A complete beginner's guide to training in medieval Italian longsword. This book covers everything from choosing a sword, to warming up, to fencing. Full of set drills and clear descriptions, this book has been the standard work on the subject since it first came out in 2004.

It takes only seven seconds for a criminal to pick you as a target. This empowering guide for women to protect themselves and their loved ones, from a self-defense expert and longtime veteran of law enforcement, combines commonsense advice on staying safe with concrete actions on what to do if find yourself in a dangerous situation. Acts of terror. Kidnapping. Cyberstalking. Campus assaults. Getting drugged at a party by a "friend." One out of four women will be a victim of a crime or assault in her lifetime. Don't let this be you. In The New Superpower for Women, Steve Kardian, a thirty-year veteran of law enforcement, FBI defense tactics instructor, and an expert on the criminal mind, demonstrates how to become a "hard target" and not a "soft target" by simply trusting your gut. Additionally, he shows how the habits of safety can become an integral part of your daily routine. This guide is your essential resource to understanding how to stay safe in today's world, whether you're experiencing unwelcome attention, feel threatened in a large crowd, or are facing online harassment. Kardian shares proven safety tips, shows how to be proactive in identifying potential trouble, and illustrates defense techniques specially created to enhance the physical strengths of a woman. Real-life stories and examples are included to demonstrate what criminals look for in a victim. You will learn how to avoid being targeted and what to do in a confrontation. Be prepared. Know the habits of safety to protect yourself and your loved ones.

On June 10, 1948, the eyes of the sporting world were focused on a minor league ballpark in Newark, New Jersey-the unlikely venue of a much-anticipated rubber match between the two men at the top of boxing's prestigious middleweight division, Tony Zale and Rocky Graziano. They had met in the ring twice before, each winning one bout. In their third fight, Zale, a clever and powerful puncher, hoped to regain his title from Graziano, a knock-out artist six years his junior. This book tells the story of the greatest middleweight trilogy of boxing's Golden Age, a championship battle Newark hoped would catalyze brighter days for a city rife with political corruption and organized crime and grappling with the beginning of deindustrialization.

Loren W. Christensen shows you over 300 ways you can add variety to your daily martial arts training routine. Whether you're a student looking for fun new solo drills to spice up your home training or an instructor in search of new ways to pump up your classes, this book has what you need. It is an incredible collection of drills, techniques, and exercises that will take your workouts to the next level. *Organize your solo workouts to get maximum results from even the shortest training sessions.*Improve your speed and power with dozens of inside tips and tricks.*Beat boredom and get excited about your solo training sessions.*Become a well-rounded fighter by adding essential skills your instructor may not be teaching you.*Safely experiment with new techniques to find your ideal personal style of training.*Get an edge on your opponents with training methods that will elevate your skills in the ring and on the street. Not only will you learn enough new training strategies and methods to keep you busy for years, but Loren W. Christensen's no-nonsense writing style will get you up and moving, even on the days you'd rather skip your solo workout. This book is packed with insight, technique, and motivation. It will become your favorite training partner.

Whether you are a law enforcement officer seeking to improve your edge or a martial artist wanting to expand your knowledge of street-proven techniques, you will find Defensive Tactics: Street-Proven Arrest and Control Techniques is filled with invaluable information to prepare you for even the most difficult scenarios. Highlights include * Joint manipulation that works* Leverage control vs. pain control*Striking with the hands, feet, forearms, and elbows* Safely and quickly crossing the gap*Blocking an assailant's strikes*Using vulnerable points to gain compliance*Head disorientation* Safe application of carotid constriction or "sleeper" holds*Controlling a suspect on the ground*Arresting big guys*Fighting concepts to take on patrol*Weapon retention in close quarters and on the ground Loren W. Christensen is a retired cop and high-ranking martial artist who survived everything the mean streets threw at him, working patrol, gang enforcement, and dignitary protection. Defensive Tactics goes beyond what is taught in the academy, during an officer's in-service training, and what is allowed by the administration. This book also includes a chapter on proven ways to control a suspect on the ground, written by LAPD officer Mark Mireles, an MMA coach, police academy trainer, and champion wrestler.

