The Way of Least Resistance

Pull backs in basic punches are ubiquitous in Asian traditional martial arts. You'll find the same concept - usually chambered at the hip - in arts are diverse as karate, taekwondo, silat, hung gar gong fu and taijiquan... the list goes on. I've previously dealt with the subject of " chambers " quite exhaustively, as I have the traditional " corkscrew " punch, and I encourage readers to check out those essays to understand my position better. I won't be going into the subject of those topics (at least, not in any deep sense). It suffices for me to reiterate the central tenet of those articles: that basic form explores a full range movement . In reality, only a portion of that range might be used. Another way of thinking about it is that basics tend to get applied in an abbreviated form . Why bother with a "fuller" form just to end up abbreviating it? Well apart from teaching you basic planes and angles of movement in an amplified way that

I'm very proud to announce that The Way of Least Resistance has received a " Best Martial Blog "award from the security site CreditDonkey !

It's more than a year since I wrote my analysis of Ronda Rousey's loss to Holly Holm .  My conclusion back then was as follows: "If there's a lesson in there for Rousey it is this: in a stand up fight, simple aggression is often enough to win against an unskilled opponent.  And if you're a good grappler, it will certainly give you some good chances to close the gap and use your real skills.  But if you want to fight a good stand up fighter, you need to know enough about stand up  defence ."  It would seem that in the intervening year, Rousey has done nothing - and I mean absolutely nothing - to improve this skill, as was clearly evident in Rousey's fight last night against Amanda Nunes. Many think that the cornerstone of stand-up fighting is  attacking : striking, in the form of punching and kicking. Indeed, this is very much the philosophy of some schools who tout themselves as " target focused ". But, as I have stressed over many years a