Rick_72

While performance enhancement suppliments may be good for some, I don't personally subscribe to them. Mainly because the only thing I'm really training for is a marathon (although I train hard all around), and I've heard too many horror stories about mixing suppliments (natural or otherwise) with intense cardio exercise, and I'm not looking to win, just to finish. If I can't lift it with the muscle I've built with regular training, I just haven't gotten there yet. Not to mention the cost doesn't meet the gain for me. I run, swim, train in Karate, play soccer on an intermural team, and do some strength training.

I tend to agree with the keeping of your belt. What I meant when I said retesting was in order, was basically that you come back in and test offline between you and your instructor as you get back into shape. But you shouldn't really give up the belt recognizing your previous achievements. Students from other styles that come to our school are even allowed to maintain their previous style's belt color. They just have to learn our system from 10th Kyu on up, and are awarded only certificates until they achieve the next grade in our style from what grade their wearing.

I wear boots to work (combat boots, so their a little lighter than work boots or steel toes), so kicking in running or dress shoes is pretty easy as far as weight for me. However, what I find awkward is how shoes change the position of your feet. Its harder to angle your foot so the blade and heel are the striking surface on side kicks. One advantage is that you won't hurt your toes if you don't pull them back when you kick someone .

I wouldn't block a hook, I just move. Body change forward to the opposite side of the punch, and counter.

I'm on contract, I pay $275 a month. Everyone will say whoa!!!! However, I pay that rate for my entire family up to 4 members. For my oldest son and I, we can attend 3 class's a day Mon-Thurs (we can attend beginner, intermediate, and advanced class's, which we do because of the sustainment of the basic's for us). For my wife and my youngest son, they can attend the two beginner class's a week, and then when they move on to Green belt could attend beginner and intermediate class's totalling 6 class's a week. So its about 30 hours of Karate a week.

See.....in a perfect world everyone wins! LOL!

I think its wrong to retaliate with malice within you own school. There are occasions that I take a shot in sparring with a little too much on it (no control), but its usually from a junior belt than I. My response is to let them know after class that they need to work on their control. The next time it occurs from the same person, I usually wind up on them once (never illegal contact, just a little harder my normal controlled strike) to remind them that this is training environment, and it usually jars their memory. I never, ever get upset to the point of taking it out on them physically, especially with junior grades, we were all there at some point. Its a physical activity, so tempers are going to flare at times, its cruicial to at least attempt to keep them to yourself when it gets to the point that you want to react physically.

You correct, however, I believe I said "in a perfect world". In a perfect world there'd be no heavy handedness, ego trips, price gouging, or law suits .

In a perfect world, there'd be one governing body for international martial arts. Staffed by proven practitioners of each art, all with the same goal in mind. Credibility of all of the arts. Unfortunately for all of us, this isn't a perfect world, and people want to feed their families while they gain fame and riches. So we're stuck choosing the organization we want to be associated with, and then attempting to defend its credibility in a world of other organizations also attempting to defend their credibility. Usually that defense comes at the cost of bad mouthing other organizations in an attempt to prop theirs up.

The gi is just traditional work out clothes. Hey mine gets wet!!!??

Yeah, well we all know how he turned out . I thought that was maybe what you meant. No I would never even bother trying to block a shin kick, I would just pick my foot up to bend my leg so it wouldn't break it.

