alsey

i can sympathise. i've had to move around a lot in recent years. i've been to four jujitsu schools, all operating under different governing bodies. i've been doing jujitsu longer than some of the black belts at my current dojos (there are two; one at university and one at home for the holidays). its annoying because i've been practicing the basics for so long and i want to learn how to do some more advanced throws and do some proper groundwork, but i keep at it. try to forget about grades and just try to learn what you can and improve yourself with every class you go to. don't give up, things like this can make you stronger in the end.

damn he's good! guess you don't get a 10th dan for nothing

remember the old masters would spend a lifetime practicing one or two kata. what you are experiencing shows that you are really trying to learn the kata, rather than be rushed through them as is often the case in modern karate.

you have to forget everyone else and focus on your kata. in fact you have to forget everything else but the kata to do it to your full potential. this is difficult in a dojo full of other students; i could never do a kata in the dojo as well as i could at home on my own. everyone is different and has their own strengths and weaknesses. don't try to compare yourself to others; compare yourself to how you were yesterday (or last training session or whatever). you can only judge progress relative to yourself. other than that i'd say you're doing everything right. get your techniques precise and strong, and speed will come. when i do my own kata practice, i usually perform the kata slowly (like, really slowly), then do it with speed and power a few times, then do it slowly again. you can learn a lot from doing it either way.

damn straight.

i've been involved in three serious fights where i could easily have been severely injured. one of them involved five other people and a couple of a baseball bats. at the time of my last real fight i was a purple belt in shotokan and i can't really say that i used any of that training in those fights. as well as those three incidents, i've also had numerous not so serious fights where i knew my opponent would never have intentionally injured me seriously. at that time in my life i'm ashamed to say i wasn't the nicest person ever and i was up for a fight if anyone wanted one. i didn't particularly need martial arts skills because then i was aggressive, had lots of mates to back me up and other, i guess, 'thuggish' traits. i was naturally quite a good fighter and i've never been beaten. several years later my life is completely different, i'll avoid a fight if i possibly can, i am much more experienced in martial arts, but perhaps less confident in my combat abilities. probably because i havn't actually fought for a long time now, probably just because i'm less arrogant. however i still feel that the experience i have had will help if i ever have to fight again, and i know that i have the confidence to put up as good a defence as i physically can. martial arts have never really been about self defence for me. if they make me good at fighting then i see that as a good effect, but the main reason i do it is purely out of interest. i find human combat in all forms immensely interesting.

lol! what a joke. and i thought karate kumite was bad.

to be honest, i don't think i've ever seen a good MA program on TV (not counting UFC). those programs are to entertain the general public, they're simply not made for people like us.

lost is probably the tv show i've enjoyed most in several years now. even more so than when i was trekkie and next generation was on i'm currently going through season 1 again, i forgot how brilliant those first few episodes were. i love anything with lots of mystery in it where you left thinking 'wtf?'. can't wait for season 3. i just hope at the end of it all they don't ruin it with a lame ending.

NEVERMORE!!! they're my favorite band and practically no one has ever heard of them. brilliant stuff! and you can listen to the ballads while you stretch!

the three serious fights i've been in, i used mainly crosses and hooks, kicks to the legs and body drops. the good old body drop has saved me from serious injury twice. nothing complicated. in my experience fighting is about being confident and taking the initiative. get in there, get your hits in first, get them on the floor and leave. all these fights occured before i had much martial arts experience when i was in my late teens. the last fight i had; at the time i was 3rd kyu in shotokan if i remember right. i should probably say that i could have avoided all of those fights had i wanted to, but teen ego needs feeding since then there have been several situations where i could have fought and most likely won had i wanted to, but i just left it.

watch that new jet li film then tell me you want to give up MA joking of course, you know what you have to do. good luck with everything non-MA!

good post. unfortunately western society is built around quick fixes, so a lot of those things are foreign or undesireable when someone first takes up MA.

get a punch bag and use it. every martial artist should have one.

there was this guy who used to yell like a brick just fell on his toe, i swear he had one of the loudest kiais ever. it was quite funny, i remember when he came to our dojo first time, and his kiai just got louder and louder as time went on. the actually shouting of the word 'kiai' is a classic, but nothing beats the good old 'HIIIIIIIIII-YAH!!'.

kendo is very much about precise form. you can't just whack someone with a stick, you have to get everything pretty much perfect. the target identification type of kiai has never been explained to me adequately, but i think its basically to show the referees that you hit what you were going for i.e. to prevent flukes. this all stems from the fact that samurai wore armor, and you're not going to kill an armored warrior by slashing your sword at them any old how. also if you ever see a match between experienced kendoka, its rediculously fast. the two kendoka will have a bit of 'eyeing eachother up' type stuff, then in a fraction of a second techniques are exchanged and its probably over. sometimes i can't tell what's happened and i'm a shodan. the target identification really helps. and daizyblackbelt's beaten me to it again; by the time you make the kiai you will already have defeated your opponent (or been countered). and lol, my only neighbour is a deaf old lady. lovely person, she's never complained but i think that's because she can't hear me!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dim_mak don't you just love wiki?

