Gloi

Hah - that explains it. I'd no idea about the rules of baseball having never played/watched it. Thanks.

I've seen this quiz before and still have no idea what this means :- 4. How many outs are there in an inning? What on earth is an inning. I know that innings are 6 balls in cricket but that's all I can think of.

It's always good to have some ammunition for a future date, though whether I'd ever be brave enough to use it myself is questionable. Both the instructor and his assistant have memories like elephants and everything is accumulated to be used against you later. The other day an incident was brought up which had happened to one of the (now) senior black belts after a training session twenty years ago. (He was a brown belt at the time and was helping a visiting top sensei reverse his car out of the car park when he managed to direct him into backing it into the wall) I do think there is good humour behind it all but boy , they can't resist a dig at any opportunity.

http://www.kamaeinternational.com/ do chest guards that seem to be quite good if you can get one to fit.

Our instructor is very strict and gruff. If anyone leaves their mobile phones on in their bags while the class is on, and the phone goes off he goes spare with them. We had a grading on wednesday night. Halfway through one group of people doing their basics for the grading a phone went off. You could see everyone looking around thinking 'Somebody is going to be for it now!' and checking for their phones in alarm. The instructor was glaring around looking who it was when he realised it was his own phone! We all cracked up it was just so funny. His assistant will never let him forget it, I'm sure.

I bought the book that's for sale on that website - Excellent!

Pair the kids up. Get them to put their hands behinds their backs and stand on their left leg. Get them to put their right ankles together then push or move the foot about trying to get the other person to put their other foot down. When one has put the other foot down change legs and go again. When everyone has got the hang of it you can do it as a knockout competition. You have to make sure the kids only use their foot on the other persons leg below the knee not go mad shoulder charging each other though. It can get to be a very tiring game and good for developing balance.

Have a look around these sites and you will find some interesting stuff about kata applications http://www.iainabernethy.com/ http://www.kissakikarate.com/

You will probably find that as you progress through the grades two things will happen. Firstly you (and hopefully your mate ) will learn to block by deflecting the blow rather than crunching against it and you won't have as many clonking together type of blocks. Secondly your arms and legs will get more used to the impacts and won't bruise or hurt QUITE as much. You shouldn't really be having to take full contact blows to the chest from someone as a kyu grade in Shotokan. An occasional accidental hard blow is one thing but not as a matter of course.

We usually do it for about 2 minutes at the end of each class. Unfortunately I'm usually thinking ... "Ow, I hate kneeling like this, my foot's gone dead, ow cramp, can we stop now?"

They sell it in the chemist, I've normally found it on the shelf near the sports antiperspirants. What it is is a liquid which is a gum rosin in solution (or something similar) and you put it on your hands before playing squash, so when you get sweaty hands the raquet doesn't fly out of your grip. When you put it on it doesn't feel sticky but as it dries it leave a non slip surface on your hands. I don't know what country you are in but in the UK they have it in Boots & Tesco and I've seen a couple of brands on the shelf.

How about trying the stuff you can get to put on your hands to stop them getting slippy with sweat when playing squash and tennis. I have some and it feels like it could work on the feet too, though it might make them too grippy for when doing roundhouse kicks etc. It's some sort of resin in a liquid form that I have.

Make sure you look up the martial arts classes and all the societies for the things you are even remotely interested in. All the first years are in the same position of mot knowing anyone so you'll soon get to know lots of new friends.

I say go for it. You are more likely to regret not doing something than doing it.

Doing Shotokan, when I started we were told the Japanese names for techniques, followed by the English name. They do that with the beginners and then after a while we just use the Japanese names for everything. I'm quite happy with this. I've done TKD and there they use English names for everything, just occasionally they would say a Korean name for something. The only problem there was that they use different Engllish names for some things. The good thing about using the Japanese names has occurred for me when I have had to work abroad. I know that even if I don't know any of the language I can go to a karate class and be able to follow what is going on. The opposite has occurred when I went to a TKD school while I was working in the Middle East. The class was taken in Arabic with the Korean terms used for the names of the techniques. Because I wasn't used to the names I could only follow what was going on by watching what the other people were doing and it was pretty confusing.

