Toptomcat

First of all, remember that old karate chestnut about hitting through, and not at, your target. If you're thinking of just getting to the chest or head, you'll glance off with barely any damage done- imagine kicking at a spot six to nine inches behind your real target. Second, try throwing front kicks and allowing them to carry you forwards in stance rather than practicing them in place. If you throw a back leg front kick, then have to use the kicking leg as your new front leg, it just about forces you to have proper hip involvement. Third, try practicing your front kick with someone holding a pad in front of you. That will help you in this matter as well.

Good to see you around. By the way, different offshoots of Shotokan have different belt colors- you're, what, 4th kyu?

Describe your issue more clearly. What problem does your poor form create- lack of balance when throwing the kick, lack of power, slowness in bringing the kick out, slowness in returning to stance, a pushing kick rather than an impactful one? Also, you are talking about a front kick with the rear leg, right?

I found it very good, even if Fight Quest is slightly better.

A good big man beats a good little man.

It's worth noting that that many repetitions of a given technique isn't that much, really. Just a few one-and-a-half hour classes focusing on a single technique will get you around a thousand reps: if you're a martial artist working in any kind of competition at a high level, tens of thousands of repetitions of your small handful of favored techniques is less super-impressive and more par for the course.

If it really burns you up, know that there are people who care about this sort of thing and attempt to do something about it. They can be abrasive, but not unfair so long as you agree with their central contention that aliveness and contact are positive things.

Judo black belts? Actual judo black belts with from USJI, USJA, or USJF-accredited rank? In what context did he 'destroy' Judo black belts- while applying joint locks on them in a controlled manner for instructional purposes, or actual free randori? What I know of Small Circle Jujutsu isn't consistent with them contending with, let alone 'destroying', a legitimate judo black belt- with the possible exceptions of Wally Jay and possibly David Castoldi, who themselves have formidable judo credentials.

Do your classmates have similar problems when working on the same surface? If so, it may be a good idea to talk to your sensei about cleaning the area you have class in. I doubt he'll object if you volunteer to mop If not, then obviously the dirt on the floor is not the whole of the story. Examine others when they're sparring: what could be different? Is their footwork different? How? If you're wearing pads on your feet, do others wear them differently? Take a look at the sole of your foot and compare it with others'- there could be a physical difference of some sort, something about the shape of the arches or the skin.

Your problem is that your feet are too dry? On hardwood? Odd. I've never seen someone have traction difficulties for that reason, but I have seen a lot of people slip on their own sweat. Try doing some jumping jacks or laps around the dojo, something to make you break a sweat. See if that improves things.

That assumes that some of those techniques aren't redundant with others, and that all of them are of equal value. Successfully identify which of them are most effective and efficient while still covering all of the situations you're likely to come across in a confrontation, and you can take all the training time you would have spent on the other nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty kicks and spend it far more productively.

There's this massive snarl of organizations, schools, and styles that call themselves Shaolin Kempo or Shaolin Kempo Karate or Shaolin Kenpo or Kempo Karate or Shorinji Kempo or what have you. We probably won't be able to help you unless you supply some more information- the precise name of your school and style, and your teacher's lineage (his teacher, and his teacher's teacher, and so on) would be a good start.

The thing you have to realize when you're talking about Jeet Kune Do is that there are two major branches of it today. There's the 'Jun Fan Jeet Kune Do' branch, which mostly tries to practice Jeet Kune Do as taught and practiced by Bruce Lee at one point or another in his life, without much modification. They view Jeet Kune do as a codified martial art. Then there are the 'Jeet Kune Do Concepts' people, who pay more attention to Bruce's advice about integrating the useful parts from whatever martial arts they may come across than his specific notes on how to throw a hook kick. They view Jeet Kune Do as a set of principles that help in the training and development of martial arts, but not as a codified martial art in itself. I'm not sure about the names- one or both of them may be proprietary monikers for schools/orgs at one side or another of the split- but the split is real. Anyway, the answer to your question depends on which group you run into. The first group is unlikely to do much grappling beyond limited work at trapping range. The second is highly likely to incorporate much more extensive grappling training, with an extensive component of submission ground grappling- because the state of the art has moved to include such things since Bruce's day.

This is a question that is dependent on differences between individual schools, substyles, and organizations- it's not something that's universal in wing chun schools. Wing Chun has a little more of a sparring tradition than other Chinese martial arts- which is to say, still not very much of one at all, but it exists. Find a local place or two and ask what kind of sparring they have, and how soon it starts. If the answer is 'no sparring, it's too dangerous', 'only chi sau', or 'only at half speed', or if they wait longer than three to six months to let a dedicated student spar, then in my opinion the school is likely to be of little practical value.

Impressive stuff, but this has the feel of rather too much stunt and not enough actual science to me.

see that's what I was thinking too, I didn't think a follow attack would be a problem, I just cant see taking them out of tourneys all together?? Good Post The problem is that the first infraction results in hansoku-make, automatic disqualification...so unless you trust the referee to be completely infalliable- to recognize that your leg takedown was, in fact, part of a combination the first time, every time- you're putting yourself at unacceptable risk of being DQed just by attempting a leg throw. No high-level competitor would take such a risk. It's a way to ban the techniques without banning them.