I've never been trained to specifically land any punch on the temple. I've always trained to use overhand punches (left or right) to counter a straight hand punch that I timed correctly, or was left out to long, and the target area was always the jaw line. A particularly good target for an overhand punch is the rear of the jaw line where it connects to the ear. Its tough to get any effect out of the temple with boxing gloves on, because there isn't anything protruding from you hand (its a pretty flat surface) to enter into that damage area of the temple. Didn't say it didn't happen, just that its not something that I train for, because its not the way I like to win. Agreed. Just takes some getting used to in a point system, not being able to pump my jab to the face to cause a backing effect on my opponent. Not sure what a "shink" kick is, was that a typo? If not, you'd have to explain it to me, cause we probably just call it something different. Absorbing punchs is absolutely essential, however, you can't just sit there and absorb them all day, because they are scoring points. Fortunately, I don't have a lot of trouble jamming up peoples kicks either. Its just the target area's for punching that I'm still ironing out the bugs on. One of my favorite boxing techniques. When the other fighter tries to wrap you up to slow the pace, start working that floating rib area or lat muscle, not illegal and won't get points taken away, makes it hard to keep guard up after awhile. Maybe the reason we disagree often, in many threads. I don't fight full contact, and don't really have any plans to anymore (haven't had those plans for years). Boxing could be considered full contact, I guess, but I haven't trained or fought in a boxing ring in over 15 years. I enjoy point sparring, and free sparring simply because I get to blow off a little steam, practice technique (for myself, as well as giving other students some pointers on what their doing wrong and what will and will not work in real life or the ring), and no one ever gets seriously injured.

Oh man, biting off a seperate chunk there. Karate organizations are ripe with politics. I think that could have not only its own thread, but its own forum filled with examples of shoddy leadership, and ignorant practices based on nothing more than individual ego and greed.

Exactly, and you don't even have to call it a lesson. Its more of those guys just getting together to do a little training with each other and sharing ideas.

I guess the misconception here about blocking is that some people (and I've seen this a lot since my start in TMA) will just attempt to block everything you throw until conditions are perfect for their attack. Which can be very tough, although I've practiced this in free sparring and been pretty successful at just blocking many strikes in succession without countering. That doesn't take into account the person that can block as they strike (which takes really good footwork), or is fast enough to block several strikes in succession then counter. Most strong attacks are going to leave your opponent off center, even if slightly, and a true power punch requires a committed attack (hips turned, shoulders turned into the punch, and sometimes the heal flared), so if you can block that you have a outstanding opportunity for counter. A counter in my mind isn't a single strike, its a counter attack, or a flury (if the situation allows). Me personally, its when I get inside with my counter attack that I run into the problems I talked about in my previous post. Blocking many strikes, with normal TMA blocks that I've learned, isn't a huge problem. But of course you can block till your blue in the face, they don't score points, and they don't end a fight.

True. I used skills I learned in boxing in street fights many times when I was younger. It was really the reason I was interested in it in the first place. So it didn't provide me with any extra mental strength to go along with the skills I was learning, hence the number of fights I engaged in when I was a teenager. It didn't take much to get me to retaliate. Wish I would have had the opportunity to train in a traditional martial art instead, things would probably have been different. If your chin is tucked properly, and your hands are up, a blow to the temple or forehead with 14 or 16 oz gloves on isn't really going to have a match changing effect on you. Unless your head gets lifted by a jab, and its followed up to the nose or chin with a cross from the opposite hand. I guess you could say that, if that's your attitude to the sport. Not to mention if the ref does see it you can be immediately disqualified at his discretion, or at best have points taken away which can cause you to lose the bout, so why take the chance of playing dirty. Its a sport, try a little sportsmanship. Didn't neccessarily say I was a newb. Just said I had more training than actual matches. I boxed for 5 years. My problem is that it was a really long time ago, and I just recently picked up martial arts within the last 5 years, so I walked in very out of practice and relied heavily on what little technique, and habits, I had left. The biggest difference is that in boxing, you can stagger or back off an opponent by keeping a constant jab in his face. In dojo sparring there's no face contact with students below black belt, so keeping your opponent outside is tougher. I block kicks with my arms all the time. Done correctly 9 times out of 10 I hurt the attackers leg more than they hurt my arms anyway (I drop my elbow into their ankle's quite often). I absorb kicks, as well as punches, just fine, but that's really not the point is it? We're talking about sport fighting here, and you can absorb strikes all day, but when the fight's over everything you absorbed is still going to be tallied up on the judges score card isn't it? Its true, different boxers fight differently. However, the overlying fact is that their still boxers. Boxer's train with pretty close to the same methods, and that training involves work with their brains, cardio, hands, and feet (feet in a different sense than TMA). They want to land their hands on you, and the simple biological fact is that legs are longer than arms, and you can take away fast footwork by tiring out their legs. I guess I should have explained that better because it was kind of vague. Boxer's absolutely train to get hit, but not in the sense that I guess I came off with. You can't duck every punch, and you can't run circles around the ring the whole bout. You use slight ducks or bob's to slip punches. You make slight moves to make punches glance instead of landing solid (or scoring points). For points to be scored the knuckle area of the glove has to land solidly on a scoring zone. So by bobbing, or slightly ducking it cause's those blows to not only be lessened, but also to not land the scoring zone of the gloves on a target area. You keep your hands up to help with the deflection (not to mention to protect your face from turning into mush), that's a block in boxing. You pull your arms in tight to you body to disallow a glove to land a scoring blow on the body target area, because points aren't awarded for blows to the arms. I wasn't blessed with Sugar Ray Leonard speed when I was boxing, so I many times ate my own hands from blocking my opponents strikes (many times I wasn't fast enough to push my hands out slightly when the head punches came), but as long as that didn't effect me physically too much (which it didn't) my opponent wasn't scoring points. I didn't have too much trouble absorbing the occasional shot to the back of the head, knowing that it wasn't points being scored, and that they didn't come very often. The adjustment in TMA is that those are now points, as well as the kidney area, which regardless how you feel about "what the ref see's", is still not only a non scoring area in boxing, but also could earn you lost points or disqualification. Boxing and TMA are different in so many way's that if you have students in your school that have transitioned easily, well good on em. I mearly outlined some of the things that I've had trouble adjusting to over the last few years of kumite.