if you use any tool enough, eventually it will cease to become a tool and just become an extention of your body. for example; the pen. when you write, you don't have to think about how to make your hand control the pen. you just think of where you want the tip of the pen to be, and its there. no concious thought necessary. the same goes for weapons. i've been doing kendo for a few years now, and i no longer have to think how to make my body move the sword, that becomes subconcious. i just think of what i want the sword to do, and the sword does it. the idea of things become extentions of your body is just the elimination of concious thought. when we're babies and we can't walk and stuff, we have to conciously think about moving our limbs, but now we've practiced it so much, it just happens. its making the body act with the mind without concious thought coming between them. when learning a weapon style, we are again trying to reach the point where concious thought is eliminated. instead of just the mind and body acting together, the mind and the weapon act together. in kendo we call it ken shin ichi nyo, 'sword and mind as one'.

i've never really practiced tonfa (just played around with them a few times), but i'd imagine the square ones are more traditional. a bit like nunchucks, today you get circular ones but they used to be angular; the edge is much more effective for striking with.

i've decided to give judo a try. now here's my problem: basically i spend half of my year at university and half of it home. the judo club at my uni is affiliated to the british judo association, while the judo club near my home is affiliated to the british judo council. the british judo association is affiliated to the british olympic association and sounds great, but the british judo council i can't really seem to find anything out about it. does anyone know about the differences between these two bodies? would training under both bodies at different times during the year cause problems?

MMA will have had an influence. it has made a lot of people realise that a 'striking art' or whatever is clearly incomplete and inneffective. however to say that because of MMA, karateka have just gone and made up grappling moves for kata is wrong. anyone who has ever practiced modern karate must have thought at some point 'what the hell is this for' with regards to a kata movement, or some totally unecessary movement in a 'block' for example. people were thinking these things for years before MMA became popular. nearly all (like, over 90%) of kata movements don't make sense at all without grappling or throwing. the same goes for those utterly lame 'blocks' every beginner karateka gets taught. grappling has always been there in karate, it just got forgotten, and now its been rediscovered. no doubt MMA helped many karateka to realise that something was missing, and gave the initiative to go and find out what karate is really about. after all, karate has been in the west for only 60 years, and its taken that long to work out what on earth all those crazy kata movements are. the fact that MMA exploded around about the same time is mainly coincidence i think, though i think it has influenced karate as well. you won't find a double leg takedown in kata because as i said in my previous post, karate was never intended for fighting other martial artists. neither will you find feints or complicated punch combos. these things aren't necessary when defending yourself against an untrained attacker.

i don't think its fair to say JJJ does not involve fighting against a resisting partner, its just that its not common in a lot of modern schools. certainly JJJ practiced traditionally is full of randori. if you ever read anything about jujitsu before it became popular, or even more so when the samurai were still active, the training was pretty brutal. in my jujitsu dojo, the more senior students are always doing randori. us lower grades aren't allowed to yet because apparently its too dangerous, so we do that crappy set responses stuff.

a guy with a 10th, 9th, 8th and 6th dan??????? something about all of it sounds dodgy to me. if you go, ask to see the instructors certifications and stuff. maybe i'm being paranoid but a guy having a 10th dan in a single style is almost unheard of these days. don't really like the idea of a budo class either. they do have a free class though. you may as well go and see what its like and talk to the instructors (and check their credentials!!).

daizyblackbelt has already mentioned it but we kiai all the time in kendo. if you deliver a perfect cut in kendo but don't kiai, you don't get the point! so i'm pretty used to it. its become very natural to me to kiai when executing a technique. it helps me focus. now if i do something without kiai the technique feels kind of empty. there is of course a difference between shouting every time you do something and true kiai. true kiai isn't really a concious decision to shout; it comes from within as a result of executing the technique using your whole body and spirit.

yes, at first you want somewhere very peaceful. the most important thing is silence. the next important thing is physical comfort. you can close your eyes, but sounds and physical discomforts are your worst enemy when meditating. silence is hard to find in the modern world, if you can't find it, at least find a place where you can't hear human voices. the mind has a way of paying a lot of attention to human voices and that's the last thing you want. the more proficient you are at it, the less you will be affected by distractions outside of your mind. i've been meditating for about two and a half years now, twice a day without fail and i can meditate in most situations as long as i can sit down. if someone talks to me, touches me or something then my concentration will be gone instantly, but i can usually shut out background noise. don't worry about that too much at first though; concentrate on forgetting the distractions inside your mind, and everything else will follow.