The Geometry of Fighting in the Martial Arts!

T-Day is over!
Long live HanaKwanMass!
You’ve been warned! ;0)

Many people think the martial arts are all about fighting.
they are about a lot more than that,
but let’s just consider the fighting aspect.

I was okay as a fighter.
Some people thought I was good,
some people could kick my ass.
It happens.
But I didn’t care about fighting
I wanted to understand.
that was my goal.
I consider martial arts as a way to understand life.

As time went by I became better at fighting.
I was aging,
I didn’t have the strength,
but I found that with intense practice
i could see what people were going to do before they did it.

Then I wrote the Flow Chart.
Take a glance at it below
and then I’ll tell you what it means.

What this weird thing is is an analysis of motion in the martial arts.
The squares are the footwork.
I probably could have used a key,
or better terminology.
But if you think about it
it gets understandable.
You’re standing about where the ‘wing chun’ label is
and you either step out,
or you cross step,
with the right or the left foot.

The oval refers to hand techniques.

I had a lot of fun making this,
trying to make sense out of where i would be
what direction I would be traveling,
which foot or which hand,
and so on.

I was influenced in the creation of this by Eddie Rickenbacker.
He was a WW1 flying ace,
and he would imagine himself in the center of a bubble,
and try to imagine all the directions he could be attacked from
and what he would do for each attack.

My Flow Chart is more concerned
with facing a person,
and imagining incoming directions, motions, hands, feet,
and so on and so on,
and what to do about each possibility.

The take away from this,
was I was able to understand each art
as it relates to each art.

Taekwondo at the kicking distance
Karate at the punching distance
Aikido moving in the direction of a circular punch
Pa Kua Chang against the direction of a circular punch.
What I have said here
is VERY simplistic.
Every art has solutions for every incoming attack.
But by isolating the concepts of an art
I was able to use all arts together.

So I began using these concepts in teaching.
I would freestyle with a student
and restrict myself only to the footwork of a specific art.

Some of my conclusions were:
No trouble with Karate because I had trained
that specific art and was familiar with specific solutions.

We had kicks in karate so I was able to understand
and isolate taekwondo.

I was not able to use Aikido purely,
but it became the most powerful of my tools
when I was able to isolate Karate and Wing Chun
and then put them together
(understand at what distances they could be used
and developed Lop Sau (circling fists)

I was never able to use Pa Kua Chang.
At all.
When I limited myself to X stepping
every student I had,
from the lowest white belt
could kick my ass.

Interestingly,
I would see people use it who had studied only Pa Kua
and it was very effective.
My training methods,
being eclectic,
hurt me in this one instance.

So here’s some ways you can use the Flow Chart
help yourself isolate concepts from other arts.
help yourself understand how concepts
from various arts have become mushed together
and how that interferes with your understanding.
figure out to be more specific in your training and drills.
Do these simple things
and you will find a lot of gold in the Flow Chart.

Okey dokey.
I was looking at Amazon,
and I have some highly rated books.
Look for my author’s page if you want all my books,
but here’s a short list of my highest rated books.

The Last Martial Arts Book has 11 ratings for 5 stars.
My two yoga books have 9 ratings between them for 5 stars.
The Book of Five Arts has 7 ratings for 5 stars.
The Science of Government has 6 ratings for 5 stars.
Chiang Nan has 5 ratings for 5 stars.

And a whole bunch of books have 1 or 2 ratings for 5 stars.
Search for the Al Case author’s page
if you want to examine those,
or the lesser starred efforts.

And,
that’s about it.
HanaKwanMass is coming,
so think about what art you want to gift yourself,
or some one else.

Have a great work out!

Al

And don’t forget to check out the interview
https://anchor.fm/dale-gillilan/episodes/S1E10—Al-Case-e12e3np

BTW
I’ve got nothing but five star reviews on

The Science of Government.
It’s really nothing more than applying matrixing to politics.

Matrixing + Politics = Sanity

I told you matrixing works with anything.

Here’s the link…

How to Fix Karate! (volumes one and two)

volume one is at

And volume two is at…