Fighting Sports, Gender and the Commodification of Violence: Heavy Bag Heroines offers a glimpse into the cultural terrain of women's boxing as it manifests in everyday gyms for novice boxers. Taking an ethnographic approach, Victoria Collins examines broad understandings of gender, violence, self-defense, commodification, and health and fitness from the point of view of women who engage in the sport. Collins unpacks dominant assumptions about gender and the sport through the eyes of the women's understandings of gender norms, social assumptions about physicality, sexuality, as well as challenges to masculine and feminine performativity. Central to this study is the appropriation and marketing of the boxers' work out in cardio-boxing gym spaces (i.e. fitness boxing), where the sport has increasingly been packaged, commodified, and sold to predominantly middle class, white female consumers as a means to not only improve their health and fitness, but also as a means to defend themselves against a would-be attacker. The body project for women in the sport of boxing, therefore, should not only be framed as a form of resistance, but one of physical feminism.

Finalist - 2014 IndieFab Book Awards The Internal Foundation of Tai Chi Chuan Tai chi chuan is an internal martial art that uses soft/round movements to redirect an opponent's incoming force. Qigong exercises are an internal method of increasing and circulating your body's energy (qi). This book teaches tai chi qigong exercises that are useful for improving your tai chi skills and overall health. If you already know a tai chi form, here are a few ways you will use tai chi qigong to reach new levels of skill and ability: *To feel qi*To regulate body, breathing, and intention*To learn how to use intention to lead qi*To learn how to circulate qi*To learn how to expand qi*To learn how to use qi to energize muscles*To accelerate the health benefits of tai chi If you don't know tai chi, but want to benefit from qigong exercises, here are a few ways tai chi qigong can help you: *The exercises are short and easy to learn*They help reduce stress*They loosen muscles and joints*They stimulate qi flow*They can help develop a strong immune system*They sharpen concentration*They build a deeper awareness of breath and body coordination

Risk, Failure, Play illuminates the many ways in which competitive martial arts differentiate themselves from violence. Presented from the perspective of a dancer and writer, this book takes readers through the politics of everyday life as experienced through training in a range of martial arts practices such as jeet kune do, Brazilian jiu jitsu, kickboxing, Filipino martial arts, and empowerment self-defense. Author Janet OaShea shows how play gives us the ability to manage difficult realities with intelligence and demonstrates that physical play, with its immediacy and heightened risk, is particularly effective at accomplishing this task. Risk, Failure, Play also demonstrates the many ways in which physical recreation allows us to manage the complexities of our current social reality. Risk, Failure, Play intertwines personal experience with phenomenology, social psychology, dance studies, performance studies, as well as theories of play and competition in order to produce insights on pleasure, mastery, vulnerability, pain, agency, individual identity, and society. Ultimately, this book suggests that play allows us to rehearse other ways to live than the ones we see before us and challenges us to reimagine our social reality.

The surprising roots of the self-defense movement and the history of women's empowerment. At the turn of the twentieth century, women famously organized to demand greater social and political freedoms like gaining the right to vote. However, few realize that the Progressive Era also witnessed the birth of the women's self-defense movement. It is nearly impossible in today's day and age to imagine a world without the concept of women's self defense. Some women were inspired to take up boxing and jiu-jitsu for very personal reasons that ranged from protecting themselves from attacks by strangers on the street to rejecting gendered notions about feminine weakness and empowering themselves as their own protectors. Women's training in self defense was both a reflection of and a response to the broader cultural issues of the time, including the women's rights movement and the campaign for the vote. Perhaps more importantly, the discussion surrounding women's self-defense revealed powerful myths about the source of violence against women and opened up conversations about the less visible violence that many women faced in their own homes. Through self-defense training, women debunked patriarchal myths about inherent feminine weakness, creating a new image of women as powerful and self-reliant. Whether or not women consciously pursued self-defense for these reasons, their actions embodied feminist politics. Although their individual motivations may have varied, their collective action echoed through the twentieth century, demanding emancipation from the constrictions that prevented women from exercising their full rights as citizens and human beings. This book is a fascinating and comprehensive introduction to one of the most important women's issues of all time. This book will provoke good debate and offer distinct responses and solutions.