Eh. The choreography was technically excellent, but lacking in a sense of tension. The main character was never in a situation where he was actually endangered by anyone he was fighting. The Northern master, the ten karateka, the final fight- he crushed everyone he came up against without effort. Some struggle would have made for a vastly superior experience.

What's up with the crescent kick? In karate and karate-descended systems worldwide it's treated as a foundational kick- often given equal or nearly equal class time with the front, side, and roundhouse kicks. It shows up often in our kata, arguably more than any other kick. It is indisputably present in the Southern Chinese systems that karate descended from, and seems to show up no matter what lineage or substyle you're looking at, so it can't be dismissed as a corruption or later addition. Yet I can't seem to find a use for it. It is rare to the point of nonexistance in high-level competition of stop-and-start point sparring, continuous point sparring, knockdown sparring, American kickboxing, Thai kickboxing, and mixed martial arts, and I've never seen a self-defense application for it that seemed plausible. Some Taekwondo instructors advocate throwing it when at clinch range- but I've never seen it actually applied successfully in a clinch where any degree of contact or grappling was permitted. The opening it presents for a knee in the unmentionables or single-leg takedown would seem to far outweigh the potential benefit. Those who put together our syllabus and our kata seem to have thought the crescent kick was important, but I can't for the life of me figure out why. Help me out!

I would reccomend the Kyokushinkaikan people over the Dover club. The Dover web site makes a number of highly dubious claims, like their fairly unknown style's founder being "the first Westerner to break away from traditional methods of training", as well as claiming high-level proficiency in swordsmanship, archery, several styles of kung fu, and aikido, despite the fact that the only named instructor of his on whom I could find any information on is a *judo* teacher, which is mysteriously absent from that suspiciously broad list of qualifications. In addition, Kyokushin and its offshoots, of which International Karate Kyokushinkaikan appears to be one, has a well-earned reputation for physical rigor and practical applicability.

There are some very good reasons that we're responding the way we are: training without an instructor is immensely difficult for the simple reason that you're never sure when you've made a mistake. You can misread a passage in your book and practice the same poor middle punch thousands of times over the course of years, magnifying and ingraining the same mistake until it can't be corrected without untold grief...where a simple correction at the beginning of the process would have saved you the pain. And really, poor form on individual techniques is far from the worst thing that could happen- self-trained students can develop some pretty wrongheaded notions about fundamental concepts, or actually injure themselves with some dangerous flaw in their execution. However, if you absolutely cannot be dissuaded, here is my advice. Value video over text. It offers far less room for misinterpretation: if you are a close student of body language and if the video is of reasonably high quality you can imitate the form you see as precisely as you are able. Isshin-ryu's founder, Shimabuku Tatsuo, appears to have a good deal of extant video of him available, which is fortunate: see here and here. And don't undervalue YouTube and similar free video services, there's a lot of learnable stuff there. When looking for texts, a useful rule is to look for those authored by the style's founder or their prominent direct students. Shibamaku does not appear to have written a great deal- or at least not a great deal of his writings were translated into English and widely disseminated- but the Dynamics of Isshinryu Karate series, Isshin-ryu karate: The ultimate fighting art, and Introduction to The Original Isshinryu Karate System, to name a few titles, appear to have been authored by those in a position to speak with authority. Actively experiment with what you learn. Sparring is the ultimate sanity check: if your methods have flaws, they will translate directly into bruises, revealing them to you. You're training in a taekwondo school, which is good- it means you have a place to engage in properly supervised sparring with appropriate safety gear, with opponents of varying ability. These are ideal conditions. Try hard to find some local source for Isshin-Ryu: the difference between learning from a book or video and learning from a live teacher cannot be overstated. Check local YMCA and free public martial arts programs: you might also check local military bases and communities considering the style's historical association with the Marines. Use social-networking tools: find Isshin-Ryu forums and online communities to try and locate a local teacher.

Self-training from books to any meaningful degree is impossible without a very thorough base of initial training. Training from video is better, but only slightly. Find a local Isshin-ryu dojo or give up on it entirely.

You said this was an except from a book. I assumed the book was by Ueshiba- I suppose I was wrong. Was it presented as a contextless, single-line quote from Ueshiba in the book, or was there more to it? Were there any other direct quotes from Ueshiba that used that same term, 'real techniques'?

Can you provide some context- perhaps the surrounding three paragraphs or so? Do you have any other instances in the same text of that precise term- "real techniques"? That's often extremely helpful in figuring out difficult terms in texts translated from a foreign language.

No melee spearfighting? I understand that was a core samurai skill for quite a while, more important than swordplay in the period when samurai actually made full-scale war regularly.

Yet to measure the time between gradings in days, months, or years is to deny the difference between someone who goes to a half-hour karate class once a week and someone undergoing a live-in apprenticeship at a dojo, studying his art six hours a day. Why not make time between gradings dependent on active hours spent training rather than days between gradings?