Spodo Komodo

Did you try the Tai Chi class Cathal? In the UK at least, Tai Chi has been pigeonholed as a gentle exercise for pensioners and hippies. I have tried four or five groups and none of them teach it as a martial art, most were hostile to any talk of martial applications as it frightened some of the older members. I suspect there is a good class at the local Chinese Community Centre as there seems to be a fair few younger men training there but I don't think I could learn Cantonese well enough to enrol.

Heh! Never let your bet touch the ground - I once saw a guy who was adamant that your belt should not touch the ground dragging his new black belt across a tarmac carpark under his foot to "age" it. I made sure he saw me while he was doing this and strangely he never mentioned it to the kyu grades again. Which brings us to another myth, that only mega-experienced black belts have a piece of grey, frayed, chewed-up string around their uwagi. My classmate mentioned above was a typical case against this. The belt was almost pristine under the knot yet the back of the belt as tied was like dish-rag. I asked him why he did it and he said it was to show the amount of training done since getting the belt. He must have been really bad at karate to fall on his backside so many times in the year since it was awarded though...

I was a big guy, I trained in Karate for about ten years and lost a lot of weight along the way. I got injured and stopped and now I'm a big guy starting all over again. Moral of the story - don't stop. In practice you just have to be a bit more careful. The racing snakes can get away with poor footwork or less than perfect rolls and breakfalls, us powerfully built chaps have to get knees in perfect position and hit the mat at the right angle if we don't want to pop a knee or shoulder. On the other hand, the harder you train now the easier it gets when you have lost the poundage. Just make sure that you get adequate nutrition and replace those fluids. PS. I'm currently at -26lbs since getting back to Karate in May this year and it feels so much better.

I first entered the dojo because my parents thought it would be character-building. I soon gave up because I had no interest in it. I then came back to Martial Arts because I was spending up to 6 hrs a day meditating and I was starting to pile on the pounds. My time spent training my mind meshed with the traditional training in Karate and Iaido and it became a part of my life. The joy of movement - the satisfaction in simply planting a foot as near to perfectly as possible, the feeling you get when you can feel the energy transfer smoothly from the sole of the foot to the skin of the knuckles - that is why I train. It is similar to the feeling I used to get from rock climbing but I don't have to travel to the other end of the county with thousands of pounds of equipment to practice it.

Ninja Warrior has been massively popular here in the UK which is basically a parkour/free running/obstacle course type show. I could imagine a 36 Chambers of Shaolin type show where martial artists have to pass feats of agility, strength and breaking a lot of roof tiles (people expect that kind of guff). Probably wouldn't bother with the red hot brazier at the end though. Kung Fu Quest sounds great, time for a letter to Channel 4...

A drunk driver can be way more lethal than the most experienced martial artist. Fast food is more effective at harming people than the average martial artist. Nobody I have ever trained with has been seriously hurt by another martial artist. A neighbour of mine tripped over his sandals and ended up breaking his neck fatally - should sandals be considered lethal weapons? On the scale of things to be worried about you barely notice martial artists way down at the bottom of the list.

I kind of hope that Karate doesn't get into the Olympics. I love Karate down to its roots but traditional Karate dojos are already pretty rare around here compared to sports karate/cardio karate/karate kickboxing.

If your criteria for choosing a weapon are all based on modern day efficiency then kobudo probably isn't for you. The Indonesian/Malaysian/Philippino knife and stick arts all have far more everyday applicability than Okinawan koryu kobudo. However the thing with Okinawan kobudo is that it extends, enhances and enriches the open hand arts that have their roots in Okinawa. Similarly most of the pacific weapon arts have an unarmed art that works well in conjunction. Kobudo doesn't just teach how to use a weapon, it teaches a transfer of skills from one art to another. A bo isn't just a broom handle, it is an arm extension. Nunchaku are instruments for striking but they are also a vice-like grip, a lever and a very solid addition to a spearhand thrust. Learning kobudo without an open-hand art is like learning the shapes of an alphabet without the sounds. The bo is often the first weapon on a syllabus, not because it is the most readily available but because the transfer of open-hand skills is by far the most easily understandable. Most Karate kata can be done effectively with a bo, with a minimum or even no adaptation. For this reason I would always encourage someone to start with a bo and then try something else when they have a grip on the basics. It isn't like someone has to choose one weapon for life, even my Iaido teacher has a side interest in the jutte and sword arts can be pretty all-consuming.

