AngelaG

A kyu rank is the ones before black belt. So it goes from 10th kyu up to 1st kyu at my club... and then black belt.

your legs or your hips? your legs aren't really doing most of the work, unless you are throwing an uppercut. Sorry I forgot to say (D'OH!) I am mainly talking about a stepping straight punch here.

This reminds me of a lesson I was taking with the juniors once. It was a quiet session and we were in the unusual situation of a 8th Kyu being class captain (and he's only about 5/6 years old, bless him). We were sat down in seiza and I was waiting for him to start the lesson off by calling "Sensei ni rei!". Anyway he obviously had no idea what to say so instead of just admitting this he suddenly slumped down and just came out with "I'm bored!". Me and the other instructor just looked at each other gobsmacked... and then couldn't help bursting out laughing, meanwhile trying to explain why this was not the right attitude to take.

Nice post Shorinryu Sensei, I fully agree with you.

I fully believe in pre-emptive striking if you are sure that the situation has escalated that far. Why let someone mess up my face before I react? The best form of pre-emptive action? Don't be there when it kicks off!

This is a bit esoteric but hopefully some of you will try and get what I am driving at. When people punch they often think of their arms being the weapon. The arm is the striking object and therefore that is what is doing the work. However I am of the belief that a punch should start from the ground up. In fact I sometimes try to think about my punch working its way up from the very core of the earth – the actual planet is adding weight to your strike. I know this is not true but this is a mental exercise to try and get the feeling for what I want to achieve. Your legs are stronger than your arms so why not let them do most of the work. Use your body like a whip. What do I mean by that? Well if you have a whip it’s the tip of the whip that strikes, but the actual power is put in way down the other end. In the same way with a punch you should start driving in off your feet and through your thighs and then use your hips to whip out the final sting. Sure add power from your arms as well but the thought should be that if your arm was already fully outstretched and you did the technique that you would still generate loads of power. Try punching a punch bag using just your arms, stand against a wall or something so that you cannot engage your hips. Then try again using your hips and legs to drive through – feel the difference.

If I have cocky stsudents I tend to do stuff like let them stay in "Yoi" (Ready stance) for ages. They have to stand, focused ahead without fidgeting until I say they can go. This tends to focus their minds but also lets them know who's boss in a subtle way. I won't tolerate back chat. That will earn you press ups. If it continues I may use the divide and conquer route and get the whole call to do press ups, so that even their peers are telling them to shut up. Eventually I may tell them to leave the class until they have the right attitude. I made one teenager stand in the corner once. If they want to act like little children I have no qualms about treating them like little children!

All this for FREE?? Amazing site

Only the one's in my head. I don't do competition karate though!

This could end up being quite a controversial subject I suspect. I think it’ll be quite interesting to get input from those who instruct and those who are students. I also think it’ll be interesting where people think the difference between children and adults comes in. Please note I will use “him” only for ease of writing replace with “her” where necessary In the dojo Sensei is king. You start when he tells you to start and you stop when he tells you to stop. You do whatever technique he asks you to the best of your ability and you don’t answer him back or give him cheek. Indeed, your very chances of grading rest with him. Even the name “Sensei” demands respect common translations being “Teacher” or “One who has gone before”. I think most people would agree with this. However once you have bowed out of the lesson where does that leave you? If you are an adult do you find that once the lesson is ended that you are suddenly two equal adults again? Does your instructor find it hard to ever snap out of his “Sensei” role, or do you find it hard to snap out of “student” role? Do you think that the status should ever change out of lesson time? Are you carrying his bags around or doing chores for him in your free time? Or are you friends with them as soon as it’s finished? From a child’s perspective I don’t see anything wrong with keeping a teacher/student role. There is nothing wrong with teaching children respect by giving them authoritative figures to look up to, whether this be parents, school teachers or Sensei. Perhaps it is a good thing to remain a bit aloof. I know that even as an adult if I see one of my old school teachers in the street I still refer to them as Mr or Mrs X. I want to take this a bit further. How much should Sensei’s influence be on your everyday life? If as an instructor you see one of the children out of class time beating up another child so you take them aside in the lesson and tell them this is unacceptable behaviour. Do you feel it brings disrepute to your club? I personally think most people would say that there is nothing wrong with an instructor reprimanding a child for bad behaviour he has observed out of club time (I may be wrong). Is he morally within his rights to stop the child from attending his club? I know he can, his club, his rules, but morally is his deciding what’s right and wrong out of club time a right thing to do? Again we go further. Let’s apply a similar situation to an adult. Sensei has been out one weekend and seen one of his adult students in an inebriated situation; the student is acting rowdy and perhaps even being a little abusive. The student then attends the lesson the next week and is pulled up by sensei for his behaviour. The student questions whether this is any of the Sensei’s business, as within the club confines he acts impeccably. Does the student have a point or is the Sensei right to try and uphold the morality he teaches within the lesson time? Maybe you thought that in the above case the Sensei was wrong to interfere. What a student does in their free time is up to them? So let’s test where the boundaries of acceptability lie. Take a case where a student attends class every week. They are the model student in class time and someone that you feel every student should aspire to be; punctual, courteous, giving 110%, gently guiding their kohai whilst looking up to their sempai. Sensei is more than pleased with this student and really thinks they may go somewhere. Until he starts noticing little niggling signs. Perhaps the student’s partner comes in with a black eye one week and a split lip a few weeks later. Doubts start to creep into Sensei’s mind. Is the person he is teaching to fight being physically abusive to their partner? Should he start prying? Is he within his rights to refuse to teach the student based on nothing more than his own doubts? (Again I mean morally, I know literally he can teach who he wants). Would it be right for him to take the student aside and demand to know how their partner got their injuries? I would think we are in some pretty deep waters here. If you are anything like me perhaps you are undecided. One minute you think that it is right and the next maybe not. What is MY role as in instructor in my students’ lives?

