tommarker

2 parts practice, and 1 part repetition.

Could you be more specific as to what you mean by spinning the sai? Here are some good sites with some background info on the Sai: http://www.karate.org.yu/Matayoshi%20sai.htm http://www.karate.org.yu/Sai%20jutsu.htm There is another thread in this section that had a few kata posted to it about 2 days ago. The most important thing I can think of is to rotate the tines of the sai so that they are perpendicular to the floor when pulling the opposite hand back during a strike. Unless you wanna get stuck in the gut.

I 100% agree with Delta1... make it your goal to figure out how to knock that kid on his butt!

We had a kid like that, until one of the women in the club side kicked him... really hard... into a wall. And then chased him around the room for the next 45 seconds without giving him a single chance to get a single technique out.. He was practically running backwards from this woman He didn't realize he was sparring with a 4th Dan in IsshinRyu who was only a "lowly brown belt" in Tang Soo Do.

Well, it *is* an effective blocking technique. I think you should try to come up with a few ways to steal the person's balance. It's hard to be sturdy when you stand on one foot, so what kind of techniques could you use to put him on his butt? I have a few ideas and ways of dealing with people who like to throw this block out in sparring, but I'd like to hear your ideas before I just give you my answer

http://ase.tufts.edu/karate/katavideos.html has a copy of Unsu

Only if they're not trying hard enough I personally don't think Bruce was squat compared to the hundreds of people with his skill level who didn't have the luxury of looking good on camera. I don't even know that I'd put Funakoshi in my top five list... Itosu, yes. Funakoshi, ehhh... fireka, i doubt most martial artists can even spell Shimabuku, much less recognize him as the founder of Isshin-ryu. Doesn't make him any less important. But this is bigtime topic drift.... I think Shotokan's best asset is it's simplicity.

Especially me, eh? OK. Sorry for expressing my opinion. Are you still mad because I gave you more or less the same advice a few months ago? What do you want out of it? To be able to kick someone's ass? Well, sheesh, yea, work out a lot, develop a bad attitude, and hang out with some rough guys, and get more practice than you'd ever get in a dojo. You'll prolly end up being a great fighter, and probably would be able to kick some ass.... especially mine If you're looking to pursue the martial arts for other or more reasons, then without a teacher or some kind of feedback, you're not going to learn anything from a video. You'll pick up some bad habits... and when you eventually find a competent instructor, they'll spend time working out those bad habits. In this case, either way, you will suck! Bad instruction is worse than no instruction, IMHO. Using videos and books, you're still receiving instruction from a poor teacher: YOURSELF. I'd personally tell someone unable to get quality instruction to spend time developing themselves physically until the right teacher comes around.

if the Bo becomes "your" weapon, you'll end up experimenting and accumulating 8-9 different kids of staffs anyways might as well get the one that everyone else has. we usually tell people to cut the staff down to about forehead level at first.

10 years of soccer and 6 of karate, and my shins still hurt when I hit hard stuff, especially those bony guys who block really well with their shins. I try to knock them over with side kicks or sweep them I don't have the discipline/insanity to condition my shins to where I can break baseball bats, but I know a woman in her 40s who can, and she's only about 5'2" 120 lbs I'd rather just wear a solid pair of doc martens

I think from your first post that if you find TKD a bit impractical, you might find Aikido even more frustrating. Using Aikido for practical self-defense requires a fairly long time, and IMHO, takes a certain level of mastery to where you can eliminate a lot of the training exercises and work with a small set of techniques (especially more of the striking aspects that you don't get in all dojos.) Isshin-ryu is a similar skill set, but they like to use some devastating low-line kicks. It depends on what you want out of the martial arts. If you're only looking for self-defense, and that's it.. maybe you should look for a group that works more on WWII Combatives. If you're just looking to pull away from kicking-oriented arts, maybe an art like Wing Chun or a filipino art may be more up your alley. I still think the best thing to do is to try talking to your instructor in private after class one day. I'm not sure how much it will help. If you're the inflexible old guy in the back, and he's more tournament oriented with the younger flexible kids, it may be just time to hang it up. If you've got a group of folks looking for something more realistic, a smart teacher may offer a different class for folks like you. Unless he's not qualified to teach it... I'm babbling now, so I'll wrap up

i have a broken little toe on my left foot. mid level side kick during kumite, one of the junior students had just learned how to drop an elbow into the foot gave it about 1-2 months (still running 25 miles a week on it though) and hurt it again while hitting a target with a spinning crescent kick.

