Gregory

This forum not be his cup of tea, but is open to anyone, so it's hardly behind his back. I have no pressure point experience, but he or any of his students is welcome to try the no-touch KO on me should they ever want to visit Toronto.

I don't know anything about Mr. Dillman, but if he believes his no-touch KO works as it has be represented in this forum, he should go try to claim his $1,000,000 from the James Randi Educational Foundation: http://www.randi.org/research/index.html. I'm glad this topic was created. This kind of pseudo-spiritual flakiness makes the whole martial arts community look ridiculous. I don't think comparing it to such things as faith healing, astrology, or theraputic touch is a stretch at all. There is enough misunderstanding about martial arts outside our community that if we don't call these folks out ourselves, then we get lumped in with them. I, for one, have gotten a great deal of personal benefit from the martial arts and I'd hate to see someone turn away from it because of the self-delusional claims, or worse, outright lies, of a fringe element.

A little off topic... but I didn't have a clever photo of my own to include, so I linked to one of the forum rank belts.

Do this every time you train, not just this week. I find the more I learn, the more I go back to basics.

I can't speak for any other schools in Calgary, but I have trained with the folks at the Calgary Academy of Karate and I would recommend it. I also began my training in Goju Ryu. I attained my blue belt at McMaster University under Phil McColl (sr. student of Don Warrener). I moved away and tried about six or seven dojos over ten years until I found the Toronto Academy of Karate. This is where Bruce Winstanley (the sensei at the Calgary Academy of Karate) got his black belt. The style has its roots in Washin Ryu, but our sensei (Burt Konzak) separated from Hidy Ochiai about 35 years ago, so I imagine there has been a fair bit of divergence. Dr. Konzak was probably most heavily influenced by his training in Japan at Nittaidai (Nippon Sports Science University), where he trained over a period of several years. This training included black belts (primarily Japanese) from a large variety of styles. As such, we have influences from many of those styles in our kata, training methods, and sparring. Although most of the kata are drawn from Shotokan (or the same source ... I have not seen any Goju kata taught here), the karate is stylistically quite different from the Shotokan I have seen. There is more emphasis on flow and speed with much less of the 'rigidity' I have observed (my apology for the term to any Shotokan practitioners - you would probably say we rush our kata ). It's also a bit less 'linear' if you take my meaning. I've heard this identified as one of the differences between Japanese and Okinawan karate, but I can't say how accurate that is. The Goju that I learned definitely had more circular and round techniques than the Shotokan I have studied and our style of karate definitely has the same feel. At white and yellow belt, we teach/learn several Taikyokos as is often the case in Goju Ryu. The actual techniques used in the Taikyokos are a little bit different, but you won't have trouble transitioning.