Toptomcat

The majority of empirical evidence indicates that the 'know lots of techniques' model of martial arts is typically far less successful in practice than the 'know a small, optimally chosen handful of techniques very, very well' model.

Eat a big, healthy meal sufficiently before the tournament that it's more or less fully digested when you get there. Eat a snack or two if you have to, but never eat a meal right before you get in there! If you're still feeling full by the time you step in to spar, your meal was way too late. The best thing to keep from fading isn't something that you do the day of, but the months before: run, miles, every other day minimum.

It honestly hadn't occured to me.

Okay, first of all: 'kama.' That's the accepted Romanization. Second, I'd like to address your examples point-by-point. If training with a sai translates to proficiency with sticks, then why not simply train with sticks? There are a lot of excellent stickfighting arts out there. And the degree to which your sai techniques intelligently exploit the unique features of the sai- its prongs, which enable it to be held in different grips than a stick and to parry other weapons in a unique fashion- is the degree to which they will be unsuitable for use with a typical stick. Much of proper nunchaku use depends on the balanced nature of the weapon, the fact that you can easily wield it from either end. Use a half-brick in a sock the way you will a nunchaku once you've gotten good with it, and you'll be hitting people with the sock end half the time. It doesn't translate well to an improvised flail with only one weighted end. As for the kama- if you're using an edged weapon even remotely like a hammer, something is wrong. The defining strength of an edged weapon- the *reason* you put an edge on one- is that a blade behaves much differently than a blunt weapon, requiring far less impact to cause significant injury. Knives are popular and deadly weapons because you can essentially slap-fight someone to death with a sufficiently sharp one. While the kama may be weighted like a hammer, in use it shouldn't even resemble one, and vice versa. I won't say anything about the tonfa except that your examples seem rather strained for examples of 'typical' items that you're likely to have on or near you in a self-defense situation, unless you're a mechanic or are very good at quickly and precisely breaking chair legs off. And agreed- staff techniques are widely adaptable. The question isn't whether proficiency in any weapon is better than nothing- it's whether attaining proficiency in those particular weapons is better than spending the same amount of time and effort studying weapons that will more closely resemble what you're likely to have on hand or close by in a typical self-defense encounter, such as Tallgeese's aforementioned club, knife, and gun. The list shouldn't 'go on and on'- it should be as short and as widely applicable as possible.

Wow. Gives me a kick to see you that pumped up. It warms the heart, it really does.

The judo community seems to be genuinely split on the rule, and it's a weird split. There aren't many people in the middle ground- there are people who absolutely cannot understand why the IJF would make a technique that's in Kano's kata and isn't a safety issue a first-offense hansoku-make, and people who can't comprehend what the fuss is about and think the first group are carrying on about nothing. Some low-level tournaments have refused to implement the new rules.

I find that you and I agree on a lot of things. You've got a good head on your shoulders.

Yes, absolutely. A somewhat more aggressive style of play is preferred than in Japan, and tameshigiri and flashy aikido-like multi-man demos are given greater emphasis than in traditional kendo, but the core art is fundamentally kendo. Some will try to tell you differently, insisting that it's derived from native Korean sword arts, but it's all revisionist history put together because of Korea's longstanding historical beef with the Japanese.

Also note that if you ask some really hard-line Koreans about all this, they'll deny it to Hell and back, spouting all sorts of obvious nonsense about the Hwarang and how TKD is really derived from their native kicking art Taekkyeon. Don't believe a word of it, it's all revisionist history made because they've got historical beef with the Japanese.

A staff is one thing, but what common everyday objects resemble a tonfa, sai, or kama sufficiently to make training with them, specifically, useful?

It's likely that you'll never see it again in mainstream MMA promotions, no- but if you want to see fighting under an MMA-like ruleset with gis worn, look for some variants of full-contact sport jujutsu. The level of competition isn't very high, but it is there if that's what you're looking for.

I know nothing specifically, but I do know that Hawaii was a hotbed of MA development from the late forties to...I don't know, the sixties? Seventies? A lot of the earlier American systems calling themselves various sorts of kenpo and karate date from that period. That's likely the source. There are native Hawaiian martial arts, called Lua, that also use staffs of the same dimensions as the Japanese bo- but they're quite obscure and it's considerably less likely for you to have run across a little piece of Lua than for you to have seen something from that 40s-60s wave of American MA development in Hawaii.

By 'bottom of the toes' you mean the ball of the foot, right? Actually connecting with the toes proper, while not entirely unheard of in the old, old Okinawan stuff, is not something I would wish om anyone.

Edit- realized my post wasn't exceptionally constructive. Short version: it can be good kendo or bad kendo, and don't believe anything they say about their historical roots.

Thinking of the Goju people I've trained with, and looking at the limited video I can find on short notice of Goju roundhouses, I can't think of anything that makes the Goju roundhouse more 'specific' or four-step than a roundhouse of another style. (In my experience, if anything, Goju puts rather more hip into the kick than is typical.) This is probably a school difference rather than a style difference. Could you further describe what makes your school's roundhouse technically distinct, so we can help you with it?