This book focuses on the philosophy of Chinese martial arts film, arguing that philosophy provides a key to understanding the whole genre. It draws on Chinese philosophical ideas derived from, or based on, Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and other schools of thought such as Mohism and Legalism, examines a cluster of recent Chinese martial arts films centering on the figure of the xia-the heroic protagonist, the Chinese equivalent of medieval Europe's knight-errant-and outlines the philosophical principles and themes undergirding the actions of xia and their narratives. Overall, the author argues that the genre, apart from being an action-oriented entertainment medium, is inherently moral and ethical.

You have trained in aikido for at least several months and wonder what's beyond the mechanics of basic technique. You ponder why we do what we do, and what principles underlie the techniques. You are looking for an edge to accelerate your learning and deepen your understanding. This book's 'Especially for Students' section is for you.The 'Especially for Teachers' section offers tips for aikido instructors. It helps you articulate to your students some of aikido's more difficult ideas.The third section's longer chapters treat philosophical and strategic questions that are central to aikido practice.Learning and Teaching Aikido shows beginning-to-intermediate aikido students how to approach their practice, explaining why we do what we do in aikido. This literate presentation for the thoughtful practitioner also advises aikido teachers on how to present difficult concepts to their classes. Drawings and photos make the explanations clear. Learning and Teaching Aikido is a needed supplement to the many books that explain aikido history and how to execute aikido techniques.

In Hero Living Rudy Reyes, the latest recruit in Channel 4's smash-hit SAS Who Dares Wins introduces his philosophy to life - part Homer, part Bruce Lee and part Spider-Man. He outlines various stages towards revealing your inner hero: recognising the hero's call, following the hero's path and returning from life's battlefield with the hero's hard-earned wisdom. Taking readers step-by-step through his tried and tested program, Rudy draws from his own heroic story of how he triumphed over harrowing childhood experiences of poverty and abandonment. Rather than giving up hope, he heeded the hero's call to live up to his full potential - first as a martial-arts champion, then as an elite warrior in the mountains of Afghanistan and on the sands of Iraq and finally in his post-Marines life as a personal trainer, actor, motivational speaker and now TV star.

On the night of 29 April 2017, at Wembley Stadium, Anthony Joshua knocked down and defeated the Ukraine's former world heavyweight champion, Vladimir Klitschko. In doing so, he added the WBA and IBO heavyweight titles to the IBF belt he already held. That bald statement of fact does little justice to what proved to be one of the finest heavyweight contests of all time, in which a brilliant but relatively inexperienced fighter took on, and eventually defeated, one of the finest boxers of his or any other age. It was a twelve-round fight before a record post-War crowd, and for eleven of those rounds it could have gone either way; indeed, in Round 6 it looked as though Joshua was finished when a massive right hand from Klitschko sent him to the canvas.

Lenny McLean - an infamous name, but forever a legend. He is arguably one of the most notorious and feared prize-fighters England has ever produced. Not only was he a mountain of a man and a true fighter, feared on the streets of gangland London and outside the clubs whose doors he manned in the heart of the capital, he was also an old-school East Ender, who took pride in operating on a gentleman's code despite the often-dangerous world he lived in. His life was cut all-too-short, just as it was taking a new, previously unimaginable direction after his role in Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels but he remains loved by those who knew him. The Guv'nor Revealed uncovers parts of Lenny McLean's life not previously explored, with shared memories from his close friends, family and various other acquaintances who crossed his path one way or another during his lifetime. Lenny McLean was one of a kind; infamous for his brute strength but also loved for his protective heart. Collated from years of interviews, Lee Wortley and Anthony Thomas bring you an array of thrilling, and often touching and amusing, testimonies from those closest to him and a new insight into the life of The Guv'nor.

