battousai16

you gotta' love a good story but striking out in reaction to being startled like that is one thing. it's another to throw a spinning back fist when someone walks up behind you and asks you for a pencile.... y'know... or some such thing.

oh, i'm not here to keep you anywhere, especially if it's not where you want to be. i was just surprised, is all.

...sounds like "simple" pressure point fighting to me... dim mak-ish stuff... perhaps i'm mistaken?

i'll never forget the first time i saw a... i think it was a hawk... huh, maybe if forgot after all... anyway, take out a little rabbit. me, my best friend, and his little sister were there, and we were walking about, and we saw this bunny. one second it's there, and then WHAM! the girl is screaming, my buddy and i are laughing, and it was just all in all really cool. and you have to admire the octupus, if for know other reason than because it can open a mason jar. how cool is that!?! yeah, i dig the octopus

i remember my first test. the sensei pulled me to the side after class, said "ben, i think you're ready to advance". he held some pads, and i did my techniques, my blocks, and my form. it was all about 10-15 minutes. he then went up to my dad, charged him money for a belt and a pair of kali sticks (we started that at yellow), and that was it. i always liked that, since it was mostly judged on my over all skill in class and my progress, and not so much on my performance on a set day, where people tend to train just a little bit harder, when they should have been training that hard all along. and it took out those often ludicrous testing fees. we never had a "standard" test until black belt, which i always thought was a good thing. a shame that school shut down

...you train in MT and FMA and you've NEVER sparred!?! how long have you been training? that probably has very much to do with it, as i've always though that MT and filipino stuff has quite a bit of sparring involved. at any rate, i think that if you pull your punches in sparring and do nothing else, you'll pull your punches "on the street" (i hate saying that. has anyone seen napolean dynamite? with the Rex Kwon Do guy? i feel like him ). but your other training should be a factor in this, ie: bag work, pad drills, etc. there are 3 major types of sparring (point, medium contanct, and heavy contact), and you have to do all 3 to be really effective, IMO.

i think master jules hit the nail on the head. be relaxed and have fun. if you have the whole bunch of fun you're meant to had, even if you do abysmally, it still wont be all bad, and you'll hopefully have a good story to share with the lot of us if you don't, even if you do really well but not quite up to your own standards, it'll ruin your whole day, and probably your whole day after that. so yeah, be relaxed, have fun, and be good and loud and really confident, because judges hate having to strain to hear you. oh, and don't forget to yell. no sense having people think you scored by accident, just as they're no sense feeling bad about scoring a point by accident. best to just make all your strikes intentional, and you'll be that much better for it

i dunno' y'all, i've found that even if judges see you've screwed up, you still have the shot of impressing them by not pausing or changing your facial expression. and besides, i don't know how much i enjoy having a judge not from my style. it's nice having everyone on an open playing field, but little nuances like striking surfaces and chambers that are unique to the style go unchecked. maybe that's just WI tourneys and y'all are more organized about that...?

ah dang it, i hate it when i miss stories at any rate, that would be all well and good, but s/he said "particularly the higher belts", which means a) not just her and b) implies they've been at this for awhile. unless by "higher belts" she means green or the like, i took it to assume brown, red, etc. in which case no, i don't think that's normal. at least it hasn't happened to me. i'm not an especially jumpy person, and people approach me from behind all the time, which isn't to say, of course, that i never know they're there, and i generally know the lay out of the room and where the exits are (my perception of awareness), but if you live your life paranoid, you're gonna' be tense, which will probably hurt you more than help you, and you'll certainly miss out on a lot of fun, which always sucks. y'all should probably work on that, before someone at work taps you on the shoulder and BAM!