Yes, there was a whole rash of really quite similar programmes and then...nothing! It seems that if you have one reasonably successful show it get imitated to death and then the scene is dead in a year. We could really do with some good MA programming, the BBC have done nothing much since Mind, Body and Kick [rear end] Moves. There was a show where they took some "challenging" youths to China for Shaolin style training but it was identical training every week and it got very boring very quickly. Fortunately TV has run out of cash in the UK so old programmes come around again fairly often. [blimus, the Equus subgenus Asinus gets flagged by the censor but I'm sure you know what I mean by "rear end"]

I had to google rashguard, never heard of one before. Personally I don't wear anything under the uwagi and I can happily skid across the matting all night without needing anything to protect me under my gi. Around here we can get a fifteen degree change from one day to the next in summer so if we get a sudden hot snap I sometimes train in just a white vest I got from an MMA supplier (although more usually a sleeveless uwagi). Maybe I have a tough hide but I have never seen the need for anything under my gi, heavyweight canvas gis chafe a little at first but the skin soon hardens up where it needs to.

Doesn't everyone want to get out of a white belt asap? I know I always have

I have never been at a dojo with a slogan but our university Iaido club t-shirts bore the legend "when we wave our weapons around we always get a whistle", usually repeated in a Kenneth Williams "ooh! Matron!" style. Subsequent shirts had different slogans such as "Noto - thumbs in peril" or "O-Chiburi - when there's just too much blood to wipe".

Yes the differences between Otsuka, Suzuki and Wado-Kai fuel endless discussions during water breaks...

Does the head/founder of your style have videos on youtube or similar? I have never learned a kata entirely from video as it is easy to misinterpret similar stances, whether something is a punch or a block etc. There are also a lot of bad kata videos out there, sometimes from people who just can't perform the kata well, sometimes from people who have created their own style and do a similar but not entirely identical kata to the one you want. Personally I learn the kata, take tips and notes in the dojo and then I watch the videos of Otsuka Sensei and Suzuki Sensei to reinforce the finer points, but only when I know the kata fairly well. Obviously a lot depends on the popularity and the availability of video clips for your style, once you get away from Shotokan, Wado Ryu, Goju Ryu, Shito Ryu and GKR you might be struggling.

I trained at a McDojo but I only twigged when I had invested enough time and effort to make it difficult to stop. The training was fun, not very hard or rigorous and I learned a whole bucketload of techniques in a rather slapdash way. I could pretend to be a fairly advanced grade and my rate of advancement was only limited by my wallet so I didn't enquire too deeply. I now train at a dojo that is very definitely not a McDojo, the training is good but hard and we don't mess about at all. Back when I started I may not have continued training had I not been in a McDojo, at the time I just wanted a bit of a workout after work and something that looked a bit more macho than a spin class or yogalates. However, I grew to love karate, the history, the mechanics and the community and can now appreciate training in a proper dojo and getting things right rather than getting things done.

I made a makiwara with a bit of old timber, a length of polypropylene rope and a couple of old chamois window leathers. I also made some chi ishi training weights by driving a couple of six inch nails through an old rake handle and then setting them in four inches of cement at the bottom of an old plastic bucket. You can also make Ishi Sashi stone padlocks with a bit of broom handle and some cement but you really need to make a wooden pattern to set them in so the handle is secured which is more difficult than using a plastic bucket.

When talking to someone who has already quit you rarely get a true answer, you get the projected version. This is the myth that the person has already worked out in their head to justify quitting, one that makes the decision seem rational rather than based on emotions. I would bet that if you asked people who trained with them rather than the people who quit you would get answers like: "he was too out of shape for it" "he and X were always trying to knock lumps off each other" "he could only kick chudan when his friends could all kick jodan" "someone commented that he needed to use some deodourant" "he couldn't stand being shouted at" "he had anger issues" "his mates down the pub found out and were making fun of him" All of these can quite happily be rationalised as "I haven't got time for this" by the person quitting. I have done this kind of research before and while it is easy to get some results that you can talk about, they do hide a lot of reality under convenient headings.

