scottnshelly

That's a great answer. I don't think anyone should focus on anything. Look everywhere with pripheral vision.

I’ve got a question about the staff blocks at the end of Chung-Gun. These have always confused me. I understand that they are blocking a staff, but the block seems so impractical. First of all, your rear hand is stretched way out in front of and over your head. Your front hand is too low to do any good. The awkwardness of the block puts your whole body as a target. The position of the hands during the block would mean that someone was trying to strike you with the long side of a staff. Am I missing something on this? Is there another application that I haven’t noticed yet? Thanks,

Training books and videos are a great supplement to training, not very good for learning new material. I would recommend finding someone to teach you what you want to know. I’ve never been to Baltimore, but I’m sure there are plenty of good schools in the area. These were probably the basics. In any school that you go to, you’ll be doing the basics a lot. No matter what rank you get up to, you’ll always do the basics. Sparring and other “fun stuff” comes only after you have the basics down. Martial Arts are more than sparring, meditation and combos. If you really want to buy some training books and videos, be careful about what you buy and what you believe. There are a lot of people writing books solely for the money. Proper Martial Arts are to be taught in person, so almost anyone that writes a book for mainstream commercialization is only interested in the profit. This results in “watered down” material. Do some research and find out who’s writing good books. I obviously don’t want to slander anyone, but Ashida Kim is not a Ninja. If you have no formal physical training, I would stick with books that discuss the theories, philosophies and history of Martial Arts. With that being said, there are a lot of good books that discuss these topics. Some of my favorites are: Art of War – Sun Tzu Book of Five Rings – Miyamoto Musashi Secret Tactics – Kazumi Tabata Tao of Jeet Kune Do – Bruce Lee Karate Dojo – Peter Urban Martial Arts Teaching Tales of Power and Paradox – Pascal Fauliot For a complete list, see the sticky thread in General Topics

Before I give my answer, I need you to answer the following: 1) What is your goal/why are you training in Martial Arts 2) What rank are you in your current school 3) How are you sure that you have surpassed all of the higher-ranking students in the class?

Please bear in mind that I have no experience with any drunken styles. All of my information comes from reading articles on the Information Superhighway, books and other reading materials. With that being said, drunken style is a deceptive style. The idea is to make your opponent think that you are drunk and thus incapable of being a good fighter. Sometimes this will dissuade the attacker from fighting altogether. The style uses a lot of unconventional stances and strikes to make the exponent appear to be drunk or off balance. I watched a short video clip of two guys sparring. One appeared to be of a drunken style while the other was an Okinawan style. The drunken guy had some good moves, but the Okinawan guy’s Kung Fu was far superior. After a few solid kicks to the face, the drunken guy bowed out. As far as other similar styles, I’ve read about a style called Sleeping Crane that uses the same concept. Hopefully someone with real experience can come on here and give some better insight. If not, try to Google search Drunken Kung Fu.

I’ve never taken wrestling, but my father and brother both wrestled in school. It’s basically two guys trying to pin each other. One starts off on all fours and the other starts off behind him. You try to maneuver your opponent onto his back and pin both shoulders for one second. It’s very interesting and I think it has very good potential for Martial Artists. It's called Greco-Roman wrestling, so I imagine it has its roots there. I'm not sure I know what that means.

Most Kenpoka don’t chamber their hands on their waists as stated. I think this was directed more toward the Okinawan and Japanese styles. A lot of Korean styles also chamber on their waste and break boards. This isn’t the right forum for the infamous Karate vs. Kenpo discussion, but I thought I’d point that out.

I went to Google and searched and found this website: http://www.laugar-kungfu.com/index.htm Looks like fun. Attend a class and form your own opinion and let us know what you think.

I’ve seen a brief video clip of a snake form demonstration. What is the difference between snake and cobra Kung Fu?

In my small Oklahoman town we have one school that used to be primarily Tae Kwon Do. A new guy took over, so I’m not sure what he’s teaching now, but I know he’s not trained in Tae Kwon Do. I just saw a Brazilian Ju Jitsu school open, but I’ve never seen anyone there. We also have a Chang Hon Tae Kwon Do school. There have been countless other schools that were primarily Tae Kwon Do, but they never seem to last more than two years.

Usually the best way to handle this situation is to find out what schools are in your area and visit them. Watch a class, and then speak with the Instructor and maybe a few students. Find out if it’s good for you. After visiting the local schools, we might be able to give you a little more advice or information, but not knowing what is available to you we’re just guessing.

We can sit here and debate over the morality of contracts all we want and never get anywhere. I think they can have pros and cons. The only thing that really strikes me as grossly immoral is if you guarantee a student a certain belt rank after coming to a determined amount of classes or paying a determined amount of money. Belt rank is not about contracts and contracts should not be about belt ranks. Like I said, I have heard rumors of some of the big city schools guaranteeing belt ranks in a contract. Also, as previously stated, I have attended many schools (10 or more) and taught at several schools (4 or 5) and never encountered any contract or membership agreement. We always just did things one month – or sometimes even one week – at a time. Also, this forum is the first place that I’ve heard of regularly scheduled testing – 8 week cycle, 12 week cycle, etc. Everywhere that I’ve been we tested when there was one or more students ready to test. Sometimes there’d be more than one student ready around the same time, so those students would test. In the lower grades its more common to have a large group testing, but in the advanced ranks it was mostly one person at a time. By the way, Enviroman, that was a very good analogy with the used car salesmen. That’s the point, in a small community we don’t need a well paid staff. The most I’ve seen in my area is one Head Instructor and one Assistant Instructor or two co-Instructors; it’s usually just one person teaching all of the classes. If you want a large successful business where you just sit back and watch other people do the work for you, you are in the wrong field.

