When we think of a fight, most think about how to destroy the opponent. But in order to defeat someone that is intending us harm, we must be able to stop him from striking us. So we must block, deflect and/or move ,,, or some combination of all of these. (there are a few other option but we will cover them at a later date).
In order to practice blocking,, we must actually block. We stood in front of each other and tried with varying degrees of effort to hit each other. Nice and easy,,, at first. It is important to learn and understand how the body needs to move in conjunction with the arms and legs. Rotation is required to place the body in the correct position or to avoid the strike all together. One thing that will become apparant very quickly is that blocking hurts,,,, both the person throwing the strike and the person blocking the strike will feel pain. This repeated banging of bone on bone will hasten what we love to call "sharpening the bones". Once this sharpening begins to occur you will find that the damage done to the attacking arm or legs is typically enough to end an altercation without the need for a direct assault on your part. Which is a good thing,, unless they really deserved a little more attention. But in this day and age with video everywhere,, less is more.
Se we put up with the pain for a short while. And then we moved on to a repeated patterned attack defense. This is the blocking and slipping of combinations. A person very rarely will through a single blow in an attack,,, unless they are not very good at this stuff,,, so we train to recognize the body movement that leads to multiple attacks. And we practice the techniques of defeating these combinations. If we get hit,,,, the attacker then repeats the combination over and again until we learn to recognize and stop each type of attack.
After a short while the tenderized arms and legs needed a rest so we moved on to active combat. This, of course, is where we get to fight YHC in order to develop the timing needed to nuetalize an attacker in real time. We must learn to trust what we know and allow the mind and body to respond to attacks and predict movement. Repetition is once again our friend as we repeatedly expose ourselves to threateneing situations and attacks that require our attention..We train the mind to recognize the type of threat and the liabilities attached to each,,, and we train the body to respond to the threat and to attack the weaknesses that are produced by each attack. We often must unlearn negative habits and reprogram fantasy TV moves in order to increase our ability to survive an attack.
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