I'm a student of John Burke but I do train with Russell as well. In fact I spent a week in Cyprus last February for the OCFM side. I see John as my mentor in Karate though, and karate is my true passion. How do you know them?

Ok, this is a kind of cross over between the Karate forum and the Internal Arts forum but I have posted it in here for a specific reason. I suspect there are people who do karate who have no idea how subjects such as 5 element theory, meridians and pressure points etc. come into their karate and therefore will never venture into the Internal Arts forum. I feel this is of interest to karateka as a whole rather than just those you want to study the more internal aspects. Sometimes when we break down the kata we take it really slow. Working with a compliant partner you work out exactly what position they end up in correlation with what position you end up. We study the target areas suddenly opened up to you. With a little bit of PP/5 element knowledge suddenly it can be apparent that the kata are showing you where to hit best in relation to where you have previously struck for maximum affect with minimum effort. Take the oft misunderstood move in Bassai Dai. It’s about move 6 where you turn to your right and a very low height, swing your arm low around and up to your ear, and storm in with an outside block (soto uki). I’ve heard so many people say that they are crouching to hook a kick with their arm (!) and then using the next move (uchi uke) to break their opponent’s knee. I suggest that it is probably a very bad idea to use your arms to catch kicks and to lower your hands down to that level whilst crouching – in that situation you have opened up your entire head for them to punch as they storm through the kick (not that many people do a nice mae geri on the streets anyway) So what alternatives do you have? Imagine your opponent has come in with a hook punch. Soft block it with your left hand and riding the direction sweep your arm up to their fist. This is going to stroke down the pericardium meridian (Fire). (If you’re lucky you may get heart (Fire) and Lung (Metal) too!) Now sweep your right hand across and through their ribs, for those who know Pressure Points you are aiming for the Gallbladder/Liver crossing – a wood point. So already you are only halfway through the move and you have gone from fire to wood – backwards along the constructive cycle. Now storm in and use the right hands momentum to crash down into the neck which is a very sensitive area and packed with PPs. You can aim for the jaw line to hit Stomach 4, 5 or 6 so that you go along the Destructive Cycle and get Earth – or strike into the neck, and leave your hand relaxed so that it wraps around and strikes into the back of the neck (gallbladder 20) for a double wood strike. Well to be honest if you go for the neck there are so many meridians you can’t go wrong – but GB 20 is a favourite of mine. One of the big questions people ask about pressure points is that how can we hope to hit a tiny target during a fight. The point is not that we are searching for them with our fingers but that we are striking in the area of them with a large target. If I strike to the neck with the whole of my forearm how can I miss hitting a pressure point? It’s like having a small nail, if I try to hit it with a toffee hammer I may miss 3 out of 5 times, if I take a lumphammer to it I will hit it every time! Just because the target area is small does not mean that the striking object has to be small. That way if you miss who care? You went to hit them hard with everything you got and therefore it will still be effective. One of the other reasons I chose to put this in the karate forum is that if you are not a fan of studying 5 element theory it doesn’t matter. The point is to study where the kata takes you and notice that it hurts more if you hit this before you hit that. You don’t have to know all the fancy names to get it to work. Try working through tour kata with a compliant partner, both just going where it leads you and you will see that it opens up some amazing targets. Kidney shots, back of the head/neck, inner legs all seem to become available just when your own body is in a prime location to hit them. Let your kata guide you rather than you guide the kata. Taking the previous example and removing all 5 element theory. You block their hook punch, you strike with your fist through their ribs (near the floating rib) and then came in and strike their neck with your forearm. It’s the same as above but with all the buzzwords taking out, that doesn’t mean it’s going to work any less. And the fact that the kata guides you to it means that you may never need to learn the names as you just hit what you’ve been given! As an interesting exercise I sometimes look through other people’s applications and play a “What happens next?” game. For example, I go to kick you, you X-Block my shin and assuming your arm doesn’t shatter leaving you in agony on the floor I still storm in and attack your head whilst your arms are around my leg level. Or the people that use manji gamae as a block against two attackers. Oh yeah, they both attack simultaneously, and then after one of them waits politely as the other one attacks you, and then he waits whilst you turn back to the first. HMMMM Do we really think that the founders of these Martial Arts that formulated these kata were that naïve? The other thing I touched upon with the x-block was why use hands to block/attack legs and why use legs to attack the head? My legs are at your leg height, therefore why kick above waist level and expose my groin and put myself off balance (and extend the technique time-wise)… my hands are higher so why bring them down to your legs leaving my head exposed and at the right level for you to pummel. Again if you study the kata the clue are all there. I am not surprised that some people see kata as a worthless exercise and no help in a self-defence situation – it’s because they have been fed *. Study the kata a bit more deeply. Think outside your box. Take your time and find out what’s really there!

