Zaine

To each his own I guess. This is just about personal preference and I've seen good and bad black belts come out of both ways.

My pleasure

I actually have a knife, but I can't ever see it being used. I can certainly maim somebody without any weapons and my first reaction is never to reach for my pocket. I keep it on me for two reasons: (1) it's a pretty cool looking knife and (2) if it's a situation in which I would prefer to scare away an opponent rather than face them (i.e. they keep getting back up or someone else, say a friend, is also with me and they're at risk as well). I hate pepper spray as well though. It really does taint the air around you, and there are varying laws on carrying it, so a knife is just easier.

It's not elaborate. I study before I check schools out. When I say that I literally mean the techniques of the system and whether or not they seem to be doing them correctly. Other than that I look for teaching techniques.

I have to agree with you, part of being a martial artist for me is being humble. Buying your belt before your test just assumes too much and if I figured out a student did that I don't think that I would pass them.

Like a hot knife through butter!

This is actually fairly common thing. I had to do one, although I can't remember the page requirement. I actually like this requirement because taking a martial art is a journey, and it does change your life. Being a black belt is also a responsibility, and not something to be taken lightly. It not only speaks to what you've accomplished, but you become a representative of the school, it takes maturity to be a black belt and the instructor needs to make sure that you can handle it, and that this journey has actually made some sort of impact on your life. Good luck at your test, it's a big one.

Make sure you're warming up fully, and by this I don't mean just static stretching. Make sure you're loosening up those hips, along with everything else. The best way to do this pretty effectively is a good 5 minute jog, just to get everything moving after a good stretch. After that it becomes a cycle of rinse and repeat. Repetition, repetition and more repetition. Also, look up some stuff online for warming up you're hip in particular for when you're practicing your kicks. Warming up fully before any work out is uber important and I cannot stress that enough, and it's not only static stretches like the ones you do when stretching legs. Always remember that a 5 minute walk will always get you more warmed up than static stretching ever will.

In life. I was never so out of whack in my training then when my life got chaotic. Martial arts is honestly part of an enlightenment, and it's hard to focus on where you're going as a martial artist if you can't manage your life outside the dojo. In this sense the instructor also becomes the therapist, not only do they need to be able to recognize a student who is struggling personally, but be strong enough to talk it out and suggest that they take some time off to get their affairs in order. The truth is that if you come into class angry you're going to end up hurting someone trying to take out their aggression, and while martial arts can be a great outlet, it should be through solo training, and not sparring (doing kata always helps me when I'm stressed or angry, it helps me focus). Everything has a balance to it, whether it be a basic jab to a tornado kick (if your system incorporates those). Proper balance is as essential to any martial art technique as going to class to learn it. This is one of the many reasons why kung fu has such hard stances, so that you create a foundation as such that you will no be moved. Intensely, but I think asking how foundation affects one's balance would be a better question. Without a solid foundation there is no balance. It's always our fault. As my quote says: 70% of martial arts is solo training, and this includes balance. It is not the teachers responsibility to make you balanced, it's their job to harp on you until you become so. Any lack of balance or sloppiness in technique comes from an unwillingness to put in the time. Martial arts takes dedication, and if you don't have that all it becomes is a pretty good work out 2-3 times a week.

It is sad that people do this though, but you can't blame someone for not knowing any better. If more people did some research on what a good school is and tried to find a school that was going to teach them self defense and drill the correct things and how to be humble we wouldn't have the negative that martial arts has now. Not that sports karate isn't bad. It is a great exercise and there are clubs out there who teach both sides, but being the traditionalist that I am it does irk me when in a sparring match I see someone do a double gainer.

Excellent video for getting in the importance of a good chamber!

Fair enough, but the problem with that is that you have to be careful about pigeon-holing yourself. That is to say, sometimes with one-steps we do them so much that it's hard to imagine any other way to defend against the thing that we've drilled a certain move for, and when they effectively counter that move, we become stuck because that's not part of the training, and that's why I like katas so much because once I know the kata inside and out I have a new set of moves that I know will work against his jab, his counter to my counter and so on.

Make sure you're chambering properly. A big mistake a lot of practitioners make is that in their roundhouse there is no chamber, but in every other kick there is a chamber. Make sure you're bringing up the chamber before you extend, and the re-chamber before you put the foot down. If you can find an instructional video or even a youtube video of "Superfoot" Bob Wallace that could really help you.

If it works it works. A system doesn't need katas to be a good system, look at krav maga for example, an excellent and very deadly system and it doesn't have katas. That being said, I personally believe that katas are worth it because they work for me, but this is just a preference. In the end it's gonna be about what works for you the best. If that works for you the best then do that, if it doesn't then try something else out until you find the best way for you to drill it in successfully. I don't know if Bruce Lee said that, but I do know that it is in an excellent book called "The Book of Five Rings" and Musashi isn't talking about kata, he's talking about fighting. The full quote is "Learning how to fight without fighting is like learning how to swim on land." I'm sure Bruce Lee wasn't to ecstatic about kata, since it generally doesn't show up in JKD, but he certainly would have know a plethora of them and he probably saw the advantages of knowing them, he was pretty smart.