For much of the twentieth century, boxing was one of America's most popular sports, and the heavyweight champions were figures known to all. Their exploits were reported regularly in the newspapers-often outside the sports pages-and their fame and wealth dwarfed those of other athletes. Long after their heyday, these icons continue to be synonymous with the "sweet science." In The Boxing Kings: When American Heavyweights Ruled the Ring, Paul Beston profiles these larger-than-life men who held a central place in American culture. Among the figures covered are John L. Sullivan, who made the heavyweight championship a commercial property; Jack Johnson, who became the first black man to claim the title; Jack Dempsey, a sporting symbol of the Roaring Twenties; Joe Louis, whose contributions to racial tolerance and social progress transcended even his greatness in the ring; Rocky Marciano, who became an embodiment of the American Dream; Muhammad Ali, who took on the U.S. government and revolutionized professional sports with his showmanship; and Mike Tyson, a hard-punching dynamo who typified the modern celebrity. This gallery of flawed but sympathetic men also includes comics, dandies, bookworms, divas, ex-cons, workingmen, and even a tough-guy-turned-preacher. As the heavyweight title passed from one claimant to another, their stories opened a window into the larger history of the United States. Boxing fans, sports historians, and those interested in U.S. race relations as it intersects with sports will find this book a fascinating exploration into how engrained boxing once was in America's social and cultural fabric.

Performance and Professional Wrestling is the first edited volume to consider professional wrestling explicitly from the vantage point of theatre and performance studies. Moving beyond simply noting its performative qualities or reading it via other performance genres, this collection of essays offers a complete critical reassessment of the popular sport. Topics such as the suspension of disbelief, simulation, silence and speech, physical culture, and the performance of pain within the squared circle are explored in relation to professional wrestling, with work by both scholars and practitioners grouped into seven short sections: Audience Circulation Lucha Gender Queerness Bodies Race A significant re-reading of wrestling as a performing art, Performance and Professional Wrestling makes essential reading for scholars and students intrigued by this uniquely theatrical sport.

What do martial arts signify today? What do they mean for East-West cross cultural exchanges? How does the representation of martial arts in popular culture impact on the wide world? What is authentic practice? What does it all mean? From Kung Fu to Jiujitsu and from Bruce Lee to The Karate Kid, Mythologies of Martial Arts explores the key myths and ideologies in martial arts in contemporary popular culture. The book combines the author's practical, professional and academic experience of martial arts to offer new insights into this complex, contradictory world. Inspired by the work of Roland Barthes in Mythologies, the book focusses on the signs, signifiers and practices of martial arts globally. Bringing together cultural studies, film studies, media studies, postcolonial studies with the emerging field of martial arts studies the book explores the broader significance of martial arts in global culture. Using an accessible yet theoretically sophisticated style the book is ideal for students, scholars and anyone interested in any type of martial art.

In 1988, then struggling writer Davis Miller drove to Muhammad Ali's mother's modest Louisville house, knocked on the door and introduced himself to his childhood idol. Nearly thirty years later, the two friends have an uncommon bond, the sort that can be fashioned only in serendipitous ways and fortified through shared experiences. Miller now draws from those remarkable moments to give us a beautifully written portrait of a great man physically devastated but spiritually young-playing tricks on unsuspecting guests, performing sleight of hand for any willing audience and walking ten miles each way to get an ice cream. Following in the tradition of writers such as Gay Talese and Nick Hornby, Miller gives us a series of extraordinary stories that coalesce to become a moving introduction to the human side of a boxing legend.

What do martial arts signify today? What do they mean for East-West cross cultural exchanges? How does the representation of martial arts in popular culture impact on the wide world? What is authentic practice? What does it all mean? From Kung Fu to Jiujitsu and from Bruce Lee to The Karate Kid, Mythologies of Martial Arts explores the key myths and ideologies in martial arts in contemporary popular culture. The book combines the author's practical, professional and academic experience of martial arts to offer new insights into this complex, contradictory world. Inspired by the work of Roland Barthes in Mythologies, the book focusses on the signs, signifiers and practices of martial arts globally. Bringing together cultural studies, film studies, media studies, postcolonial studies with the emerging field of martial arts studies the book explores the broader significance of martial arts in global culture. Using an accessible yet theoretically sophisticated style the book is ideal for students, scholars and anyone interested in any type of martial art.