AWWWW shucks! Thanks

You have to keep up with the old stuff. The other day only four of us turned up to the adult lesson. There were 3 brown belts and a 2nd dan. Despite this the instructor decided that we could do red belt basics - as soon as the longer combinations were cut down everyone was struggling. People get into rhythms and think about that (like a dance) rather than thinking about every technique individually. I'm sure you instructor knows what he is doing, have faith in him. Maybe he is teaching new stuff to people who have gradings sooner than you. Or maybe you are learning new stuff but just not realising it? Or maybe, as someone has already said, your attitude is letting you down. Or maybe when you graded he thought you only just scraped through, so he wants you more proficient at the white belt stuff before you move on to anything else? Could be lots of reasons! The one thing you will learn though is that any MA is made up of constant repetitions, that's the only way to train the body to do it right, and to do it instinctively.

"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!" Homer Simpson

Wrestling is virtually unknown. There are a few BJJ clubs (one that trains at my dojo). I suspect judo is a bit more popluar, but I think sports like TKD and Karate are the most popular, with perhaps jiu-jutsu too.

Ummm excuse me but I am not giving advice from a BJJ practioner's, a wrestler's or any other art other than Karate's point of view. All along I have said IT IS MY OPINION! How much clearer do you want me to put it? Look under my name <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< It says Shotokan Karate.... that's the angle I was approaching it from!

Why woul I be? I do karate? I'm up on all that terminology if it helps!

Yeah I know I swapped between wrestlers and BJJers but that was because the OP was about wrestlers but other people started going on about BJJ to me - so I was covering all bases