Well I suppose that explains it then!

I've really never known either of those systems to be all that graceful, beautiful absolutely, but the Shorin Ryu I took was all about the quickest way from point a to point b. It was brutal, short and extremely effective if used correctly (all martial arts generally are, so that's not saying much). I'm curious as to the particular style you took, maybe that could shed some light on the differences of our systems.

It almost feels like he just learned to form himself.

I agree with you absolutely. Any martial art should be about defending yourself. That's certainly what they were created for, and I feel that a lot of that spirit has been lost in the long run. I would like to say that whereas tournaments can create bad habits, it's up to the teachers to explain that it is a fun thing that is set up for everyone, but should not by any means be taken to heart as how an actual fight will happen. Then it's up to the student to understand that and move one from there because, lets face it, tournaments can be fun, and they are a great way to network and to set up opportunities to cross train and hold seminars so that both the teachers and the students can continue to grow in their training.

Super solid advice! An instructor is there to instruct and that is no easy task, trust me! There is so much to teach at each rank that it is really easy to let bunkai slip. When I was teaching (unfortunately I moved away from the location, and I miss it) I made sure that my students felt comfortable with coming up to me with any questions they had because I knew that I was likely to go over something to fast or skip something entirely. Instructors love nothing more than to see their students strive to grow and learn, and I'm sure that your instructor is no different. Go up to him and ask for some good bunkai applications, and also ask if there can be a class dedicated to one stepping your forms.

Sounds super intense. Congratulations on your passing! Sounds like you earned it!

At this point in my training, I look to see if the teacher giving all the right techniques and focusing on them for an appropriate amount of time, and also how big of an ego he has, I like a humble teacher. I say that because I know that as long as I'm learning the techniques, I can drill them at home enough to become proficient in them, and go back and ask whether or not I'm doing the correctly. For me any martial art as been 30% class time training and 70% solo training.

Shorin Ryu is a great system, I've dabbled in TKD, take Longfist and Mantis, and Shorin Ryu is still by far my favorite, and it is defiantly a practical system that will teach you to defend yourself if you train it right. Now, when I first started Shorin Ryu I hating kata training. I had joined because I had a bully, and I was tired of getting the crap beat out of me, so I joined to learn how to defend myself, and to me the kata portion just didn't fit in to that mold. It wasn't until I reached my 6th kyu that I started to realize what katas were worth. I was never the best at katas, but I knew them, and I knew the moves well enough to go through them but there were anything but "crisp and clean." I was sparring with a bigger guy in class and I realized that I was starting to use moves from the katas that I had learned, and as I was talking to my instructor about it he told me that katas were anything but useless. They teach to drill moves into your head until they become muscle memory. So in a way, it's like the one step drills and the sparring, they're teaching your body to react in certain ways in certain situations. Once I realized that, I started moving faster through the ranks because I got it and I started practicing Shorin Ryu as a whole and not just the things that I liked. I still didn't like practicing katas, although now I love it, but I pushed myself to everyday take some time and go through the list of katas that I knew. Now, I never had a problem with a weapons kata because I love learning them, but I can see where you're coming from. Look at the bo and the sai as extensions of your body that you are trying to learn to control (what is a kata if not a drill in controlling your body?) and that may make it better. The Okinawan's used the weapons they used to defend against swords because swords were outlawed if you were an Okinawan native, so they improvised. Clearly this is not necessary today, no one is going to come at you with a katana (most likely). So the continued practice of using weapons is part tradition, part control. Once you start using the weapons you learned with some proficiency you are going to be amazed by how much control over your body you have as opposed to how much you did before. Shorin Ryu is rarely going to teach you something that is going to be useless. Stick with it, it's a rewarding system with a great history. Good luck on your training!

We used it as a strike to the throat, and then that hand was used to grasp the back of the head to pull them into an elbow strike, you reload (ours is more pronounced than his) and you threw him and did a punch as they were going down.

I am someone who believes in discernment and has studied this to a good extent. I would say it might be a person in the building who has burdened themselves with something to the extent that it follows them. They can be nice on the outside but dying on the inside. It could also be some sort of spirit in the building (if you believe that sort of thing like I do) that is causing this feeling. Ask your instructors about it, you might be surprised by the answer, regardless of the answer though, it will give you some good insight as to what to do about your situation. Good luck.

TKD is super popular in America because it's fun, it's athletic and it's not as high impact as other systems. Because of that, there are a good deal of really bad schools of TKD, and for every bad TKD school, there has to be two good ones to outweigh it. This situation would be the same if there were as many Shorin Ryu or Shaolin Kung Fu schools, but unfortunately the burden seems to fall to TKD. That being said, TKD is an excellent system, and even though I have never taken it, I would defend it if the school were a good one. Also, just because the instructor is bad, doesn't mean that the student has to be and vice versa. Your training and skill in any art depends on you, and how you train.