evergrey

God help you is your trying to stop that guy with an inside crescent kick! Whatever works, man, even if it is something that seems completely redic.

Some guy out of his mind on meth who becomes convinced that you are a government agent conspiring against him or something isn't going to care what is and isn't legal in "matches." Even with all the fun and pretty sports that are attached to modern martial arts, they are still, in essence, martial.

Haha, except you don't have as far to fall in a BJJ mount!

Sounds like mindfulness? I am starting to get it with horse riding. Karate, well... I have a ways to go!

I met someone who did Kyokushin, and being an aggressive playful sort, I challenged him to spar. And it woke something up inside of me. I just followed my gut and my heart. I came to it because it felt right!

More push ups. Practice. Practice just about every day. Eventually, you'll be able to do more. There isn't a magical quick fix... you just have to slowly work your way up to it. My actual serious resolution for this year is to be able to do proper, good push-ups in a respectable quantity. By the end of the year. So don't stress, just keep plugging away! It's hard when you start out. And if you're training right, you will always find ways to learn and expand so there is always something new that is hard. Or something that is hard because you are doing your best to, once having learn it, perfect it.

Not bite as many people in the dojo, unless they really have it coming. OM NOM NOM NOM!

OSU- kata for sure has it's uses! But the number of kata in Kyokushin is also limited.

Hey, I gave my honest opinion about your wanting to learn more katas now, given the input that self defense was the most important thing to you. But yeah, I'd say don't worry about learning more kata until you've learned the kata your sensei has to teach you, because yes, by the time you have learned all of those, your sensei will probably have learned more to teach. Just be patient. It isn't about what rank you are at all, it's about the learning process, and how that process works. Muscle memory from kata is very useful. But actual contact in a more realistic fashion than a series of pre-set moves is going to test your ability to defend yourself more. People aren't attacking you, or trying to say that they have mastered their martial art completely, or that they know everything. They are offering up their opinions, and what they have learned from their experiences. Look, I'll give you an example myself about trying to run before you can walk. I noticed that in many of the Kyokushin cull contact knockout videos that I'd seen, the actual knock outs were often a mawashi-geri (roundhouse kick) to the head. "Aha!" I thought, "I should do that! I'm flexible enough to reach there! One strike, one kill." So I started doing head kicks during kumite. The problem was that I hadn't really gotten my kihon, my basics, down yet. Furthermore, while I was flexible enough to reach that high, I didn't yet have the control, the balance, or the technique to execute a powerful strike, or a strike that I could control the level of force with. I was throwing my leg up there, but I wasn't able to drive it up there. I kicked at my sensei's head after class one evening. He reached up and grabbed my heel- I had no control, no snap to a kick that high. Next thing I knew, I was flipping end over end, and I ended up slamming into the floor mat. My other sensei walked up and said to me, "if you can't kick that high really slowly without losing your balance, you can't kick that high at all. You can only swing your leg up there. It will never be effective until you've taken the time to do it right, and before you can do that, you have to be able to kick right in general." I tried to kick high slowly, and sure enough, I just wasn't getting my leg up to head height. It wasn't because I was a 9th kyu, it wasn't because I had a certain opinion, it was because I just wasn't ready yet, and shouldn't have really been worried about learning it yet. That's one of the points people are making- learn those kata, get good at them, develop a strong, solid foundation. Spar. Drill your basics. Get good at the kata he can teach you. Then go from there. Trying more advanced kata at 10th kyu, especially without and instructor to guide you through it, can easily lead to learning it wrong, and that will simply make it harder to unlearn and re-learn properly later on down the line.

Me, I say you fight how you train. How alive is your sparring? Do you really hit each other hard? That's probably going to have more of an effect on how well you learn to defend yourself than learning Pinan 38.

Best escape tool...TICKLE THEM A LOT!! Haha, hey, don't think I haven't been paying attention to who in the dojo is ticklish! I've got at least one green belt's number! Muahaha!

I'm a big heavy girl, and I had him in a trap... trapped both his hands, and was headed for trying a wrist lock. He could have gotten away, had he chosen to resort to slamming his knee into my midsection... but since I'm a white belt and we were playing lightly in fun that day, it didn't happen.

The funny thing for me is that in the heat of combat, I forget about gender altogether. That's how I ended up mashing an instructor's hands against my chest and dragging him around in the middle of kumite. Hah, I wasn't thinking about anything but "he can't hit me if I trap him!" It wasn't until I saw the video of it that I realized how it looked, and how studiously he was looking away, haha! But he had already gotten my speech of "I want to be seen and treated as a martial artist, not a girl," so he didn't comment, heh! Anyway yeah, I think about attack, defense, how to come out on top, and what I should try next. *shrug*

Are you being asked to be the sensei in this dojo?

Sometimes I think "oh, I might not be any good at this at all. What if I end up always being terrible at karate?" Then I get really stubborn. I look at everything I failed at, and I say to myself, "no, no, I'm going to work my way through this, I'm going to learn from this, I'll work until I get better at it!"

Congrats Lupin1!

Yar, there are a lot of low kicks, but we kick to the head too. It just doesn't usually look as fancy. Though sometimes someone gets lucky and actually has the opportunity to make an axe kick actually work... usually when the person is already doubling over. :} I get punched in the face a lot at my dojo, but it's always controlled punches. Very irritating ones. Which is the point, because I am not keeping my guard up! OSU

And congratulations to everyone from me as well. :} Sorry I didn't say so earlier- I was a sleepy lil' karate-ka! OSU!

Thank you so much, everyone. What a great way to brighten my day! I hope I can continue to entertain in a useful fashion. :} OSU!

I have tendonitis in my achilles tendons, an offset patella with a messed up ACL, and a couple of herniated discs in my spine. So I am pretty much crazy for practicing a martial art, especially a hard style, haha! Sounds like gun-fu could be a good choice, if you need to take really good care of those wrists for your career, honestly...

Well if you're really worried about it being hard on your body... I would say Aikido, but it has a very steep learning curve, for one, and for another I am not sure how effective it is on the street. I hear gun-fu is good for the street though. Bang-jutsu?

A good instructor and a good martial artist can overcome a lot of weaknesses in a style. The thing, as a Kyokushin person, that I would say about Kyokushin being hard on the body is that you also aren't so likely to crumble when you take a good hit, because you are conditioned to it. Kyokushin is also about practical instead of pretty. Does it work? Will it bring your attacker down so you can get out of there fast? Then we like it. :} Kyokushin was not developed to be a simple sports style. It is both a practical technique, and an internal spiritual style... though that has been forgotten by some.

Haha, yes yes, as Sensei Wah said to me, "you shouldn't go around in your gi as an adult outside of the dojo because you can't trust other people to not be stupid." I wear a coat over it now, if I have to stop before getting home to change.

Haha, doubt it's dangerous. They dry, and nothing is going to live in there in a colony or anything for long.

Haha Lupin, Nope, he's a nidan and an instructor! He's just short like I am. The only thing that I would have liked to have seen, really, was more stand-up styles represented, and more stand-up sparring. Mostly people grappled... which I do want to learn someday! But right now, it's stand-up for me.