I find that very all-or-nothing thinking oriented and don't agree with it because it is too absolute of a concept. People don't operate in absolutes - they just think in them. There are plenty of people who are still learning things who might not consider themselves "students" necessarily of another person but who might consider themselves "students" of a field of knowledge. There are plenty of people who have outgrown the need to have a mentor out there. In almost every field of endeavor, people "graduate" eventually to become experts in their own right. It is only due to Japanese cultural influences, for the most part, that so many martial artists believe that if they are not attached to some greater organization or calling someone else "Sensei" that they are not really working their thing. I've done Shotokan for a long time. I don't know everything little thing about it, but I long passed the point when my learning curve was steep, and I find it more stimulating to look elsewhere for things to learn. Mostly, when I learn new things about Shotokan, they are pretty small things and I'm not particularly impressed to have learned them. But right now I find Shito-Ryu and Goju-Ryu kata fascinating, and I am enjoying learning their technical methods and learning more about where Shotokan's highly modernized system came from. So, I still consider myself to be learning - learning is fun. But let's not be so bold that we assert that martial arts are like rocket science and that they are bottomless pits of information. That's mostly just a warm and fuzzy platitude - it doesn't really play out on the floor where many very intelligent long-time experts yawn hearing the same old speeches and performing the same old kata over and over again for decades and yearn to do something a little different. So you reached a level in which your considered an expert in Shotokan, and what did you do? You became a student of other things. If your learning something from someone else, regardless of what you want to call it (its just symantics), your a student, plain and simple. That's not a narrow minded way of looking at things, its exactly the opposite. I can't be the expert at everything, and it is my, as well as just about every other human on the face of the planet, wish to attempt to learn new things. Unless of course you want to take what you've learned so far, and lock yourself away from the rest of the world with it, never to return. Everyone is always a student in something, or we cease to have drive to do anything that we haven't already done.

I'm certain that you've probably retained some of your old knowledge from your previous training, so that's going to be evident to not only your instructor's, but your fellow students as well. I'll bet your Sensei also makes it a point when introducing you to let the school know of your past achievements, and may even use you as an example of perserverance in the martial arts. Double grading back to your previous grade sounds like a pretty generous offer to me. Considering its been so long, I'd say your going to be working awfully hard anyway. In our organization if a black belt doesn't train for more than 3 months without contacting the Dojo, they have to re-test back to their appropriate level (and our Shodan test is no joke). So having been gone for 15 years, yours sounds like a great situation to me.

I'd be leary of any master that didn't still consider themself a student. If your no longer learning anything, then your journey is over.

