AngelaG

Just for curiosity: When you went for gradings did you find that time and experience eased your nerves, or did the increased pressure mean that your nerves got worse? Time did not help me at all. The higher the grade = the worse the nerves at the grading.

Tension is used to stop the punch or kick before you hyper-extend your knee or elbow. Each move should be fluid until the very last bit, when you then lockdown every muscle for a fraction of a second to stop everything swinging wildly around and give the kata focus (kime). Like everything else too much tension is a bad thing and not enough tension is a bad thing. Tension will slow you down. I often find that big built blokes are full of tension, relying on strength rather than technique, whereas gangly people (especially teens growing into their bodies) often have too little tension and therefore look wild. When we are working on tension we will practice our kata in 3 different ways. First of all with maximum tension as slow as possible. Every single muscle in your body is tight. This gives you the feeling of what tension really feels like. If you are doing this properly by the 3rd move you should be sweating and feeling quite tired. If it's too easy really try and concentrate on tightening every muscle, including bum cheeks, stomach, legs etc. Secondly we do the kata with no tension at all. As fast and whippy as possible, not worrying about where the moves stop, so that we can feel what flow and fluidity feel like. After that we try and combine the two and get the feeling of the fluidity through every move, right up until the last bit and then, BAM, we throw the tension in to stop the move dead in its track. You should now know what kind of feeling you are looking for. It's worth while noting that if you are hitting a bag (or someone) there is actually no tension needed as the impact will stop you before you get anywhere near hyper-extending. As Force=Mass x Acceleration (F=MA) you don't want anything like tension slowing down your speed as it will reduce the force with which you hit. It's very important to learn to relax when hitting and not become too "shouldery" and start to rely on brute strength rather than technique.

Have you looked into this particular school? It just may be the worst martial arts school- EVER. Of course theres nothing wrong with making a profit on what you teach, but if what you teach isnt what you claim it to be, thats a different story altogether. As far as people paying what they think its worth bear in mind that the majority of the public does NOT know a whole lot about fighting and martial arts- its VERY easy to decieve people and by telling them you can make them high and mighty, anyone will pay anything for that. But the fact that hes got a nice car or anything like that means nothing- I know of a TKD school around me that has close to 300 students at $79 a month- completely affordable for anyone and plenty of money for him. Theres nothing wrong with that. Of course I haven't trained at that school. I am not assuming it is a fantastic school, but neither am I assuming that just because it is a for profit school and that the Instructor drives a nice car that it is a bad school. All I am saying is that one cannot make any assumptions about it unless one actually goes and train there yourself. If you don't like it you move on and find somewhere you do like. There are obviously plenty of people that do find it somewhere they want to be, and something they want to spend their money on, We cannot be the dojo police and tell people where they can or can't be training. If we find it a McDojo of the highest order that is up to us, but we should not be treating other people like under-educated morons and try to save them from themselves. The truth is some people want McDojo type karate!! Oh the horror!

I've been trying to convince all my junior students that they REALLY want to buy me a box of Maltesers or a Tobelrone for Christmas I find it totally appropriate MMM chocolate.

I'll try to do a brief explanation of 5 element theory. The body has lots of pressure points, these are the areas that acupuncturists use to heal when they jab their needles in, and that martial artists use to harm when they jab their fists in. Each pressure point has a meridian name depending on the characteristics it shows and the pressure points are joined by the meridians (like dot to dot), each point is also either Yin or Yang: Yang if the meridian goes to the head, Yin if it doesn’t. The meridians are as follows: Yang Stomach (Earth) Large Intestine (Metal) Gall Bladder (Wood) Small Intestine (Fire) Triple Burner (Fire) Bladder (Water) Yin Spleen (Earth) Lung (Metal) Liver (Wood) Heart (Fire) Pericardium (Fire) Kidney (Water) The names in brackets after the meridians are the element assigned to them. As you can see they all have elemental pairs .e. Yang Earth (Stomach) and Yin Earth (Spleen) – except for the Fire element which has 2 elemental pairs. 5 element theory is easier to explain with a diagram but imagine a circular diagram with the five elements placed around it going (clockwise) Wood – Fire – Earth – Metal – Water. (Constructive cycle) Acupuncturists will use the pressure points this way to heal people i.e. from a Fire pressure point to an Earth pressure point. A martial artist however can utilise the diagram in the other direction to get harmful effects from them. I.e. hitting a Fire point and then hitting a Wood point. (Fire burns Wood). (Going the wrong way around the constructive cycle) Moreover it can get more complicated if you imagine the circle bisected by lines, like a pentagram. This is the Destructive Cycle, and it works by jumping across elements. So the Destructive cycle would go: Wood – Earth – Water – Fire – Metal. These too will also get a nasty affect if you hit points in this order. I’d recommend Patrick McCarthy’s Bubishi to see diagrams of the points (Although the Triple Warmer and Pericardium are labelled up the wrong way). Or the free online .Pdf book I posted in the other thread in here. After that you can label them up in their elemental pairs yourself and put whether they are Yin or Yang – and experiment with effects. Be careful though, playing with pressure points is dangerous and should only be done very, very lightly with a willing partner, and with a trained first aider and someone who knows a bit about energetic KOs and revival.