Bringing the Dao to life for readers of all generations Fables entertain us, enlighten us, and guide us. We recognize ourselves in the characters, be they emperors, village children, or singing frogs. They help us see our own weaknesses, our strengths, and the many possibilities. Their lessons transcend time and culture, touching what it really means to be alive. Whoever we are, wherever we're going, these short tales help us along the path-the Way. Some offer a moral compass. Some illustrate the dangers in human folly. Others just make us laugh. In this collection of fables, Dr. Yang, Jwing-Ming shares the stories that have influenced him most as a teacher, a partent, martial artist and lifelong student of the Dao. These fables bring the Dao to life for readers of all generations. The Dao in Action will inspire young readers to refine their character. Older readers will smile and recognize moments of truth. This collection is for anyone who would like to explore the enduring lessons of virtue and wisdom. These lean, concise fables illustrate balance, the duality of yin and yang, always shifting, always in correction. They help us laugh at our human predicaments-and maybe even at ourselves. We can all use some reflection and inspiration from time to time.

"The best book on taekwon-do since the encyclopaedia" This groundbreaking first book studies the history and development of the Ch'ang Hon (ITF) Taekwon-do patterns as devised, taught and developed by the founder of Taekwon-do; General Choi, Hong Hi. Ch'ang Hon Taekwon-do Hae Sul is an in-depth study of the Ch'ang Hon Taekwon-do patterns; their history and their roots; Taekwon-do's evolution; its genetic make-up; its differences with other martial arts; and the techniques and movements that define the system. For the first time since its inception, this book details realistic interpretations for the ITF patterns including Chon-Ji, Dan-Gun, Do-San, Won-Hyo, Yul-Gok, Joong-Gun, Toi-Gye, as well as Saju Jirugi and Sagu Makgi. Over 17 chapters covering 360] pages, with over 1,600 detailed photographs, the patterns are examined, dissected and rebuilt to help both students and instructors understand the applications that are really contained within the Ch'ang Hon patterns - many of which were previously unknown and undocumented. In step-by-step photographic detail, learn what the techniques and combinations of the Ch'ang Hon patterns actually represent and how to turn your patterns into a realistic way of training actual self defence techniques that work, and turn them into something much more than they are practiced today. Along the way, the reader is treated to a fascinating insight into the history of the Ch'ang Hon patterns as well as Taekwon-do itself, with many of its previously unknown, undocumented or understudied principles revealed. Read what helped to shape the art which became so feared on the battlefield of Vietnam that enemy soldiers were told not to engage the Korean soldiers, whether armed or not, due to their knowledge of Taekwon-do. A historical study of Taekwon-do and its patterns - as well as a training manual and an encyclopaedia of realistic applications - make this book a must-read for all those that study and practice Taekwon-do. A milestone for the development of Taekwon-do.

Women and sport (exclusion, engagement, equity, etc) is an absolutely central topic in sport studies, and a massively important issue in wider sport and society. Judo is an Olympic sport but there are currently no academic books in English about women in judo. Drawing on the expertise of a range of well-respected authors this will be the first academic treatise on the topic in the English language.

Unleashing Manhood in the Cage: Masculinity and Mixed Martial Arts addresses the question "Why do mixed martial arts participants endure grueling workouts and suffer through injury, with little or no pay, just to compete?" The answer is because the participants enjoy a form of idolization from their supporters, each other, and culture more generally, which is linked to masculinity. In fact, MMA organizers, from the very beginning, purposefully created elements of the sport that are linked to dominant narratives about manhood. In this context, men don thin open-fingered gloves, lock themselves in a caged enclosure, and slug it out in a fight with few rules to see who comes out on top. This all occurs while "ring girls" in high-heels and skin-tight shirts and shorts stride around outside the cage holding signs and peddling t-shirts. The sum of these elements is the creation of a type of a publicly accessible and consumable form of masculinity. The sport of mixed martial arts is a rich and intriguing space where the construction of gender can be explored through a sociological and ethnographic lens.