that's not true at all. 1. he's not shooting at you from a mile away, he's shooting from punching distance or closer. you most likely will not be able to sidestep in time, nor will you be able to unleash multiple strikes. If that first one doesn't drop him, you're gonna go down. Once he has you up in the air and going backward, you will have zero power to your strikes, and they will do no good until you are on the ground again - but that won't be until you are on your back. One thing to keep in mind is that in order to learn to defend it, you need to actually defend it - that means working with someone who has grappling experience. Otherwise, They will be doing it all wrong. This is the reason that many people think defending a tackle is the same as defending a good double leg. As far as defenses go, work takedown defenses, like the sprawl. After you've sprawled and stopped his momentum, THEN you worry about striking. Another option is to keep him back pedalling while he's standing. This is easier said than done, because a grappler doesn't mind absorbing a few shots if it means he will get you where he wants you. If you can keep him back pedalling though, he will be unable to shoot effectively, because it requires forward motion. Personally I don't think as many fights go to the ground as people make out (I'm talking serious confrontations - not including the schoolyard type brawls). If you ever watch a fight kicking off it usually involves men pushing and shoving at each other... they'll get separated and then one will usually rush in and sucker punch the other. This means that it usually ends up with one person on the floor whilst the other stands up and him (and his mates) kick the cr*p out of the one on the floor! 1. I've seen several go to the ground. Also, in some instances, they are better serverd on the ground. For example, when you work security, you are allowed to restrain, but you cannot strike. What does that mean? That you will have to grapple. 2. It doesn't matter how often fights go to the ground. What matters is that some of them do go there. Even if statistics showed only 5 out of every 20 fights go to the ground, how do you know that you won't be one of those 5? You don't. First of all I think we have to bear in mind that you are talking about a trained karateka and a trained wrestler here. Therefore you would hope that the karateka could snap out a low kick, or a punch before the wrestler gets the chance to grab. I don't think it's fair to say that a wrestler would definitely win or a karateka would definitely win, it would be down to whomever was most skilled (and perhaps a bit of luck on that day). Of course I personally believe that the vast majority that really throw themselves into intense training are doing it for self-defence, physical fitness, way of life etc. so the actual chances of two trained MA practitioners coming up against each other in a real street fight would be slim anyway. Secondly, I have had several years worth of working in bars and pubs in the past, including ones in a pretty rough city. I have also dated a bar security personnel (bouncer) and my dad was a cop, so therefore I do have some experience of what I am talking about when I say that I'm sorry but you do not see people rolling around on the floor grappling in the same way two trained BJJ fighters grapple. At no point is this a criticism of the art, I'll be the first to agree that neither do you get two people sqaured up bouncing around doing reverse punches and above the belt kicks in a real fight. Also the point about security taking people to the ground is, I think, wrong. If you watch most fights in pubs or clubs most of the time a security guard just wants to remove the trouble as soon as possible. They often do this by storming the person and overwhelming them (often by pure numbers) and then forcefully dragging them out. They may sometimes put a choke, arm bar or neck bar on etc. to help them on their way and help ensure the person cannot resist but they tend to not go to the floor (unless someone trips). Well I practice arm bars, chokes and headlocks in my karate anyway (and how to get out of them). I guess it always comes down to the individual fighter. I suspect somebody that trains in sport karate would easily get overwhelmed by a wrestler, but someone with more practical knowledge may be able to hold their own. Each art has their pros and cons, but I think it would be mad to say for definite that either the BJJ practitioner or the karateka would win. By the way, for those of you with paper thin skins, this is not meant to knock anyone else's art in any way. There's no need to start getting uptight or upset. And for those that seem to see the need: THIS IS MY OPINION!

Actually, that shows a complete lack of respect. If you are going to be rude and dismissive I am not even going to bother to dignify that with a constructed debate.

Nope but my instructor is teaching us 52 uses of Gedan Barai this year. One of which is shift out of the way and parry the kick in the direction it was already going using Gedan Barai. This most specifically is not a block. It is a last resort situation that they have managed to get a kick in so you avoid the kick and the parry is only there as a precaution. At no point do you meet the big bone of their leg and the full force of their leg muscles with the much smaller one of your arm and the strength of your arm.

"I think you'd look better in a pink belt"

Start pestering your instructor about when you will learn the Crane Kick. Start screaming "No Mercy" as your kiai! Start talking out of synch with your lips like you are in some badly dubbed Japanese MA movie. For cross trainers - point out after every demo how your other instructor did it differently and you thought his way was better... AND he was a higher grade so he should know. Make strange "WHOOOOOR" noises every time you move. Point out that you all should get guns as they are better than any Martial Art. Look mystically at your instructor, nod wisely and say, "You will learn one day, Grasshopper!". Fail to look as though a technique is hurting you when doing partner work. This guarantees that the instructor will come up to show them how to do it, using you as the dummy. Every time your instructor asks you a question reply, "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!". Turn up to your traditional dojo with a Union Jack gi, a Japanese flag bandana tied around your head and a camoflage belt. Bring in a group of your mates to be cheerleaders as you do your kata. Tell your instructor that you wanted it to be more like a real life street encounter, so you turned up in street clothes, reeking of alcohol. Eat your dinner half an hour before coming in on the day the instructor decides that the warm up mainly consists of stomach crunches and leg raises whilst he runs across your stomach. Point to all the high grades' belts in a sneering manner and say, "Where did you buy that then? Mr Pound?" Stand in the middle of the dojo and declare yourself undefeatable.

Our school has 4 dojo - 3 of them full time centres. We have our chief instructor who takes classes at all 4, and 3 full time instructors and a few part tiem instructors (I currently fit into that category).