I don’t see any reason for a three-year contract except to make more money. As far as the three-year “black belt” contract, does that guarantee a student will reach “black belt” in three years? I’ve heard of a school in Oklahoma City that does that. That is despicable in my opinion. None of the schools that I attended or taught at have any type of contract. If you came to class you could pay for that month; if you missed a month then you don’t pay for that month. What is the benefit – other than the obvious one that I stated in the first sentence – of a long contract?

Kicks, that’s very remarkable. I just started learning Yoo-Shin from my John Chung video. It is a very nice looking form. It must take you several hours to go through all of your forms. Aodhan, those are new names to me, what style/substyle are those from?

While we're on the subject of Shaolin temple, does anyone know where the temple is located? What region, province, etc.

That is quite impressive. When you say Chang Hon, is that the Chun Ji patterns? There is a Chang Hon school in this town and they do the Chun Ji hyungs.

I was just wondering what forms you guys know. What is the highest level form, what style is it and how many do you know.

If the Jeet Kune Do Instructor shut down to move he might still be open to new students. Ask him (if you can contact him) if he would train you in a one-on-one setting, commonly called private lessons. This might cost a little more than going to a class, but it would be Jeet Kune Do. If he shut down because he isn’t interested in teaching anymore then he may not be willing to teach you.

Thanks, that’s basically what my Instructor did. We learned some form of Tae Kwon Do and learned complimentary techniques from other styles. Now I’m leaning more toward Kenpo, and Kenpo is a pretty broad term anyway, maybe I could just call it Kenpo featuring kickboxing, Jujitsu, Tae Kwon Do, Arnis, etc.

I think the point has already been made, but I’ll re-emphasize it. One should only fight when it is absolutely necessary and there is no other option. If this is the case, then it should not matter how many are going to attack you. If you have the option of leaving, leave. Don’t fight just because you think you can handle them.

Awww, nothing for Kenpo! Pretty funny read though.

Without ever being to this class, meeting the Instructor or browsing their website; it’d say that you could certainly learn something from there. Maybe all you’d learn is not to sign a year-long contract, but you’d learn something. The fact that he has 19 schools makes me ponder. The problem is, when you start one school you have a certain goal in mind for that school. You come up with a syllabus and you do everything you can to follow it. Then when you open the second school, you trust someone else to follow the curriculum. Then they open a third school and they trust a third person to follow the plan. By the time you get to 19 schools, they’ve got to all differ so much. How can one man run 19 schools efficiently and correspondingly? If I were in the area, I’d at least attend and speak with the Instructors to see if it was worth my time and money. How much does he charge anyway? In summary, don’t write this school off based solely on the website and some people’s opinions. Make your own educated opinion.

I always use the same rule: avoid, prevent, dissuade, control, end. If I wasn’t able to avoid the guy, and wasn’t able to prevent him from approaching me, then my next step would be to dissuade him from confrontation. There are many useful techniques of dissuasion: ignoring, humor, distraction, reasoning or the ever popular intimidation. I’ve always defeated my opponents at the dissuasion phase. If for some reason I was unable to dissuade him from a confrontation, then I would control and then end the fight as fast as possible. Of course, depending on the situation (wife and/or child involved) some of the phases go pretty quickly. If my wife was involved like the scenario indicates, I might be more apt to quickly try to dissuade and then control the confrontation before he strikes. In other, calmer, situations, I would likely try to avoid confrontation at all costs. Don’t forget that your most valuable defenses are getting help (calling the police) and getting away (getting in the car and driving off).

The sad part is, this is life. We all end up working at a job that we don’t like, waiting for a better one to come along. You say you’re 15, that’s about how old I was when I was your age. My first job was at 15 at a gas station/car wash. I was the guy that cleans out the bays after a big trailer comes through. I also prepped cars going through the automatic and restocked the armor-all machines. I left there to work for a lawn mowing company for the summer. My next job was at 16, Instructing Martial Arts classes for $6.50/hr. Put in your application at other places, don’t limit yourself to just waiting/bussing tables (unless that’s your passion or something). Try Wal-mart or convenience stores.

I am a scientist working on time travel and teleportation. Just kidding, I work in a call center for a fortune 500 company. I’m the guy that decides which agent takes your call. All of the calls are routed to our site from a couple guys, then once they are ‘in-house’ we route them to the agents. We also manage workloads for the e-mails that our customers send and the online chat feature. It’s quite a job. I’ve been doing it for a couple years now. I’m in training to become a Law Enforcement Officer at my local Police Department.