We are taught to have our hands up in a passive gesture (palms out), to say something along the lines of "I don't want to fight!".. This way your hands are up and ready should you need to strike but you look as though you are trying to calm the situation down, and everyone has heard you say that you don't want to fight. People's memories are faulty, they often won't remember who hit who first especially if the strikes are fast and it's over quickly, but something said in a loud and clear voice is more likely to stick in their mind.

Open hand techniques are usually illegal - so that means that a doing a shuto to the head could get you disqualified.

No they don't. That is just how some people choose to interpret them. Why would you ever do two moves (block/strike) when you can do one (strike). All you are doing is giving them time to hit you again. I would recommend that you read "Reflex Violence" by Earle Montaigue. He has a section describing the "Rules for Fighting". Rule number 4, Never use two steps in fighting. I'll quote a small section: "You must make your defence your attack. Never block, then attack, make your block your attack. His subconscious switches tell him that you will attack next after you have blocked. But if your block becomes your attack, he has not had time to think about it. You have attacked him during the time that he is supposed to attack you!."

Sometimes it is a case of how you visualise it to get the effect you want, rather than what is physically actually happening.. If I feel that my punch is coming from the centre of the earth (any punch) I can almost imagine that I have the weight of the entire planet behind my punch.

For heaven's sake! At what point did it become a crime to actually earn some money doing something you like? Seems to me like there's an awful lot of jealousy around. At least an instructor who makes a profit is not going to have to shut down unexpectedly because of lack of funding. The likelihood is that they will be able to put on more lessons a week as well. And as for screwing people out of money... no one FORCES anyone to pay for these lessons. People pay whatever they think it's worth, if they don't think it's worth it they will find somewhere else which does fit with their expectations. Just because someone drives a nice car does not make them bad people! Just because they are full time instructors does not make them bad people, nor does it mean that their instruction will necessarily be poor. Stop believing what you are spoon fed and start thinking for yourselves! Life is not so simple - it is not black and white, there are shades of grey everywhere!

Really? That is very interesting, since when has cost been any reflection on quality when it comes to MA. That's a very blinkered view to take. Still I guess it is a far too common thing, in my view, for martial artists to come to unresearched harsh critical decisions about other martial artists.

You grade to get a white belt?

For training I think playing with ki in relation to karate is very possible and can be a very interesting exercise. However in a real self-defence situation you won't have time to meditate, or build up ki using the normal methods and therefore in that respect it is a bit defunct. However you can use 5 element theory to take away the opponents ki and therefore weaken them - which has the same overall affect of building up one's own ki. There are a few exercises you can try though. Try aplying centre lock or striking someone, then lift up your heel so that the pressure is on the front of your foot (activating Kidney 1) and then try again. see if you get any difference.

What do you mean by Ki? Are you talking about utilising something such as 5 element theory? Or building up ki and using it against someone, or taking away an opponent's ki etc? Could you clarify a bit more please?

I wear some of my lightweight gi trousers in bed. Wouldn't swim in them though, far too heavy for starters. I take good care of my heavyweight ones though, they are too expensive to keep on replacing.

Careful! You're gonna get me all embarrassed! Thank you for your kind words.

Bad luck mate

Good luck! I work in Exeter! I train in Torbay though.

Not online at the moment, but I can do one for you.

Golden rule: Avoid siblings sparring with one another!

Our sparring stance looks nothing like that. We bend our back leg to lower our stance even more (less target area) and we are taught to use one hand to protect our head and one to protect our body. The people in the picture are far too "rooted", they would never be able to move out of the way quickly from there - I suspect it is nothing more than a pose for the photo.

Pressure points are the icing on the cake of a good technique. You can still hurt without them and if you never study them it does not mean that you cannot be an effective fighter, but if you do get them then suddenly it all becomes a lot more effective and simpler. They also level the playing field. However you also need to train in everything else or you will never get in a position where you can target a pressure point as you will be too busy scraping yourself off the floor!

Effort, effort, effort! Kiai loudly, and act confident (even if you don't feel it). Half of it is about convincing them that you believe you are ready for the next belt. Try your best and no one can ever fault you. Best of luck!

I think one of the problems with secluded training is what if you develop a bad habit? Imagine that you decide to go for a year, a few months in you accidently leave a chunk out of your kata and spend the rest of the year practicing it like that; by the time you come back it's engrained in your system that your kata no longerhas that chunk in it. Similarly your technique may suffer if you have no one there to correct you. I think you would have to be very confident in your abilities to do this.

I have trained with both compliant and non-compliant, however there does have to be a bit of give because obviously I would not want to be smacking a training partner in his/her pressure points. Sometimes people stand there and say "It doesn't work", because their partner resists and you have to explain that of course it doesn't work because they haven't really smacked their partner through the ribs and they haven't really smacked their partner in the jaw etc. But! A light strike to these points can still give a good indication of what would happened if you really went for them.