lordtariel

Got out of the car about a week ago still wearing my gi. A kid across the street started in with the comments like hey karate man and making all the hoowaaaa noises and such. Right before I walked inside he yelled "MY FU IS STRONGER THAN YOU!" I think I'll use it for a new battle cry.

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Not only is this disrespectful to everybody else in your dojo, it's unsanitary. It's especially bad since you're in a grappeling situation and a very valid concern for safety reasons. Does he have open cuts? I know in our dojo, if you came in smelling of alcohol and filthy you'd be sent home. I would definitly talk to your sensei about this. The least you can say is that you feel uncomfortable training with this guy and ask if you could be paired with someone else.

Well, since I've started tonfa, I've throughly conditioned my upper arms and elbows. The bruises have finally started to go away. Got a couple good thwacks to the head with the bo when I was messing around and twirling it. Never really had any problems with the dao, but sliced my fingers a bit with the gim. Also ruined one of my favorite shirts the first time I used my gim because I didn't realize the blade was oiled... but that wasn't an injury.

It may be legal to throw the first strike, but it's easier to deal with the aftermath if you let them make the first move. There's also the whole concept that "My opponent moves first, but I'm the first to the target."

You may already do this, but you may want to vary the types of situps you do to work the different abdominal muscles. Having a strong core is always a good thing. I was also told recently that where you place your hands while doing pushups will change the muscle groups you're working. I wish I had the time and dedication to do that many every day.

All those fancy flourishes are pretty usless with the 'chucks where you choke back up to the string. However, the strikes are pretty effective and I've heard they're pretty good against other weapons.

We actually had practice on halloween one year and before I left we had a trick or treater. I answered the door in my gi and it was this little kid dressed as a ninja. He tugged at his mom's sleeve and whispered really loudly "I think he's for real" I still get a kick out of it.

There's something I've been wondering. At our dojo we start rank at 10th Kyu-Ho go to 10th kyu and then proceed down to 1st Kyu, then go to Shodan-Ho which is a blackbelt, but then you progress to shodan, nidan, and so on. I always thought shodan was the first black belt you got. Are you not officially a black belt until shodan? Is this like a preliminary black belt status?

I'm sure when I hit black belt, there will be many things I could still learn about stuff I learned when I was a white belt. Also, there's more to advancing to higher rank than just skill. Maybe they're wanting to see how you handle helping those students that have less skill than you. Perhaps some of those students can only go once or twice a week, not necessarily because they're lazy, it might be the only times they can go. Do you know for certain? I normally train in class 4 days a week, but the last couple of weeks I was only able to go once or twice. We're on a stretch of manditory overtime at my job. Just a thought.

Haven't seen it since the 80's but I believe it's just a hopping front kick with some useless arm posturing. We practice them sometimes in class(the hopping front kick not the usless arm posturing ) The move didn't make a lotta since since he came down full weight on his supposed injured leg for a moment.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1568664,00.html Hope we'll be able to see these in the US. It sounds really interesting.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=JfFLHKH82O8&search=mountain%20dew Finally found it after a little more digging.

couldn't find the dew one, but I vaguely remember it. Here's the lipton one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peDzr5azPqM There's a pepsi one too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqYLayOqUEo

The link to the other post is broken, but I believe I remember the other post. It was a video about martial artists being overtrained and completely useless in a real street fight... My take is it doesn't matter what style you train in or how good you are, unless you're mentally prepared to fight, that internal debate of fight or flight is going to be occuring during the fight when you should be paying attention to buisness.

I think that everyone knows that getting hit in the groin hurts, training or no... Unless you practice golden egg

Hehe... KataKata Revolution...

Sensei was nice enough to order a pair of both. He gave me my pick of the two, and kept the other one for the dojo. I wound up going with the square ones. I found the round ones were ok, but the square ones just seemed more solid and moved better(once the blisters went away )

That was great.

In sparring for non-black belts, it's light to moderate contact to scoring areas of the body with just touch allowed for the head. If you are going to throw, you must be in control of the fall and follow up immediatly with a scoring technique. For black belts, the restrictions are relaxed a bit though.

Well, I passed all my testing requirements for 8th kyu. I also have all but one of the extracurricular requirements done. These are usually non-testable oriented things such as Japanese terms, participating in tournaments and demos, helping other students, being aware of what's up on dojo announcment boards, greeting new students, ect. The one that is hard to get is participating in dojo cleanup. It's not so much that I'm lazy and don't want to do it, but when it's a requirement for every rank, there's usually not much left over to clean. Sensei's sure got a clean dojo. I find it amusing that it's the hardest requirement to get. Fortunatly, helping set up and tear down during tournament counts, so I'll get it covered about a day before the promotion deadline. Just an amusing situation I'd like to share.

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I did something relativly similar when I was helping teach in tai chi. I would take a piece of sidewalk chalk and draw a giant compass on the ground. I had the student stand in the middle of it and perform their form. It helped them enormously for keeping track of how far to turn and where they should be facing. It's a great method to use to get beginners to learn the basic footwork of a form. I would say it works for helping memorize the form, but not for learing the form.

When I was in judo, we used to get donation/sponsership for our tournaments. All the students went out fundraising to help put on the event. The buisness would get a T-shirt with all the sponser's names on it, would get advertising in the program and/or in the form of banners in the building. We made it a competition to see which student could pull in the most sponsers.

I would think a jar of beans would be a safer way to practice spear and finger strikes than hitting a bag. I wouldn't go overboard with it though. My sensei used to condition his feet by doing toe kicks to a hard target, and while it did calcify some of the bone, it made his toes totally gnareled. At least those can be covered by shoes, can't do that with your hands.