OneKickWonder

I'd love to have private lessons. By that I don't necessarily mean one to one. Possibly small private group of me and most trusted training friends. And as for 'famous' teachers, I don't think so. I know a handful of martial artists that I consider exceptional. They are not famous in any way. Just ordinary regular folks that happen to be good people and outstanding martial artists. Those are the folks I'd be happy to pay for private tuition. But what format would that take? If it were entirely up to me, I wouldn't attend regular classes long term with private instructors. Instead I'd want maybe a few sessions with one, then a few sessions with another and so on, because each of these exceptional martial artists that I know has different things to offer. I have a friend who competed in what might have been called MMA except no grappling. He is the best I know at striking. Then there's a guy I know that is an ex soldier who mixed aikido with combatives. He is the man for practical, realistic, dirty street survival. Then there's a guy who loves aikido but added in tai chi and some judo and a few other bits. He is the most fluid at moving of anyone ever. He'll ask you to genuinely try to punch him for real at full speed, you'll miss because he's moved off centre without any apparent effort, then he'll calmly explain all the dynamics from his new position to your side. So between the three, one can teach excellent striking skills, one can teach real stuff and one knows how to move without effort. I think if you put the three together I think that's a pretty comprehensive coverage. Especially if added to a foundation of regular generic training.

Karate is a method of training body and mind. If you have to 'do karate', you're in trouble. You'll just get beat up by the guy who is not restricting himself to a particular style, while you're busy thinking about your posture and what the other guy would do if he was also doing karate. Now if you just fight, and it so happens you fight a lot better because you've trained your body and mind, then you've got a much better chance of doing OK. Or look at it another way. The question is, can you use shotokan karate on the street? Well yes. Of course you can. You could do a kata in the street if you wanted to. Maybe with a willing partner, and spot of kumite. But can you use shotokan in self defence? If you're shotokan school focuses on kata more than anything else, then you'll have fitness and balance etc but the only fighting skills you have will be your built in instinctive ones. If on the other hand your shotokan school does loads of sparring, then you'll have a good chance of defeating an attacker that knows and complies with your sparring rules but doesn't train (ie pretty much no attacker). Now if you ignore the shotokan, but take advantage of the fitness and flexibility and balance and judgement you've developed, and add those attributes to your instinctive ability, then you've got a fair chance.

Would you use shotokan karate if attacked in the street? I hope not. Would you use ANY system of martial arts if attacked in the street? Again I hope not. Would you fight to defend yourself if attacked in the street? Hopefully yes. And if that happened, hopefully any training you've had in any style will augment your inate natural ability. You don't need martial arts to kick or punch. Those actions are instinctive. But through training, we become better at kicking and punching. We don't need martial arts to keep our balance or judge distance or react to threats, but martial arts training gives us better ability in those areas. But still, will you be able to defend yourself? That depends on so many factors it's impossible to say. Defend yourself against one or many? Are your attackers armed? Are they or you under the influence of drugs or alcohol? Are you tired or injured or wearing very restrictive clothing? Have they got more practical fighting experience than you? Did you even realise they were going to attack before the first punch landed? These and many more things have an influence on the outcome.

I think for a style/association to be credible beyond its own boundaries, we must ask ourselves, what do people outside of martial arts think black belt means. Because at the end of the day, you are selling a dream to people. Nobody joins a martial arts club with the dream of one day being able to perform a few choreographed sequences and count to 10 in another language. If you said to someone, 'after at least 5 years, if you work really hard and give us loads of money, you'll be able to kick something that isn't moving, fight thin air, and bow a lot', I reckon most people would say no thanks. So what do people believe they are working towards when they sign up? Well let's start with what is promised. Many martial arts adverts offer fitness, confidence, self defence as a minimum. So surely then a black belt should be fit, confident, and able to defend themselves in many realistic scenarios. Clubs have rules. And those rules are designed to keep people safe. I get that. But sometimes the rules are so restrictive that anyone with an open mind will quickly realise that their training is flawed. For example, if the rules say, don't fight a takedown attempt because that's when people get hurt, then it doesn't take much to realise that in a real fight, your opponent won't dive as soon as he feels a technique going on. Are you a black belt if you haven't tried your techniques against resistance? Can you truly have confidence in a technique you've never truly tested or seen tested? If the answer is no, then you haven't achieved one of the key attributes often advertised as a benefit of martial arts, confidence. If you haven't achieved what was promised, then how can you be a black belt? By that logic, I think regrettably, many clubs and associations really should not be dishing out black belts, ever. Others however, produce people that have genuine skill and ability at much lower grade, and therefore produce very credible black belts.