press-ups is one of those funny english terms like anti-clockwise and calling your car's truck the boot anyways... a neat exercise while watching tv is to put your feet on the coach, and your hands on the floor. commence pushups. there's another sequence called "hindu pushups" like look sorta like the yoga upward and downward dog. I can't describe them very well though. try a google search on them, and you should find plenty of info.

spinning roundhouse? like a jump spinning roundhouse? or do you take a step mid-turn? I can't visualize how you would do a spinning roundhouse otherwise.

Why not Hapkido?

because if they don't, they are beaten silly.

have you talked to your instructor about your concerns?

Other stuff: running, biking, swimming, mountain climbing, weightlifting, or just stretching. Nothing better than when people leave for the summer, and come back a heck of a lot stronger than when they left. Much better than the guy who comes back, has forgotten his forms, etc.

look at what you know from a different angle. My instructor used to spend hours in the woods training. How the heck did he do it? He would start by training forms. Pick a form, any form... do the form until something doesn't feel right, and then work on it until it slides smoothly into the move before and after it. Pull away from the techniques, and look at the transition: what gets you from the last move until the next. Look beyond the obvious interpretation of the technique you're doing. How does the technique before and after it change the outlook? What happens if you play with the rhythm of the technique. Instead of going 1...2...3... try 1-2...3, 1..2-3, etc. What happens if you start with the last move of the form and work backwards to the beginning. What happens if you do the form in it's mirror-image? I know the feeling of getting lax in the training. I've had a bit of a downer time in the last 2 weeks.. Haven't been motivated to do squat, and it shows when I do stuff, too. I'm just starting to get back into the flow of things.

either way, you'll prolly suck.

point taken.. but it is a good idea to make copies of stuff you like, especially since the good stuff comes and goes.

i wanted to say "are you taking the piss?" but then I realized that you weren't joking in the least. how sad..

solo... if you are using Internet Explorer, look for a directory on your computer called "temporary internet files" and there will be a couple different folders in there. browse around in them (i like to view file details, and then organize them by file size. it's easy to spot a 15 mb file in your cache, because it is huge.) then drag it out of the cache folder, and onto your desktop, or whereever you like to store that stuff.

which part? the hairbrush? Most brushes have a pretty substantial handle. If you know how to throw a hammerfist, you can fight with a hairbrush. It's just a plastic yawara stick. Yawara was built around tanto-jutsu. Seems easy enough.

Keep in mind there are plenty of folks out there who use bodyweight exercises in what can only be described as insane numbers to get fit. Football great Herschel Walker did 2000 situps and 1500 pushups a day. Jhoon Rhee does 1000 pushups a day, and he is well into his 70s. A few years ago, he went on TV and did 100 in a minute. Matt Furey is a beast and does similar. Mr. Chen's workout sounds almost impossible to believe, although I know that there are plenty of people who do such a thing.. though the heavy bag and running thing sounds downright unhealthy. I am currently working on trying to do 100 pushups in one go. I'm up in the 60's right now. I also run 4 times a week. 3-5 miles during the week, and then a long 8 mile run on Sunday. I keep within 6-7 minute miles. Sometimes, I toss out a 3 mile run day and hit the track for some interval work instead. Cross-training, I work on the bike. I like to take the bike to work and back, although the weather hasn't agreed with that plan much lately. Ohio sucks for commuting via bicycle. Class three nights a week. In the evenings after class, I like to take about 30 minutes to do some slow static stretches. Other nights, I'll run a few miles to warm up and then spend an hour doing forms outside, bagwork indoors if it is cold, or playing with the nunchaku and sai. I've been thinking about adding some weightliting just to balance out a few muscle groups that aren't as developed.