I spent a year as a white belt before testing because I was nervous of doing a grading. Since then I have always graded every time I was eligible. The instructor would tell you if you were eligible by the amount of time spent training but not good enough to grade and he often tells the juniors to wait until a later grading. I think that if your instructor thinks you are ready to grade and you do not do it then it comes across as either you are afraid to do the grading or that you think that your opinion of your skills is better than your instructors - in which case ; if you know better than them why are you going to them for your training? We have a few people who are long past the date they could have graded but have not and they say they do not want to take it until they are certain they will pass. I think though if they took it, the worst that could happen would be that they failed and were told what they needed to work on, and if they don't take it well they'll never move on. I know one person who has been eligible to go for their shodan for 7 years and constantly finds an excuse to put off taking it.

I would suggest that she joins a normal gym for a while to improve here fitness and to get used to exercising. The gym I go to has all the cardio machines and plenty of beginners aerobics classes. When she has got back into the routine of exercising then would be a good time to look for a martial arts class, and to find a school where there are other older adults with similar problems, not a bunch of super flexible teenagers. Going back into an art like jujitsu or aikido would probably be better rather than something like TKD where it could get demoralising not being able to keep up with young supple and fit people.

How about this for a strange thing to happen. A class was taking place with some blackbelts who were sparring with the aim of the exercise being to try and take the opponent to the floor. Suddenly one of the women does a back flip and crashes to the floor. Her partner couldn't understand what had happened as he hadn't touched her. She couldn't work out what had gone on at first either. What she had done was she had seen a flash of black and grabbed at it thinking to grab the other person's belt as part of a throw. She had actually managed to grab her own foot with a black training shoe on it and ended up throwing herself. Duh!

"You fight pretty good for an old man" This was actually said as a complement by one of the kids. The instructor is just over 40.

Never been knocked out in martial arts. One time I got hit and went groggy and threw up, but never knocked out. However as a kid I was knocked out by a swing, falling off a slide and hitting my head on the floor, once coming off my bike and twice coming off while showjumping on the horse.

I train with a bunch of not too young people and almost everybody trains in contact lenses. I normally wear throw away contact lenses but occasionally train in my glasses but take them off for sparring. This is because from experience I know just how much it hurts when someone bashes them from the side and the glasses take the hit onto the bridge of your nose. I'm quite short sighted so sparring without them is a novel experience as the opponent doesn't come into focus until they get into range to hit them ot they've hit you!!

I did something very similar a couple of months ago. I kicked and knocked my big toe into the other persons shin as they kicked and it made a real loud crack and hurt a lot. The next day it was sore and swollen at the joint and I think it must have partially dislocated and then popped back in again. It took about 2 weeks to be totally recovered. When I have broken toes (fortunately not the big toe) There was a lot more vivid bruising in the first day or 2 after it was done where the blood vessels in the bone have been bleeding. Of course the thing to do if you aren't happy with it is to go and get it x-rayed.

I used to have a lot of problems with holding my breath when concentrating too hard or when I was anxious. I had a real problem when sparring and would almost pass out during grading tests due to not beathing properly due to tension. The key of course is to relax and I am slowly getting better at this as time goes by. (How an instructor expects you relax when he walks up behind you, slaps you on the shoulders and screams "RELAX!!!" down your ear I'll never quite understand though) I've found it helpful to work on different breathing patterns when doing kata. Firstly breathing out on each technique as major_mokuto said before, but also doing it in another was - Breathing in on any blocks/receiving techniques and out on the punches/attacks. Doing it this way gives a different feel/flow to the kata. Going through a very basic kata in this way I find helps with keeping a relaxed breathing through it.

At our school teenagers are allowed to go in the adult class as well as the junior class when they reach 3rd kyu level in their training. They are expected to work as hard as the adults though and if they aren't up to it sent back to the junior class.

Although there is only one version of gojushiho in shorin ryu in shotokan there are two general versions of Gojushiho: Gojushiho Sho and Gojushiho Dai. Gojushiho Dai is the original version, while Gojushiho Sho was introduced by Yasutsume Itosu.