JR 137. That's interesting. It makes sense but I hadn't thought of that. It reminds me of a situation a while ago. I was feeling a bit sorry for myself one evening. I ached all over and really felt old. When suddenly there was a noise a bit too close to the house.instantly I felt as fit as a 20 year old and felt primed for action. It turned out to be nothing as it happens, but still it showed just how quickly you can become ready when necessary. Mushybees, regarding footwear, I have arthritis in my feet. There is nothing good to say about arthritis but if I was forced to find one positive it would be this. When you have arthritis in your feet, you have to become very, very selective when choosing footwear.that doesn't mean you have to wear ridiculous shoes. I have formals, trainers, and plimsolls. But it dies mean you have to choose very carefully. That means that for me, my footwear never impedes me. Even the formal shoes I wear for work provide good support, good grip, and just the right amount of flex. The result is I can run in them as well as I can run in any other shoes, and when I practice a bit in secret in the facilities at work, I find I can move reasonably well.

In the dojo / dojang / gym / call it what you will, we are typically dressed for training. We'll usually do some form of warm up, maybe stretch a bit, loosen off. Then go full tilt. Do you ever test your ability when in normal clothes and not warmed up? I like to practice kicking in normal clothes with no warmup. I fund I can do all of it, but only to about waist height instead of head height. I'm content with that. The reason I ask is because in a real situation, you can't ask the attacker to give you half an hour while you get changed and warmed up before getting attacks.

There shouldn't be. That's not the point of the thread. The question is, at different life stages, do different styles offer greater suitability than other styles. Would it be fair to sell a kicking style to someone that is never going to be a good kicker? When I phrased the question, I was careful not to ask, are there different styles for different age groups. We all pass through different life stages at different points in our journey. Except at the very beginning and very end, age has no bearing on it.

About 30 years ago when I was training in kung fu, I made a bit of a mess of my foot. I was hastily treated with some ointment that really helped. Years later I did some research and concluded it was probably dit da jow. So I tracked some down and bought some from a wing chun academy. Suffice to say that the dit da jow was not the stuff I'd been treated with years ago. And in fact the dit da jow I'd bought was in fact utterly useless. That's not to say it's all useless. I'd love to find a supplier of some decent stuff.

But what about the older person that hasn't trained for decades? It's a common thing to see on posters advertising martial arts clubs to specify an age range. Often that age range will be something like from 5 years to 105 years. Presumably nobody has ever tested the upper age limit. Or 'any age or ability' or such. Are such statements really valid? I keep an open mind, but if a 90 year old doddered into our hall on a walking frame, could they really become proficient in a very kick oriented style like TSD? I can't see it myself. Yet if that 90 year old can still move a bit without the walking aid, then they might make some progress with something like aikido. They may not do all the falls and rolls but they might do fine with the wrist locks and such.