a month or so. y'know, not to get it perfect, but to get it competent. the key is to stay relaxed; if you tense up, it makes it truly difficult to move at all. just stay relaxed and stay fluid. remember to turn your shoulders all the way around. when i started learning i had my arms out in a "chicken wing" fashion, so i could see how far i was turning my shoulders (turn them farther than you need to. turn the shoulders and the body will follow) AND so i could make sure i was jumping straight up. if you angle your body, you'll veer off to the side, which makes it sloppy. think helecoptor rotor. once you have that down, keep your arms in so you'll spin faster, and, of course, tuck in the back leg. what really helped me practice wise was to do five in a row. because the momentum from the last kick moves you spinning into the next one, you can see what kind of rotation you need and what it feels like. just out of curiosity, when you do the jump spin do you kick with the heel or the side of your foot?

we sweep all the time in HRD, in fact, we're encouraged to do so. but, like SS, only at the ankle, never at the knee.

"as a general rule, those who call themselves "artists" usually aren't..." just because jackie chan says he's not a martial artist dosen't necessarily make it so. personally, i think that humility is what takes him above and beyond. but that's just me and my own naive thinking

as far as the name goes, i bothered more by the "X" than the "MA". the whole concept is bastardized by the "extreme" band wagon. bah! but, y'know, my point was that i've yet to talk to anyone who refers to XMA as a fighting art, including the practitioners. it's just something fun to do. as for the sinbad thing... y'know...he's sinbad. i wouldn't take him as the definitive word on the arts. oh, and agreed, the uniforms are butt ugly.

"why did she say that you would't become a doctor?" i think more than anything she recognized that my desire to be a doctor really wasn't a passion as much as it was just an option that i might enjoy; thus, i wouldn't be able to compete with the passionate people.

i wanted to be a doctor for a while. on career day in my highschool, you have to call in a person from your desired occupation and interview them. mine said i would never make it into the med school program. although brutally frank and a bit rude, she's probably right, and it saved me a bit of time. so uh... i guess the point is know what you're getting into.

ha, back to school is a classic; one of my all time favorites, if not just because my favorite author has a cameo god knows i'm gonna' miss him...

wow... i wonder why we don't have very many XMA people around here... you'd think we'd have more, what with y'all being so welcoming and all and, for the record, there's an XMA school here in madison. the instructor does indeed say it's not a fighting art, but rather a performance art. he offers self defense-ish stuff for those who want to learn it, but most people just go there for the fun of it and the exhileration. and as long as that's the case, i don't see a problem with it. some people like to learn how to shatter someones skull, some people like to learn how to do pretty butterfly kicks, somepeople like both. . that said, i've seen it under some people style indicator thingy, so i know they're around. they're probably hiding from sasori te and mu ryuk

well good, i'm glad you shared that with us

of course! not to mention the older stuff that didn't make the cd! did you ever read james clavelle's shogun? i think we may have to have a thank you system similar to that one for the gift of zero gravity, eh?

http://www.karateforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=12199 and i think a mod has to come around and do it.

YES! finally someone sees it my way! take THAT, kchenault! i think the last time someone asked this question, it was decided that the spectators won. but yeah... my votes still on batman

i must say, i'm almost insulted that you think that just because we're young, we don't know who peter frampton is. granted, he's been reduced to guest spots on the drew carey show and the simpsons, but that dosen't make him any less influential and all around awsome. yeah, we know what record players and 8 tracks are, too. some of us even have 'em y'know, not to get to far off topic...

ha, that's the only episode of kim possible i've ever seen. i was watching my cousins and they insisted. it wouldn't have been so bad, of course, had they not made some crack about me looking like him, and it's kind of become a running joke, much to my displeasure. as to paulie zink, i've come across his name a few times, and i've seen some videos of hin, but that's about it, really. he kind of looks like a guy i used to know, actually...

"Its just common sense, and not everyone in Australia is a bowie-knife weilding crocodile dundee, so the use of weapons in street altercations usually only occur in muggings and similar crimes. " oh...i'll be damned... and here i thought you were just a nation of paul hogans

y'know, in my experience, people who obtain a pair of nunchaku and try to train them on there own always end up smacking themselves in the head a bit to many times and end up getting discouraged. if anything, i'd say that would be a good idea to weed out the dumb people