samertz

Drills drills and more drills. Work on stepping forward and shifting back. I'm not talking straight forward and back, but do 45 degree angles. Work your footwork like crazy, this will help you immensely. Once you start getting fast with shifting, then shift and punch at the end, or shift and kick. When you get this down start doing shift kick/block, or shift punch/block combos. Try not to just only work one type of combo either. Don't always just shift in and do an oi tsuki/uchi uke, but start changing it up, try gyaku tsuki soto uke combos, and stuff like that. The point of it is to be original and work on getting in attacking and getting back out. Don't stress with doing more than 2 or 3 attack/block techniques in your training. Usually in a fight (tournament) it will be a 1/2 block counter or shift in attack shift out that will win. Just be original in your training and figure out what your strengths are. If you are a good kicker then work shifting kick/block and shift back. Just make sure you work your weaknesses as well and you should do just fine. Scot

I agree 100% with this. Once you get to a certain level you can identify where someone should fall. If they claim to be a Shodan or something you can usually tell if they are one or not by watching them do a Zenkutsu Dachi Gedan Barai. Just one movement is all it takes to usually figure someone out. Karate is all about learning and constantly striving for improvement. The color of the belt doesn't really matter as long as you are learning. Even as a teacher, you are constantly learning from your students as well as passing knowledge to them. Everything is give and take. Also please try to remember that the whole belt system is only like 90ish years old. Back in the day no one use to wear a belt or anything to show rank and it all came down to what you could do on the floor. IMHO martial arts should go back to that type of mentality, because with all the places that just hand out rank and stuff kind of degrade the whole idea of the arts. At the end of the day all anything comes down to is what can you do and how well can you do it. So don't worry about if your school uses a blue belt or a purple or even a pink for that matter. Just ask yourself, how well can you do what you do, and do you think you could use what you know if you had to defend yourself or someone you love, because that is really what it is all about. Scot

PAL is right. There are many many versions of Hakutsuru out there. The one that we (Saishu Ryu) practice is the one from Seito Shorin Ryu. It's not the full out Hakutsuru that Hanshi Kise knows. If you get a chance to see the Saishu Ryu 2006 guide you will see that we are actually practicing a lot of different crane kata, especially in the Dan levels. Tomo if you want to talk more about this please don't post this stuff in these types of forums, either e-mail me or talk to Eric Whitsell. Scot

Tomo, Hey now I resent that. God I feel a bad Shodan testing coming up for you. LOL Scot