If these are the same people that state they can stop someone or knock someone out without touching them (which I seem to remember they are) they are a joke. I buy into meditation to focus the mind, I buy into fasting because it does have health benefits but the whole celibacy thing (not for me). The whole no touch knockout and stopping someone with your mind is fake and utter nonsense. I don't care if you meditate, fast and abstain from sex your whole life, you can't knock someone out with your Chi. Pure bull pucky. I mean look here is the thing. We have had many seasoned MMA and combat sports champions and for all their fighting abilities, they lack a decent amount of flexibility. I mean heck, just a decade ago, MMA fighters looked down on boxing and judo while at one point, MMA was basically Muay thai, wrestling and BJJ. Now we are seeing fighters from different styles, fighters with flashy kicks and fighters that have the ability to embrace obscure techniques. Now this doesn't mean we get No touch fighters. But we have yet to see a fighter embrace the healthiest lifestyle that is based on deep meditation and abstaining from parties and loud toxic environment. ALL professional athletes embrace meditation and avoid things that will hinder them. Otherwise they'd just get beat. Meditation is any activity that focuses the mind onto a particular goal or objective. Shadow boxing is meditation. It is visualisation. A cyclist studying a map of the race route is meditating when he tries to tie what he sees on the map to what he saw when he rode the route a week before. Fasting - OK, that's not common practice. But what is the goal of fasting? To adjust the body chemistry to optimise blood sugar regulation? To initiate fat burning? To trick the body into banking energy in the form of glycogen next time you eat? Serious athletes do all of these things through carefully planned diet. Abstinence / celibacy - I'm not convinced there's any good science there. Meditation by the way is not something magical fancy thing. The shoalin monks meditate a lot. But they don't float up into the clouds or visit the astral plane or anything. They work on keeping the mind clear while holding very painful physically demanding body conditioning positions. It's the same when a westerner works til they feel like puking then keeps going anyway.

If it's any consolation, every instructor I've ever known, across several styles, has been something like you describe. Talking to friends in other clubs it sounds similar there too. By that I mean, sometimes it's like you just can't get anything right. Sometimes the best you can hope for us no reaction at all. In my experience, no reaction, even if your technique is still pretty terrible, means your instructor saw it and believes you are on the right track. In my experience, intervention usually happens when you do something that is the seed of a bad habit forming. To give an example. In our club, let's say we're practicing roundhouse kick. Nothing fancy, just the plain old mid section roundhouse. You might have one person repeatedly kicking really well. They have balance, speed, accuracy and control. Superficially it all looks good. But they are not pivoting their supporting foot say. Someone else in the line is wobbling about all over the place. They even stumble over a couple of times. It looks terrible. Who gets pulled up? Depending on other factors, I'd say most likely the first guy. Why? The guy that's wobbling all over the place is doing so because he's trying to get the hang of pivoting the supporting foot while engaging the hips. He's still rubbish at it but that's what he's practicing. If he keeps practicing that. In no time at all he'll have a good base for a roundhouse. The guy that superficially looked good is making no attempt to pivot his foot. He is just accepting that all the torsional stress is going through his knee and ankle joints. He is getting away with it for now because he hasn't developed power yet and he's still quite young, but left unchecked, once he develops a bit more power he's just going to rip his knee joint to bits. Of course this is just one example scenario. I think another factor that comes into play is that you are being trained to fight. That's every bit as much a mental thing as a physical thing. By that I mean you can get great big body builder types that get intimidated by skinny psychopaths. If you're not mentally prepared, you're not prepared no matter what physical ability you have. If someone attacks you and you do a half decent punch to their face, nobody is going to say well done. The fight us going to continue and you'll have to just keep doing it until one of you is defeated. If it is your attacker that is defeated, chances are still nobody will say well done, because real fights are horrible and nobody except a total psycho feels good about either being in one or witnessing it. So if nobody is going to say well done if it's for real, why should they when training? All of the above comes with a caveat. I think when it's young kids in question, praise is appropriate. But for adults, I think it should be used sparingly. And in most cases I don't think it means the instructor is a bad person.

