Most martial artists have seen the so-called “Wing Chun dummy,” which is actually called a muk yan jong in Cantonese, or mu ren zhuang in Mandarin, meaning “wooden man post.” This training tool was widely popularized by Bruce Lee and, more recently, the Ip Man series of movies, starting Donnie Yen. While these dummies were developed for Chinese martial arts, […]
Uke-waza (receiving techniques), as has been discussed before, are much more than just blocks, but they often incorporate defensive methods in their movements. While karate has a wide array of methods for defense, the most universal is probably the “parry-pass” style of blocking. Essentially, this is a method of blocking where one hand parries the attack to the side, and passes […]
Traditional martial arts are often criticized–and rightly so, in many cases–for training against unrealistic attacks. Most often, the attack that gets the most complaints is the infamous straight lunge-punch in a long front stance that comes from 10 feet away, and wouldn’t hit the defender even if they stood still. A close second to that is the wrist grab, […]
When you are attacked, you don’t really want to deal with an attacker that is throwing a barrage of punches at you–you want to stop their attack as quickly as possible. Limb control is one way of accomplishing this, and is a very important aspect of old Okinawan karate but, like many important aspects of old Okinawan karate, it has […]
