aefibird

Like you said, mmafighter, you're interested in cross-training, so whay not go for that? BJJ, karare, kenpo, krav maga, JKD, wing chun, jyu-jitsu, judo, muay thai - try mixing up those. You've had MA experience, so you know what its like to train, so go along to a few of the clubs in your area (you're pretty lucky, BTW to have a lot of martial arts clubs in your area! I wish there were plenty near me...)and check them out. Sort the good from the bad and give the good ones a try! On the matter of fitness, I'd try and have a fitness program outside of your MA training - techniques can't really be learned effectively if you spent a lot of the lesson doing fitness stuff. However, lots of MA training will help to get you fit anyway!

If you want a primarily striking art then how about trying karate, kempo or TKD. Personally, though, I'd recommend you go and check out the clubs in your area - go and watch a lesson with each one and speak to the instructor. Then make up your mind based on what you have seen. There's no point in deciding that you want to do judo (for example) before you've seen what the club is like. It may be a bad club with a bad reputation - in which case you'd have to look at something else maybe. Go and have a look and maybe try a lesson. Only you really know what you're capable of and what you're looking for in a martial art. Don't forget to let us know how you get on, though! Good luck with your 'quest'.

Yesterday I went to a karate competition (broke my big toe in the kumite, but that's another story...) and there were loads of children there (as there usually are at karate comps). Some of them were as young as 4 or 5 and a lot of the children aged around 7/8 seemed to have black belts. This got me thinking about children doing karate. What age do people think it's right to let children start training? Should they be training at all or should they have to wait until 16/18ish, say, to be able to begin the martial arts. I know a large proportion of most clubs are filled with junior students, but do people think this is right? My sensei refuses to take any child to teach under the age of 9. Is this a good age to start karate or not?

Ditto for Shotokan. It's all in the legs and the hips/rotation of the hips. A lot of power comes from the calf muscles too, transferred up through the hips. Hmm, most people have mentioned hip power...do ya think there's a bit of a theme going on here?!?!?

CONGRATULATIONS Darce! Well done on getting your orange belt!

hey I assumed it was a friendly sparring session. If it was meant to be full contact then fair enough you take your chance as for hitting them back in the groin, notice my winking face? I was joking m8! revenge in this context has no place outside of films It was a friendly sparring session= basic one-step kumite. I got caught with a kekome that was a bit high - he should have been aiming for my stomach! I know that in full contact you take your chances (and when I compete I'm fully aware of the risks involved), however, I didn't think that I'd really need protection just for a small session of ippon kumite. Thanks everyone for your replies and info on manufacturers!

Ah, so it's not just me who does that, then... Bo kata with a pool cue - it would certainly make a stir in competition!! Fancy starting a 'pool cue kata team' stl_karateka??

So do the Okinawan styles of karate continue to use weapons? And have any 'Japanese' styles of karate adapted to include traditional weaponary? I'm interested in learning to use traditional weapons, but obviously I can't do that in Shotokan because we don't train with them. Unless you count sweeping the dojo with a broom as weapons training... LOL Thanks.

After getting a nipple burst open last week during training (all I can say is OWWWWW) I've decided to buy a chest protector. However, I don't know what sort to get. Can anyone recommend a good type/make to buy, preferably one that I can get hold of in the UK... Thanks!

https://www.fudebakudo.com Very funny website!

You know you’re Martial Art’s mad when… You slice vegetables etc for cooking and use a Katana. You play football and attack the ball with mawashi geri. You sweep the yard with a broom and end up practising Bo katas. You greet someone and say "Oss" and bow. Your house is a dojo with a sleeping bag in the corner. You remove your shoes and bow before entering a building/room. Your absent-minded doodles turn out to be Japanese kanji. People ask you a simple question and you answer with a Zen-like riddle. Someone shakes your hand and you can't resist putting them in a wristlock. You try to train your cat in the art of ninjutsu etc and encourage it to walk silently across rice paper. You teach your budgie to recite the Dojo Kun. You don't walk in your sleep...you practise kata. You go shopping and practise techniques on the clothes mannequins when no one is looking. You kneel down and automatically sit in Seiza. You look at everything in your house and think how it could be used as a weapon..

Wow, I can hardly believe anyone would be dumb enough to say that to a senior instructor!! I bet they never said anything like that again....

Shortly after a friend of mine started karate she bought a hamster and named it Kiai. It's a vicious, evil little (bleep), just like my sensei on a bad day... LOL! j/k Kiai the hamster is now the 'mascot' of Swinton Shotokan Karate Club!! I own a pair of cockatiels - Heian and Yondan (named after my favourite Heian kata). I had to take Heian to the vets a couple of months ago as he had an eye infection; it was funny to see the look on the receptionists face as I told her his name and then explained whay he was called Heian!!

