Almost all cultures have roots in some sort of self defence system and yet there is relatively little research in this area, outside of a sports related environment. This project investigated different applications of strikes from Kung Fu practitioners that have not been addressed before in the literature. Punch and palm strikes were directly compared from different heights and distances, with ...

The purpose of this phenomenological research was to discover whether training in the Korean martial art of Taekwondo may benefit undergraduate (UG) students in handling stress. The goal of this innovative approach to learning and stress management was to allow UG students from across disciplines at a metropolitan university achieve an increased sense of emotional balance, inner peace, and over...

OBJECTIVE Concussion, defined as an impulse blow to the head or body resulting in transient neurologic signs or symptoms, has received increasing attention in sports at all levels. The King-Devick (K-D) test is based on the time to perform rapid number naming and captures eye movements and other correlates of suboptimal brain function. In a study of boxers and mixed martial arts (MMA) fighters,...

On November 24, 2015, the city of Chicago released dashboard camera video footage of the shooting of a seventeen-year-old Black male teenager named Laquan McDonald by Jason Van Dyke, a police officer with the Chicago Police Department. The video shows McDonald strolling down the street, holding a knife in his right hand by his side. McDonald does not appear to be threatening anyone. In fact, th...

BACKGROUND One of the goals for training in combat sports is to mimic real situations. For mixed martial arts (MMA), simulated sparring matches are a frequent component during training, but a there is a lack of knowledge considering the differences in sparring and competitive environments. OBJECTIVES The main objective of this study was to compare biochemical responses to sparring and officia...

OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between alcohol and tobacco use and sports in a national sample of secondary students. METHODS This cross-sectional study enrolled a representative sample of secondary students from public and private schools from all 27 Brazilian state capitals. Students were assessed in 2010 by a self-report questionnaire including questions on drug use and sport activi...

25 In antagonistic encounters the primary decision to be made is to fight or not and so it 26 is predicted that animals may possess adaptations to assess fighting ability in their 27 opponents. Previous studies suggest humans can assess strength and fighting ability 28 based on facial appearance. Here we extend these findings to specific contests by 29 examining the perception of male faces fro...

PURPOSE The session rating of perceived exertion (RPE) is a practical and noninvasive method that allows a quantification of the internal training load (TL) in individual and team sports, but no study has investigated its construct validity in martial arts. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the convergent validity between the session-RPE method and two objective HR-based metho...

“Tameshi-giri” (or “suemono-giri”), in which corpses were used as mediums to test the quality of swords or the skill of swordsmen, was an unusual cultural practice of the samurai (i.e., warrior) class in feudal era Japan. Although tameshi-giri as a modern martial art jargon referring to “a method of training in the use of a sword by cutting conventional mediums” has already been imported to the...

This is a descriptive, cross-sectional study describing the physiological responses during competitive matches and profile of elite exponents of an emerging martial art sport, pencak silat. Thirty exponents (21 males and 9 females) were involved in the study. Match responses (i.e. heart rate (HR) throughout match and capillary blood lactate concentration, [La], at pre-match and at the end of ev...