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Showing posts from January, 2017

"Hiki te" - what is it really about?

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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

Winner - Best Martial Arts Blog 2017!

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

Rousey v Nunes - a tutorial on how NOT to receive strikes

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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