Both my current style and my current teachers are OK for a good mix of abilities and points of emphasis. However, the style itself has its own biases. TSD has the obvious striking, but also has grappling and takedowns. To a much, much lesser extent it even has some ground work, although to be honest that's negligible. But, despite its range, TSD is very much biased towards kicking. Sure I could explore the hand techniques and grappling aspects to the nth degree, but I'd be largely training solo because my fellow students seem happy with the focus on kicking. To explore hand techniques and grappling more, I think I need to go elsewhere. Even for basic footwork. It's not the emphasis in TSD. Most of my positioning skill comes from my practice of other styles. Tai sabaki as practiced in aikido really freaks out my TSD friends in sparring. They're just not used to people moving in diagonals and pivoting, or walking into an attack and meeting it rather than blocking and retreating. It's all in TSD, but it's not where the emphasis is.

With respect, I'll add that to my list of terrible quotes along with, no pain no gain, pain is weakness leaving the body, and fall down seven times get up 8 times. Pain is evolutionary genius. Pain tells us that physical damage is being done. It's message is, 'keep doing that and you will develop life changing injury or you might even die'. Of course we don't learn that message often until we have actually caused significant damage to ourselves. One of the most highly regarded individuals in history, Mohamed Ali, worked through the pain. He realised that to be the best of the best in his game he needed more than the ability to keep punching. He needed to be able to absorb his opponents punches. In his prime he seemed indestructible. Towards the end he could barely even speak. His brain had just taken too many knocks. Sports science has moved on a lot in the last couple of decades. All the old pain related 'inspirational' sayings have long been discredited. Even in the field of combat sport we're seeing a shift towards sensible precautions. Pain is indeed a good teacher. It teaches us to stop doing things that are stupid. One Kick Wonder, I agree with you with respect to us learning about safe practices in training and the ability to understand our bodies and what they are telling us. I also agree that certain old practices were unsafe and should no longer be conducted because they can cause long term physical damage. However...I also believe that one of the most important things to develop is "toughness." The way I define toughness is a person's ability to overcome adverse mental and physical conditions. Being tough does mean falling down 7 times and getting up 8. If you are training for combat, life protection, or some other similar objective, you must train hard (but smart) to be ready for those situations. It is not a good idea that the first time you are confronted with a situation that is emotionally, psychologically, and physically painful is an actual violent and hostile encounter on the street. No matter what skills you may have learned in the Dojo, if you are not "tough" none of this will matter. Part of developing toughness is confronting pain in the Dojo (albeit controlled pain). I understand all that. Before I go on, you can't get up more times than you went down. That's just physics. Now that's out the way, I think where we disagree is on semantics. I personally make a distinction between pain and discomfort. Many do not make the same distinction. To me, discomfort is receiving a kick or punch or being taken down by someone who applies control and is not trying to break you. Discomfort is training til your muscles ache and you really want to stop but you keep going. Pain on the other hand is a signal from the body that something is being or has become damaged. Pain is a muscle ripping or a bone breaking or enough cells being ruptured to cause a substantial bruise which if hit again, may result in significant injury. You can develop 'toughness' without having to break things. In fact toughness counts for very little if you can't do very much because several joints are finished or your brain is mush.

The thing about chi is it is so misunderstood. It is so misunderstood because the shaolin cabaret brings so much money into China. Chi means something like, the energy we obtain from the air we breath. Even in its original meaning, it's nothing magic. It's the fact that we die if we don't breath, and don't die if we do breath.that simple. But because of the lack of direct translation it is somewhat open to interpretation. The shaolin dudes and folks like them twist it to make it appear like it's magic. When people see the shaolin monks doing seemingly superhuman things, what they don't see is a lifetime of intensive training and for every one that makes it, possibly hundreds more that don't.

Now in my mid 40s, try as I might, I can't kick as rapidly and repeatedly and accurately as I once could. That's OK though. My focus now is more on the joint locks and takedowns. They seem to work better for me. So much so I'm thinking of putting more aikido in my life and less of the high energy stuff. However, my motivation is my son. I want him to progress in martial arts. He has now power. He's only a kid. I know many aikido fans say it's not about strength but of course it is. In the dojo you might hit the exact spot every time with practice, but in the blind panic of a real situation you're going to need strength and weight to make many of the joint manipulation stuff work. If you're a kid with no strength and no weight but seemingly infinite energy, then the likes of TSD or TKD are ace. Get in fast, land a couple of strikes, get back out fast. That works better for skinny energetic lightweights than more heavy slower older folks. So this does get me thinking, are different styles more applicable at different life stages? Any thoughts?