LOL!! That was excellent! Also scarily possible too, knowing what the EU are like... heh heh

That's very good and prett funny too! *makes a not to remember to try that out on a couple of people at work...* heh heh heh

I pay £3 per session (about 1 hour & 20 mins), which I think is extraordinarily good value for the standard of instruction that I've recieved from my sensei. Between about £3 and £5 is average for MA classes in the area I live in, unless you go to the only commercial purpose-built dojo in my area, where thay charge £8.50 for 3/4 of an hour of TKD. It's always packed in there too, so people obviously think that 'you get what you pay for' and are willing to pay the extra just because of that principle. In that club's case you DO get what you pay for - the instructors are excellent (and one of them drinks in the same pub as me and regularly buys me a drink, so he's alright by me!! lol), but sadly, with MA, higher instruction prices don't always mean better instruction. On a related issue, do most people pay 'up-front' for a month at a time or do people pay session by session? Also, when you started in MA did you get your training suit thrown in with your first lesson/block of lessons? Recently, I've noticed more clubs offering 'package deals' of a block of x number of lessons plus a free suit for x number of pounds. Do people think this is a good thing or not?

If you really want to train in aikido then I'd go for it. Even though your weekly sessions may be short, then it will be worth it if you are dedicated to learning this MA. If you do plenty of practise at home too then you will improve what you learn in the dojo and this will help you in future lessons. Good luck with your quest to start aikido! I'd like to train in aikido too, however my nearest club is an hour and a half drive away from where I live.

I always wanted to do martial arts, but my parents would never let me, which is VERY hypocritical, as both my dad and my brother have trained in judo (a slipped disc finished my dad from training, my brother is still training, though I can kick his butt in a fight! lol ). I first started shotokan because a friend of mine had recently started karate and she showed me her first kata one day. I saw it and was hooked! So I went along with her to training and have never looked back and I'm about to take my black belt in a few weeks time (eeek!!). I joined because of a friend and continued because of the love for karate.

That's very good advice. I've been training shotokan for about 3 and 1/2 years and I'd like to think that I could carry on indefinately, but who knows? Anything could happen to prevent me from training - my sensei could retire from teaching, I could move to another part of the country without a shotokan dojo nearby, I could have a serious injury that could force me to stop training. I hope that none of the above happen, because I'd like to keep training in shotokan for as long as I can. However, you've got to keep an open mind. I might even start another style of martial art and 'prefer' that to shotokan and therefore give up the shotokan. I can't ever see that one happening, but you never know! Anything is possible, especially in the martial arts world!!

Mostly striking first, as karate is a striking art. However it depends on your sensei. Plus, there are examples of grabs, throws and locks within kata bunkai, so if you train in bunkai then it's likely that you'll do those as well as 'regular' striking.

True. Karate aint a democracy. Whatever a sensei says in their dojo goes. If you train with more than one person, though, it can be pretty confusing trying to remember who 'allows' what in their dojo. Ah well, just another hurdle to overcome on the road to karate 'enlightenment'! lol

I train in shotokan and some of the fights I've both seen and taken part in have been pretty brutal.Blood-splattered gi's ahoy! LOL Sometimes shotokan can seem a bit slow or lacking in techniques but if you look carefully at the style there's a lot more to it that reverse punching and a couple of kicks. My sensei is a 5th dan in shotokan, 3rd dan in goju-ryu, 1st dan in kyokushinkai and has also trained in isshin-ryu, wado-ryu, judo, aikido and jyu-jitsu, as well as starting his own style of freestyle self-defense. (How he managed to find time for all of that I don't know...) He says that he thinks shotokan is one of the hardest forms of karate to understand, as everything is 'hidden', especially with kata. A lot of the techniques within shotokan katas can be hard to see how they'd be useful in a real fight situation, until they are broken down and studied carefully, which is what my sensei has been doing for the past 30 years! Other people may disagree, but (even though I only have limited MA experience, about 3 and 1/2 years shotokan) I can see that shotokan is an effective form of self defence, just as much as other martial arts. It's just that some arts suit certain people and not others. You have to go with what suits you best.

I train in shotokan and my sensei (5th dan) doesn't encourage us to breath audibly. However, the head of my organisation (6th dan)does say you should be able to hear someone breathe loudly when they're performing a kata. A third sensei (3rd dan) that I know says that you should be able to hear a person breathe when they're doing kata, but that it shouldn't be very loud.... Very confusing! I think that a lot of the time its up to individual sensei's what they teach according to who they have trained with in the past.

Thanks everyone for your replies - very interesting comments! Good luck with your orange belt, Darce.

The website is VERY annoying, but the club itself seems to be pretty decent. Go along and take a look, it can't hurt!