Spodo Komodo

I am not qualified to comment on the kata but who was the guy walking across your line? How rude!

Depends a little on the type of bag but in general you need something that will fill it out without going lumpy, provide enough weight to be useful and not be too hard to hit. I prefer chopped clean rags but it can take ages to get enough to fill a bag and chopping them can be a pain. If you can find an old sofa you might be able to rip enough fibre padding out of it to fill your bag. Sawdust is good and if you have a joinery shop nearby you might get it for free. Try to find somewhere where they cut a lot of softwood, many hardwood dusts and MDF are not great for the lungs. Punching a softwood dust bag smells great as well As for using it you can warm up with a few rounds of quick jabs but if it is going to be of benefit in your karate practise then use karate techniques - junzuki, gyakuzuki obviously but also shuto, haito, tettsui, uraken, empi, all the kicks and knee techniques and so on. If your bag is able to swing a bit safely then you can give it a push and practice blocks or tai sabaki techniques where you move off the line to avoid the swinging bag and deliver a blow from the side or behind. Lots of fun to be had.

It will vary widely from country to country but here in the UK, Chan and Zen are way behind Theravada and Tibetan Buddhism in the general population and Pure Land is virtually non-existent. A lot of this is due to availability of sangha, most small towns will have a New Kadampa or Triratna group nearby, Zen and Chan tend only to be available in major cities (London, Manchester, Birmingham etc.) and Pure Land is probably only available in London. With so few footholds there has never been the opportunity to move out of the cities, especially as most of the people likely to be interested have already settled for other more expansionist groups. I was initially interested in Pure Land myself but ended up going to various NKT and Thai centres for teachings while practising Zen alone. So few publications in english and no teachers within travelling distance made Pure Land a non-starter for me.

Last week practising Pinan Godan in the field behind my house. I made the jump at the end of the kata and landed with both feet in a previously undiscovered mole run. I was planted in the ground cross-legged to just under the knee...

I know that not everyone recognises it as a legitimate Chinese Kung Fu style but you occasionally see a Lau Gar* practitioner or two in open competitions. *Lau Gar as in the system taught by Master Simon Yau, not the Hung Gar set.

Well at least people have heard of Groudhog Day, no-one has ever heard of any of the films made around here (Dead Mans Shoes, Sightseers) apart from Jane Eyre, to which they add the qualifier "which one?".

I have done a few Wado kata with sai, just to get the feel of them. For such a thing to be successful the kata has to fit the weapon - since sai are mainly striking/blocking weapons this works well with some karate kata. However an open hand kata done with sai has to be a compromise, you can't train the locking/pulling/throwing aspects of open hand and you can't train the hooking/pinning/distracting aspects of the sai. As a gateway to leaning a good weapon kata though, go for it!

I had an unbleached organic cotton Aikido gi that I used for karate a while back. It lasted for ages but eventually had to be retired when I got blood on it as there was no way unbleached fibres were going to give that stain up without chemicals. It was also a light green colour after a sock incident. Personally I don't machine wash my gi very often, after a class it gets rinsed in clean cold water, spun in the washing machine and hung up in the shower to drip dry. I have three gis which have clearly numbered labels (with a laundry marker) and they get worn in rotation so that gi no.1 gets at least a week to dry. Once a month they get a machine wash and in winter they might get a tumble dry just to get one back into service in time. Even cheap gis can last 5-6 years with a bit of care.

Here in the UK it would be unusual for such a situation between adults to involve legal action but it wouldn't be unusual for parents to try on behalf of their kids. I have had to fight legal action for a tooth which was chipped following an after-school cricket training session I used to run. Despite the fact that the session had ended and the recipient of the injury caught his own rebound from bowling into a net at idiotically close range the magistrate deemed me responsible until they were off the premises (a public park so I couldn't insist they left). My insurance had to take a hit and they insisted that I ban him from the club, so everyone lost apart from the lawyers. The vast majority of parents understand the risks of sport but for a few, you can never be sure that the lure of a payout wouldn't get the better of their morals.

We have the oldest surviving railway tunnel in the world. Other debatable local notables include the last English uprising, birthplace of the industrial revolution and the home of the Rolls Royce Merlin engine (Spitfire, Lancaster, various tanks).

Don't try to learn them all at once. Pick out the main ones for your grade maybe four or five at a time and say them every time you do the technique, under your breath or in your head. If you are only training once or twice a week try to make time for a couple of sessions in between to just say the word out loud and then perform the technique. You should be able to learn a batch every fortnight or so and at that rate you could learn a whole syllabus worth in four months. Don't stress about them, they will come to you if you apply a little patience and effort.

Congratulations Ram18, sounds like a tough weekend. I am glad I didn't get a fitness test at my dan grading - I might have been knocked back to white belt

Anything that involves human relationships, such as politics, religion or sport will naturally involve people forming hierarchies based on prejudice. We all do it -I may regard another Shotokan or Wado Karateka as an equal but I would be suspicious of a GKR Karateka until they had allayed my suspicions in the dojo. It can be regrettable but to some extent it is a defence mechanism; McDojos only manage to operate by getting people who have yet to form such prejudices and hierarchies.