I didn't realise this was Kano's criteria. I like it. It kind of fits with my opinion of different coloured belts in general. I concluded quite some time ago that coloured belts have no value at all, except to help visiting instructors who don't know anything about you personally, to quickly be able to tell who to pick to demonstrate on. The scenario is like to use as example is where a big strong athletic man in his prime gets picked out to be taken down. Without belts, he might look like a good candidate, able to take it. While the 60 year old rotund person might look at bit weak and vulnerable. Big man gets thrown, he panics and fights it. He suffers long term joint damage. Turns out it was only his third class. Now put belts on, our big man has a white belt and our frail looking rotund older person has a black belt with several stripes on it. Now things look very different indeed. Old chap gets picked, he dutifully falls down, rolls out, and lands back on his feet and bows.

Thinking about this some more, all martial artists meditate. That would include the most hardcore sceptical modernists. What differs is HOW they meditate, and whether they call it meditation. The tai chi guy might hold a pose for many minutes while focusing his mind on the sensation from his body. Or he might practice visualisation. The karate guy might practice kata repeatedly for a while, slowing it down and speeding it up to feel it. The MMA guy might practice his accuracy against a partner holding focus pads, or he might repeatedly practice a very short flow drill to develop the feel for a particular scenario that he feels he needs to improve on. It's all meditation. It's all focusing the mind on the task at hand in order to move closer to a particular goal.

Meditation is incredibly valid, and done right, will drastically improve your fighting ability. But not by some weird magical means. Meditation enables you to settle your mind sufficiently to have a greater control of what to focus on. The average untrained person is very inefficient in combat. They tense up muscles that don't need to be tense, thus wasting energy and slowing themselves down. They fire inappropriate shots from the wrong range, therefore again wasting energy but also offering their opponent an opening. The breath erratically and therfore don't maintain optimum oxygen levels in their blood so they start to burn out before they really ought to. Meditation allows us to breath better. That gives us a fitness boost for free in effect. We don't actually become fitter (that requires hard work as for everyone) but through better breathing you get best use of what fitness you already have. Meditation also allows you to better control your muscles. And the clarity of mind it offers gives you better judgement in the heat of the moment, enabling you to move better and choose better options. Nothing magical. It's just like uncluttering the mind so it can function better.

With respect, I'll add that to my list of terrible quotes along with, no pain no gain, pain is weakness leaving the body, and fall down seven times get up 8 times. Pain is evolutionary genius. Pain tells us that physical damage is being done. It's message is, 'keep doing that and you will develop life changing injury or you might even die'. Of course we don't learn that message often until we have actually caused significant damage to ourselves. One of the most highly regarded individuals in history, Mohamed Ali, worked through the pain. He realised that to be the best of the best in his game he needed more than the ability to keep punching. He needed to be able to absorb his opponents punches. In his prime he seemed indestructible. Towards the end he could barely even speak. His brain had just taken too many knocks. Sports science has moved on a lot in the last couple of decades. All the old pain related 'inspirational' sayings have long been discredited. Even in the field of combat sport we're seeing a shift towards sensible precautions. Pain is indeed a good teacher. It teaches us to stop doing things that are stupid.

Is the tai chi class combat oriented or is it more meditation and health oriented? If it's combat oriented, you'll get an awesome workout from there, and their style is not entirely dissimilar to wado. I left wado in favour of kung fu (tai chi based) years ago. I found the transition very easy and I also found that each style exposed strengths and weaknesses of each other. I found both styles to be very practical. Some tai chi schools start with massive great over exaggerated moves. That is only a teaching tool to get you used to the circular moves to generate more power while protecting your own joints. There was nothing flowery or showy in ours. It was just brutal dirty practical combat. Much like wado in many ways.

