Ooops.

[camwyn]

Karate class today: time to practice sidestepping. Someone coming at you with an overhand right-handed strike? Slide your left foot towards them, then move the right an equal distance to follow; you're getting out of the strike's way and getting a good shot at their unprotected side.

Line up in two lines, facing each other, says the instructor. Practice this as I give the count. So we do. Then we switch roles and the dodgers do the striking. Fine. So we switch partners and repeat. Great.

Now, says instructor, you and your next partner are going to do this with the striker throwing overhead blows at random - no count, no pattern. Just keep your eyes on his or her shoulder/chest area and sidestep as appropriate. The striker is to aim for the dodger's centerline before they start moving, as if they were trying to hit them on the center of the head.

So we do, and I avoid Eric's strikes pretty well, though he's an orange belt and I'm a white and he's six inches taller than me. Huzzah. Okay, says instructor, now switch.

We do this. And the first few strikes go okay, though Eric's not sidestepping all that far...

Then comes the overhand left-handed knife hand strike.
The one he doesn't sidestep far enough.
The one that comes straight down on his wire-rimmed eyeglasses.

He's okay. He was pretty good-humoured about it all. Even after he got the towel and started holding it to his face. The glasses didn't break, they just came down very hard on his nose... I drew blood. A fair amount, apparently.

I admit, my first thought was, 'You were supposed to be DODGING!'. After that came 'are you okay?', because I'd clipped him - I hadn't seen the blood yet. Then came 'I'm glad I had LASIK' and 'dude, you're an ORANGE BELT, I shouldn't have been able to do that'. At least all I said out loud was 'are you okay?'.

But geesh. I'm not supposed to be the one drawing first blood.

Comments

[firestrike.livejournal.com]

It's a nice maneuver when done correctly. Works well with any single-hand melee weapon. Not always a great move in unknown terrain or on unsteady footing, though. And don't ever try it if you're up to your knees in a river.

Personally, I'd rather have a bloody nose than broken glasses. It heals on it's own, and is much cheaper. (Kleenex vs new frames)

Just because he's an orange belt doesn't mean that he was paying attention. Or that his reflexes are better than yours.

One could make a case that you are more dangerous than he is, as you have less training. Though at the respective levels, I don't quite see you two in the 'best swordsman vs worst swordsman' situation.

-M

[camwyn]

Knowing what I do of my own instincts, I probably am fairly dangerous, although it's in a bull-in-a-Swarovski-store kind of way and probably more to myself than anyone else. When the instructor asked us 'if someone is coming at you with an overhand strike, martially speaking, what's the best direction to move in that particular one-on-one situation', my instinctive response was 'down! duck and hit him in the exposed soft bits!'. Then again, my fondness for ducking and/or dropping my center of gravity in class may have something to do with the fact that Eric and maybe one other person are the only ones taller than me.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

I think I'm 'supposed' to express sympathy or something, but what with countgeiger, ardaniel, et all in sword classes every Sunday of the world, my first reaction is, "Goooo, Jess!"

My second is sympathetic wincing for the bleeding guy. But, really, this is martial arts, people goan get whacked. It happens.

-- Lorrie

[camwyn]

I swear, my general feeling was that of being miffed - Eric, you were supposed to be dodging, remember? - and only secondarily 'oh, hells, is that blood? I thought that was just a bruise. . .'

Belts don't mean a thing.

[mtr1966.livejournal.com]

I've found with my own exposure to martial arts (jiujutsu) that the belts seem to mean nothing more than "this person has spent X amount of time studying this art". My own elevation from white to yellow belt involved taking on a brown belt student in an exhibition match (he was the only person in my weight class) and winning. How did I win? He did an attack on me I didn't know and couldn't counter, but screwed it up enough that he got a half-point for it. In trying to pin me down, he could only get a single-point pin on me. (Forgot the name of it -- it was about 15 years ago.) I knew the counter to that one and applied it. I did it perfectly and got a full point. End of match. White belt victorious. The instructor was so happy with my performance that he ordered me to stay in the ring and had someone else give up their yellow belt for a bit. A brief bit of ceremony later I had a yellow belt around my waist instead of a white one. (Later on, of course, I returned that belt and had mine dyed.)

The brown belt in question undoubtedly knew many more moves and counters than I did. But the moral of the story is this: knowing lots of moves sloppily is worth less than knowing a small number of moves very, very well....

Re: Belts don't mean a thing.

[camwyn]

This is, fortunately, something of a slow-moving school in terms of rank advancement. It takes me forever to get muscle memory active, and I'd rather spend another semester in white belt learning to get the back kick right than go on to yellow without knowing what the fsck I'm doing.