Carnival of Martial Arts

Carnival of Martial Arts #4

Exciting news: the Carnival of Martial Arts #4 has been posted over at Nathan’s TDA Training. This is the first guest-hosting we’ve had and I hope it is a sign of things to come.

Just as exciting, the next edition (#5) will be hosted by Pat Parker over at Mokuren Dojo. Pat has chosen a theme for edition 5, which is “Warriors for peace and justice” to coincide with MLK day. So be sure to submit a post by January 19, 2008.

Go ahead and check them all out, but I wanted to single out a few of the submissions and add a couple comments:

Eric Frey wrote Why Head Kicks Are A Really Bad Idea For 90% Of Fighters and Do Martial Arts Really Work?. It took me a bit to figure out where he was coming from on the first one. I mean, I appreciate the general principle, but I think I come at it from a different approach. His reasoning is more that most martial artists can’t capably kick hard that high, which I don’t know that I agree with. I had to look around on his site to figure out that he is a kenpo karate guy. My approach is more from the Muay Thai side, so I suspect that we may be picturing different things when discussing high kicks. My problem is more with the environment and opportunity than that I think it couldn’t happen or couldn’t be effective.

The second post was (generally) not applicable to the places I’ve trained, so I think I’ll chalk it up to different training experiences. I did happen to catch his Stand up Martial Arts vs. Grappling Arts post, which I almost completely disagreed with, but I’ll save that for a post of my own. Sometimes reading stuff you disagree with is more fun than the usual preaching to the choir, though, so give his site a look.

Bob Patterson posted some thoughts about Women in the Martial Arts. I see where Bob’s coming from and agree with much he says with exception to his last point. At the same weight, I’d put someone like Lucia Rijkers up against any untrained man, and against almost all trained men including most professional male fighters in boxing and kickboxing.

One Punch KO at Ultimate MMA Videos posted his New Top 5 Pound for Pound Rankings. I generally find these sort of things ho-hum. I’m glad I checked this out, though, because I liked some of the discussion, especially for Fedor Emelianenko. That led me to checking out the Fedor-Crocop documentary and the 2005 fight between them, and some Urijah Faber fights just because he’s been tearing it up lately. For the last year or so I haven’t had cable, so I have not been following professional MMA much lately. And I never watched many Pride fights just because they were never as accessible as the UFC. I’m definitely bookmarking this site and getting caught up.