In this case if a student has a limitation with using their legs. Would the focus be more on joint locking and hand techniques? I ask because soon I will be helping my instructor with teaching but I have to be careful here. Like I don't want to impose some generic skill set and saying it's either done like that or your not qualified. On the other hand you can have a person with one healthy hand and that hand can be capable of destructive power. This will compensate for their handicap. My biggest fear would be is of I give the student false confidence. This would probably haunt me for life. But at the same time a person's sincere effort as well as dedication should be acknowledge since it is a winning trait and one that is becoming rare. I would be careful about calling it a handicap. The reason being that folks (such as myself) that have limitations in certain ways often think a lot more about how to work around the current limitations and avoid acquiring new ones. Whereas those still blessed with everything working properly often give little or no thought to how they might function if something breaks. Within our class, for example, if you say to a training partner 'yes but what if ...? The response you get differs between those, even at black belt, who have a fully working body, and those even at lower grades who have something that doesn't work. The former group will often look confused, having clearly never thought much beyond the actual technique, while the latter group will often enthusiastically agree to explore all the ins and outs. Incidentally I prefer working with the latter group, because they're experience and outlook is often much more closely aligned to actual real life. Often those of us with such limitations don't consider ourselves to be handicapped. Sure it would be great to take all the experience gained from having that limitation then somehow magically take that limitation away. So I'm not saying it's a good thing to have physical limitations. But it's not always a handicap. Handicap suggests automatic disadvantage. Those of us with limitations don't necessarily see ourselves as at a disadvantage.

Hmm. Good question. For me, a black belt should understand core principles and be able to put them together instinctively. If I were to pick one thing, that would be it. We all know that martial art is about getting maximum result for minimum work. That's where principles rather than techniques come in. I think techniques are just example applications of principles. We practice throwing roundhouse kicks to the jaw line. That is a technique. Not everyone can do it, and even those that can, can't do it in all circumstances. But it covers many principles. Target selection for maximum effect, balance, footwork, positioning, hip rotation for power etc etc.

Funakoshi wrote all about the reasoning behind his naming of the forms. Apparently many of them were already known by several different names depending on who you asked and where they'd trained. More than that, many of the written names had several possible translations. Funakoshi chose the names based on his own interpretation of them. An example being pyung ahn which he renamed heian because pyung ahn doesn't translate as accurately and unambiguously as heian. The point I'm trying to make is that the 'shotokan kata' are actually just forms adopted by Funakoshi when he set about packaging up and formalising karate. He didn't make them. The already existed. All with many variants and many names. So if someone wants to take the 'shotokan kata' and change a few bits and rename it, is that really what they are doing? Or are they looking at older/other interpretations that already existed in Funakoshi's day? Even if they did take the shotokan ones and tweak them and rename them, is that such a bad thing? We have the same thing in TSD (although few will admit it). But because TSD likes to put more emphasis on kicks than anything else, some bits that started off as footwork or simply low kicks, suddenly became bigger kicks but otherwise it's the same forms.

Are there any clubs covering styles other than karate in your area? Do you specifically want karate? In my experience sometimes changing styles is a good thing even for your primary style, as often they shed new light from a different perspective that makes previous stuff you learned make more sense.

I love to hear, please because I love to hear a good martial arts story based on eccentric and mysterious characters. There was once a kid that got knocked down by a bigger young man after the kid tried to mess with the young man's girlfriend. So the kid found a wise old Japanese caretaker who happened to secretly know karate. To cut a long story short, the old man agreed to teach the kid karate. But to the kids surprise and frustration, the old man just got the kid to do chores like polishing his collection of classic cars and painting the fence. Naturally soon enough the kid had had enough. So he confronted the old man. At which point the old man proceeded to attack the kid, while asking the kid to mimic the various chores. To the kids surprise and delight, he discovered he now knew karate.