First, all sport fighting is "point system" fighting. How do you think they pick a winner at the end of a fight that didn't end in KO? How those points are tallied, scoring locations, round times, and whether or not action is stopped after points are scored are what differ from sport to sport. A full contact fighter isn't neccessarily more powerful than a point and stop system fighter, its simply a difference in what they're training for. For example, I'm a Traditional Martial Artist, with a few years of boxing training (years ago), I don't utilize leg kicks when sparring because its not authorized under the rules that I spar under. Does that make me less of a fighter? No it doesn't, because practically speaking, I'm not going to round kick someone in the thigh in a street fight anyway. I'm going to kick them in the knee or groin. So why would I train to kick thighs? Another example. In most TMA competitions (besides the full contact) theres no face contact below the black belt level. The reason behind this, I'm sure, has a lot to do with what this topic relates to. The equipment TMA use for kumite, doesn't lend itself to safety for face strikes. Besides MMA, most striking sports (boxing, Muay, kickboxing, etc, etc) are wearing gloves that vary anywhere from 12-16 oz's. They protect both the wearer and the opponent much better than the little half inch foam padded gloves that we wear. Does this mean I'm not going to strike someone in the face in a street fight? Of course it doesn't mean that. For most that have never competed in a "full contact" sport, a common misconception (and one that I have felt personally with new students of Karate during kumite) is that you throw powerful strikes in training. When your sparring (training) in any sport, you shouldn't be throwing strikes/kicks more than about 50-60% of your power. Training sparring, is just that. Its not conditioning you to take some massive blow to the head. Its simply conditioning for fighting in the ring/cage with a live opponent, exploiting openings, finding timing, and getting used to the rounds. No one train's full speed because there's no sense in getting injured or causing injury during training. If a point system practicioner (as you called them) climbs into a ring with a full contact fighter, for training, and one of them is throwing full power strikes, than their just trying to show how tough they are, their not really training.

I really like, and agree with, your interpretation. Absolutely true. In other words time means nothing, its the quality of what you put into it that should gauge your progression.

I don't do anything to prepare for sport fighting. When I fight I completely move off of instinct and muscle memory. I look for openings and hit them. If my opponent hits the openings faster, I lose.

That's a cop out. Pride means nothing when it comes to injuring someone. I'm a very proud person, but I'd much rather swallow my pride and walk away knowing that I could roll someone up if I wanted to, than to beat someone down that was just egging me on.

I'll tell you the same thing I've told my 10 year old son. If your put into a situation, that you cannot talk you way out of, and you have to fight, you fight to win. Plain and simple. I'd much rather my son come home on a trumped up school suspension (trumped up because if he was defending himself, its not fair that he should be suspended), then come home beat up with possible life changing injuries. Do you continue pounding someone after you've won the fight? No, of course not, but that doesn't mean that you don't incapacitate someone that started a physical altrication with you. Any parent that doesn't allow their children to defend themself when there's no other course of action is a moron in my opinion. What's the point of sending my children to martial arts class's if they can't use them in their defense?

We use the standard padding for kumite; hands, feet, head, and mouthguard. No chest protector. I've gone a step further with the shin pads, because I once had a waist high round house kick blocked with someone's bent knee, and my ankle swelled up like a balloon, so I didn't like that much haha. I think having progressed through stages where I would get in the ring and pound on my opponent and get pounded back, I've gained a lot of control, as have most others with experience. I usually base how a kumite match is going to go by who my opponent is. If I'm fighting a lower belt in class without much experience, I understand that I'm probably going to get hit with about 80 - 100% of their power. If I'm fighting with a brown or black belt, I can usually expect controlled, fast strikes that I feel but don't leave me sore the next day. I have to agree with elbows_and_knees, standard sparring pads are garbage. While its going to take a little of the bone on bone contact off of it, your going to feel everything as if you were bare anyway. Two weeks ago I had my nose busted in kumite by an orange belt. Some face contact is going to occur when your fighting inexperience guys, but the padding provided from our gear was more or less non exsistant. That being said, I don't think the outcome would have been any different had we not been wearing any padding at all. I just would have been angrier, for his lack of control haha.