If I am busy it has to be kata. The meditative aspects of kata training help to relax me while I keep up my general activity levels and have a good stretch out. Either that or half an hour pounding the heavy bag.

I have always been sceptical of hand conditioning. I know roughly how it is supposed to work by strengthening the connective tissues and encouraging bone density but those are things that are going to decrease after the mid 30s anyway. Starting conditioning at 50 is going to be an uphill struggle and you might get as much out of bog standard weight training to keep up bone density and keep everything moving as you would striking hard surfaces and traditional hand conditioning. I did a fair bit of hand conditioning when younger and now I am finding that other bits are starting to go, my knuckles are solid but my elbows are very painful after a heavy bag session. I think that middle age is the time for moderate overall training not intensive focussed conditioning. So don't go mad at it and enjoy your training.

I would say that this only applies where practical self defence is a necessary part of the art. I have seen Modern Wushu McDojos and I don't think anyone would regard modern sport arts such as Wushu as practical self defence. Same goes for Kendo and Iaido, in cases such as these then tradition is paramount, a lot of the stuff you learn doesn't work unless everyone is sitting in seiza parallel to the wall or wearing full armour. I would suggest that in most cases a McDojo puts technical or traditional considerations secondary to the business ethic. It is possible to get a good martial training in some McDojos if your wallet will stretch to it.

I did a little Shotokan as a kid because it was the only martial arts class in the area. I gave it up due to the religious restrictions placed on training by the new priest. In my late 20s I found a Wado Ryu school with which I trained to shodan, also because it was the only martial arts class in the area. I gave it up due to increasingly McDojo-like practices. In my late 30s I found a Shotokan class, the only MA class in the area, and trained with them for a while but the deep stances didn't do my arthritic knees any favours and all the kata were disturbingly familiar yet totally different. They were an excellent school but I kept hankering for Wado Ryu. A new school opened up a few months ago and I am now doing Wado again, this time with someone who knows what they are doing and is in it for the love of the art, not to make a living out of it. For once they are not the only MA class in the area, I got to choose one I wanted to do.

It might be worth seeing an osteopath or a sports physio. I had lower back pain and went to a sports injury clinic. I had everything checked out and they found that muscular imbalances were throwing my pelvis out of line. Since I started the training programme they gave me, plus a few osteopathy sessions, my back pain is almost gone. Without an expert eye I was concentrating on my back when I needed to work on my core and legs, you can't really work that kind of thing out for yourself.

Every time I think that, my local McDojo does something that even master Ken would laugh at. I think the main problem is toning it down enough to be believable!

My first job was painting for a small fantasy miniatures company just down the road from me which ended up becoming Games Workshop. These days I play mainly historical (or pseudo-historical) wargames. My main periods are Classical Greece through to the late medieval era and a secondary interest in imaginary eighteenth century nations played with 1960s style miniatures and old-school rules. My other vice is Subbuteo, table soccer of the flick-to-kick variety using 1970s style teams I paint myself. Oh for the days when footballers didn't look like mobile advertising boards...

I am at the beginning of a similar journey, I was a shodan about ten years ago and then I got injured and quit. Now I am back in a white belt and realising that a lot of things are either not quite right or look OK but don't really work. I am spending a far bit of time unlearning in order to re-learn. However, I don't let it get to me. Grades and skill evaluations are always subjective and if you trust your current instructor then you ought to give yourself the benefit of the doubt and trust your instructor's judgement as well. Of course having a critical eye turned upon yourself is an incredibly useful tool to have as long as it doesn't turn into loss of confidence. Once the seeds of doubt have been sown it is difficult to rebuild self-confidence but can you really be sure that you are trying to be a good 1st kyu (and obviously achieving that) rather than trying to be a 3rd Dan in disguise. If your self-image is three grades ahead of your actual level then you will always be disappointed. Relax and enjoy your achievement. TL,DR - trust your sensei, accept your current level but always strive for self-improvement.