I lived to climb for the first 30 years of my life. I moved to Sheffield (a major UK climbing city) and tailored my employment around midweek days off to climb in the Peak District. The inevitable happened and I had a bad fall, leaving me in a wheelchair for a short while. I lost track of my regular climbing friends as I was now climbing way below my former grade and I just stopped one day. After a while of doing nothing and piling on the pounds a friend suggested I needed a new sport to be obsessive about and suggested martial arts or football. I tried football and couldn't find anything technical to get stuck into so I went to a Karate class and the rest is history as they say.

I have used both heel and ball of the foot pivots, depending on what the pivot was intended to achieve. Generally speaking I have been taught to pivot on the ball of the foot for speed and flexibility but just occasionally you need to keep low and braced in which case a heel pivot can help. If someone puts in a lot of low sweeps I sometimes pivot on the heel as well, I can stick my heel to the ground pretty well if I put all my weight on it and still be able to turn.

If you are overweight (as am I) then beware of kicking without some instruction. Kicking seems to be as natural as breathing or walking but if you kick air without some understanding of the technique then you can damage the ligaments and cartilage over time. The same goes for deep stances and anything that puts a twist or side-loading on the knee. Stay safe, knee replacements are not that good yet!

Well at least I only look like an 80s throwback in my white trousers and training jacket. I always get changed fully after Iaido practice as it doesn't pay to wander around the streets of Yorkshire in what looks like a skirt.

I have three options 1. after training take off my belt, throw on a jacket and walk to the bus stop safely. 2. change into a t-shirt, pack belt and gi top into bag and run to the bus stop in the nick of time. 3. change into civvies, pack gi into bag and run to the bus stop like a madman across several lanes of traffic, bounce off a car or two and still end up walking the eight miles home, assuming nothing is broken. Since the club won't change its training times and I can't force the bus company to run a later service I tend to prefer the first option...

Possibly also to do with the fact that many of the best Kung Fu movies came out of Hong Kong at a time when the place was booming. They were usually semi-historical and had the motif of overcoming unjust government or bullying bandits, local officials etc. This played to a largely Chinese population under Colonial rule which had just gone through half a century of internal and external wars. The Japanese in contrast had just taken a bitter blow to their national pride and so their focus became as much taken by science fiction as the golden age of Samurai warfare, pre-dating Karate. The Karate era was generally one that was difficult to address in context without the shadow of the wars that ultimately led to Japanese defeat (Sino-Japanese Wars, Russo-Japanese War, Second World War). On the other hand there are loads of good Iaido movies!

I think everyone needs a few techniques they are extremely confident about. If you know you can get a really solid empi in that will usually knock your opponent back then your mental state is going to be better than if you are only half-confident in throwing an effective junzuki. However if it looks like you are not going to get into a situation where you can throw your empi in there then you also need the other techniques in order to control the distance and the openings to get your favoured technique set up. This can lead to missing opportunities due to restricting your techniques. I think the middle way is probably for me, train in everything but have a few tricks in the bag for when they are needed.

My Katana is called "Dragonfly" because that is the design of the tsuba, my Iaito is "Monkey" for the same reason. My hand-and-a-half sword is called "Arsebane", it got its name when I used to spar against a regular partner who always left his right unguarded so I could slip around and give him a good whack across the buttocks. "Prepare to meet Arsebane again" became the prelude to every duel. I don't name anything else apart from a very heavy wooden nunchaku called "Mr Smashy" because I have broken many things around the house while twirling it without due care and attention.

Traditional Dojos are becoming harder to find. The emphasis now seems to be on hybrid systems and many actually advertise that they don't deal with the spiritual side of things at all. Out of my local dojos there are many that advertise themselves as training a traditional martial art with Muay Thai and BJJ thrown in for added effectiveness. To me this is not training in a traditional martial art but a hybrid system. One local class advertised Aikido/Muay Thai which seems a bizarre combination of conflicting doctrines to me. I suspect that it is a bit of a fad, the current seems to go deep (Iain Abernethy's bunkai approach et al) and then broad (MMA, hybrid systems etc.) on a cycle of several years. New guys on the scene need a USP and they can only choose to be different from what is on offer at the time, whether that be a return to tradition or breaking out and innovating. It all adds to the rich history of the arts, not everyone likes tradition as much as we do. Given time it will come around again.

At the moment I'm trying to get back to fitness following an injury and back into the dojo after many years away so I am gradually building up my kata and kihon practice. I go through each kata I know three times and five times through the one I am currently focussing upon. I also go through a few basic techniques in warmup gently and later on at full speed. Ippons, Ohyus and Kihons (from the Wado syllabus) are done at random using visualisation and going through both roles in turn. It is about 30-40 minutes if I don't mess about and I sometimes split the session into 20 minutes kata in the morning and 20 minutes other stuff later on. I also hit the gym for weights twice a week and Yoga on a saturday when I can book a place in the class (VERY oversubscribed). Unfortunately I practice outside so all this white stuff is making it a bit dangerous.

The belt I never wear has name and style like everyone else. The belt I actually wear in the dojo has just a small wado-ryu dove and fist emblem in gold at each end. It was a present and I wish I knew where to get them from because I like it way more than my katakana/kanji-embroidered belt.

It is pure showmanship, boards don't hit back (is often quoted but I have no idea who originated it). I encountered board breaking at a TKD school where they also kicked apples off swords but it was more a test of courage and something fancy to put on for the parents or demo days than anything. I haven't seen much board breaking at Karate, which is a shame as I have a wood-burning stove...