 2009, 05:56:53 pm ---
--- Quote from: pinballjim on November 05, 2009, 04:57:44 pm ---Jeez... you know, leave it to men to take something WAY TOO SERIOUSLY and ruin it.



Can't Chad's kids get some exercise, maybe toughen up a little, and have some fun?



--- End quote ---

Yikes, write this down.

(I agree with PBJ)



--- End quote ---

+1

However, I just can’t resist getting involved …  ;D

Chadwick, I totally agree with the main gist of what you’re saying. However, I think you’re perhaps being a little unfair about Wing Chun. To illustrate my point I’m going to try and compare Wing Chun with Western boxing. Note, I’m not a martial arts expert, so take what I’m saying with a grain of salt.

Firstly, if you ask me who’s likely to be the better fighter, a boxer or a Wing Chun practitioner, I’d have no hesitation in saying the boxer. That much we can agree with.

A typical boxing class will involve full contact sparring (albeit with gloves being worn). And whilst fighting with gloves on is somewhat different to bare-knuckle fighting, it’s close enough to be useful. However, a typical Wing Chun class will only offer, at best, semi-contact sparring. Many don’t even offer that.

There is really no substitute for full contact sparring if you want to learn to fight properly, and that in a nutshell is why the boxer will almost certainly be the better fighter.

However, despite that, I would still argue that Wing Chun is a more effective, and certainly a more complete, system of fighting than western boxing. That sounds contradictory but you need to separate the effectiveness of the art itself, from the way in which practitioners typically train (at least in the west). If Wing Chun classes incorporated full contact sparring then I believe “chunners” would be just as effective as boxers. Conversely, if boxing classes didn’t incorporate full contact sparring then boxers would be just as ineffective in real fights as Wing Chun experts.

In fact I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to describe boxing as a subset of Wing Chun. If you take the handful of Wing Chun moves that can be executed comfortably whilst wearing boxing gloves and then remove the kicks, you’re left with something that is fairly close to western boxing. There are, after all, only so many ways that you can hit someone. Also, many of the principles that underpin Wing Chun (always face the opponent, protect the centre line etc.) are exactly the things that boxers are taught to do.

As far as the exercises that take place in oriental martial arts classes are concerned, they’re just that – exercises. Whether they work or not is of course debateable. I guess it’s ultimately subjective. But one thing is clear, they were not designed to make people into fighters on their own, they were designed to help people already learning to fight by other means to be better fighters.

This is not unique to martial arts. Most sports have training exercises. But you wouldn’t expect to become any good just by doing the exercises, you also have to actually play the sport. The exercises are just the icing on the cake so to speak.

I suspect that the need to do the exercises in conjunction with genuine sparring is something that got “lost in translation” when some of the oriental martial arts were exported to the west.

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