Make sure that your reasons for studying martial arts fit the school you’re studying at. There’s a lot of variation in martial arts schools: some are best at teaching fighting skills, some at providing hobbyists with a fitness activity, some are best at teaching the mental and spiritual aspects of the art, some are best at making their students’ techniques look artistically sharp, crisp and appealing. If your school isn’t giving you what you want from martial arts, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and give it up for swimming or badminton: try another few schools in the area instead. (Unfortunately what a school is good at isn’t necessarily what they say they’re good at- in particular, the spiritual, artistic, and fitness crowd will all say they’re good at fighting. )

There's this huge two hundred page thread that's all Q&A about training in Thailand over at Sherdog. There's a lot of inanities about the night life, but a lot of useful information: it's well worth going through in its entirety if you're going over there.

A style's sparring tradition can dramatically inform the fighting method of its practitioners. Look at the differences between knockdown karate and point karate, or Brazilian jujusu and judo- to a very large extent, the totality of their syllabus of techniques is identical, but because their sparring rules emphasize different qualities their students are good at different things. Which is why the lack of uniformity in sparring rules in Chinese martial arts interests me considerably: there's all sorts of push hands, there's forms-only people, there's various forms of lei tai fighting, there's san da... What's your art, and how do you spar/compete, if at all? Tell me everything- give detailed rulesets, tell me what kind of equipment you use, tell me why your style/school has chosen to spar that way.

That depends entirely on whether you find Tai chi chih or just plain "Tai Chi", which is fundamentally meditative low-impact exercise for oldsters, or a more traditional, more martial form of Tai chi chuan, which has the same quality control problems as many other traditional Chinese martial arts, but is quite worthwhile as a MA if you can find a good kwoon. Which is one of those once-in-a-blue-moon things unless you live in an area with a large Chinese population.

The University of Michigan has a Shotokan club. If you ask, they might let you practice with them: if not, they could probably direct you to other Shotokan schools in the area. http://www.umich.edu/~shotokan/shotokan.html

That depends largely on what you view the purpose of Shotokan to be. If you view it primarily as a method of exercise, or an art in the aesthetic sense, or as a spiritual pursuit, then perhaps you are correct. If you view it as a practical method of self-defense, then you will be well served by beginning training in a grappling discipline. As you said, you get good at what you practice, and no one martial art actually practices combat or self-defense per se. None of them contain an activity exactly analogous to fighting. Each of them instead contains various methods, skills, drills, exercises, and sets of sparring rules, all of which are designed to make you better at self-defense, but none of which contain the entire set of skills useful in self-defense. If a certain aspect of combat- such as grappling- is left untouched by the syllabus of one martial art, it is certain that study of another which does cover it will increase the student's ability to deal with the totality of self-defense or combat. The present interest in grappling is no mere fad, but an improvement in the state of the art. While there are some techniques that make it more difficult to take down a knowledgeable and resistant opponent, using them as an excuse to ignore the full range of combat addressed by many venerable martial arts verges on the foolhardy. The completeness of your confidence in your ability to prevent anyone from taking you down shows that you have never tested that theory against a well-trained judoka, wrestler, or jujitsuka. In particular your description of a double-leg takedown as 'diving headfirst at the legs' shows that you have not made serious study of the mechanics of the technique. Find a grappler or mixed martial artist willing to help you test your skills in the area: whatever the outcome (though I suspect I know what it will be), it can only help improve your understanding of budo.

I believe that, like judo, kendo's rank system allows for a sudden jump of multiple ranks in the event that a significantly lower rank demonstrates the ability to consistently defeat higher-ranked kendoka in tournaments. That might be what happened.

Pick up a grappling style. It's become an unquestioned fact that a martial artist needs to be able to function in the grappling range in order to be practically competent. Brazilian jujutsu and judo are of high quality and likely to have a dojo in your area: sambo, shuai jiao and catch wrestling are worth a look but less likely to be reachable: and wrestling is sort of a special case, being quite good and trivially findable if you're in high school or college and very difficult to find if you aren't. Of the three arts you mentioned, I'd pick Kyokushinkai karate. Wing Chun is a large collection of wonderful, fascinating theory that I've never seen anyone unite into a coherent, functioning whole, and while good Krav Maga is very good, you're vastly more likely to find bad Krav Maga due to its quality control problems.

True, I forgot about that. I'm 5th kyu. My dojo uses blue belt for 5th and 4th and brown for 3rd, 2nd and 1st kyu. I've always been meaning to ask, which belt color system is the "real" one? I know that traditionally, there were only white and black and so on, but I get confused when some dojos have red, purple and whatnot. There isn't a 'real' progression of belts. When Jigoro Kano introduced them in the thirties, he just had white for kyu ranks and black for dan ranks, and later brown for higher kyu ranks. Colored belts for each individual kyu rank came from Europe in the 1950s, and there was never a time when they were fully standardized.

This is such a fine point that I suspect even a dyed-in-the-wool Japanese-born, Japanese-trained traditionalist would find very little to get upset about. I suspect the 'right' answer would be that only your seniority from 2006 onward would apply, but it's probably something best resolved by talking either to the other (purely hypothetical at this point) 1st kyu or your sensei.