DWx

Kinda depends on the school in my TKD style. As a rule everyone senior to you in age or rank is Sir/Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ma'am unless they have a 7th dan or above. They are then "master" at 7th dan, "senior master" for 8th dan, and "grandmaster" at 9th dan. If they are a master, you always refer to them as "master X" or use the Korean alternative. 1st through to 3rd dan can be called the Korean "boosabum" (assistant instructor) and 4th through to 6th "sabumnim" (instructor). We also use the senpai/kohai terms although the Korean equivalents are sunbae and hubae (sp?). The designated sunbae is the highest grade in the class as well as any blackbelts that aren't also instructors. My school is fairly casual about it and my instructor goes by his first name outside of class. In class its always Sir or Mr though. I've always made special care to call all the instructors Mr/Mrs etc. when the kids are there as I think it reinforces the idea that these people are their teachers, like school teachers. Some schools in the same style are really strict though and you always refer to people by their full title even outside of class. When I did Tai Chi, it was just first names all the time.

Welcome

I'll probably do just that. I wish the title were different. I feel like the victim of some sort of bait and switch. Also, I got if for Christmas from my grandma who just so happens to have an Amazon account. (they require you to have purchased it there to write a review) I'll have to use her account to write a review, but it should prove to be a rare scathing review from a 70 year old woman that's both online and Star Wars related. Don't think you have to purchase it with the same account. I've written reviews on Amazon.com and .co.uk when I've bought the item elsewhere or it was a gift. Sounds like the book really really sucked. Although now I'm intrigued as to what he was arguing throughout the book. Not much of a consolation, but here's a Star Wars-y video that I came across recently which is awesome:

Anyone here actually use any supplements? Stuff like protein shakes, creatine etc. etc.

nice vid Wastelander Really does show Etim stiff as a board when he gets hit. Don't usually make any special effort to watch the UFC but if there's gonna be more of striking like this..

Amazon's customers disagree: http://www.amazon.com/Sword-Fighting-Star-Wars-Universe/product-reviews/0786434619/ref=pr_all_summary_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 You should post your review on there to save anyone else from reading it ... In fact, it seems as though he replied to one of the reviews on there so you could get a reply from the man himself

Barboza's finish was just beautiful to watch: http://youtu.be/pVmLZgZ1Ld4 (apologies for poor video, YouTube keeps taking all the good ones off)

Welcome

Welcome Dave

Photos are of the bats. Looks genuine enough to me, but I don't know about baseball or demo bats.. One of the photos shows one with the store sticker thingy with the barcode on.

I love this reason! Although why not make blue the 1st kyu level too? We've got these colours, half-belts / stripe belts are in between White: to signify innocence and no knowledge of the style Yellow: signifies earth, foundation level, plant your seed of knowledge in it Green: plant's growth as your skills develop Blue: heavens to which the plant's growing Red: signify danger as the skills develop but to also caution the student themselves to exercise care and control Black: opposite of white, also impervious to darkness and fear (I guess this means being cool headed and still making the right choices ) Use roman numerals or bars for dan grades 1 to 9. Schools in the system that do award junior blackbelts give them a blackbelt with a white stripe through the centre. I half suspect we stole/copied the colours from other styles and applied these meanings to it.

Having them held in a stand like that makes it a slightly different break to the vid Kuma posted. Kiyohide Shinjo Sensei's break was the bat breaking where it was struck, basically a speed break whereas the Rou Chan break was essentially bending the top and forcing the break at the weakest point. Do you only do those breaks on the bats dre2308? Or do you test students on other strikes or kicks?

Happy Birthday Brian

A belated Happy Birthday

Welcome wilkan

Great post Bob I bow to the person and to their rank as a sign of respect for them, for the style, for what we're about to do.. I do think it can sometimes be a little OTT though. I remember being on a seminar with a high ranking Korean master and he found it quite funny how often we were bowing and told us to cut it out!

Maybe you misunderstand sine wave. Sine wave isn't about taking steps, its about weight management in the stance. Sine wave can be applied in a static stance when you're toe to toe with the other person. I'm not trying to convert everybody to sine wave. Obviously we all know that you can get power without. Just don't think you should write it off as a "no power" method. Everything goes full circle and if our patterns are rubbish and powerless because of the sine wave, then most likely our sparring and breaking and everything else is rubbish too. I'll let you guys be the judge of that. And speaking of breaking, not everybody likes it, but breaking is a brilliant way of quantitatively measuring power and ITF guys can break using sine wave so you must be able to generate some force from it? Sure power is best delivered in a straight line and that the quickest route from A to B is a straight line. But surely you guys don't solely use linear strikes? The vast majority of blocks, strikes, kicks are not linear and move in an arcing motion. Besides which, you're not solely using the mass of your fist/arm to punch. All you guys move your hips when you punch don't you? You're utilizing mass that isn't centred directly behind your fist by moving your hips and throwing your whole body weight in to it. We use sine wave to assist in both putting the mass into the technique and also to assist in our mobility between stances and in stances. Besides there comes a point when talking about the raw power generated from your punch or strike becomes a bit pointless really. In an ideal world we'd all like for all fights to be ended by "one hit, one kill" but after a certain point, when you can already generate however many pounds of pressure from each kick and punch to smash a man's skull with one blow, the benefit of increasing your power starts to tail off. If you can get that first shot in and end the fight there then great. Well done you. But if not, now you've got to add in mobility so that you can move around and then chain together lots of strikes and we believe that proper use of sine wave assists with this. Anyway, I'm digressing. Good Luck

Welcome spinner12

Congrats

We do kicks and punches to the body even in my TKD class so its not that special. The neck and groin shots tho... ouch. Couldn't the neck punches (and I guess the groin shots) be similar to all that stuff where people bend iron bars with their neck and all that? Kinda all the tricks you see the Shoalin monks do? edit: Just searched for Shoalin Monks conditioning on YouTube. Am now slightly traumatised.

Welcome Mikky

Welcome to the forums cjd4life, thanks for taking the time to answer people's questions If you don't mind me asking, what's your TKD background? and why did you choose to call your style "ChunJiDo"? (Just because I do TKD and I love to talk about it )

We require this at 1st and 4th dan. At 1st, its just an internal school thing where you can write about anything you like within the style. Most people do what the belt means and their journey in the art, but we've had some pretty interesting ones over the years; one guy who was heavily into maths did one of the mechanics of a punch.. At 4th its a more indepth analysis of something and gets sent off to the organization headquarters. I think its just a nice way of showing what you understand and taking a deeper look into your style. If people genuinely struggle at reading and writing, I think they can do an oral presentation instead.

It depends what you mean by rhythmic. Makes it v rhythmic IMO. I've never seen any other style do it (although Karate team kata comes close) but in ITF we have team patterns. Since sine wave dictates the pace, they look v rhythmic and you can almost match the moves to a metronome. I compete in both individual and team patterns and to get the pacing right for competition, I do actually keep a count in my head as it keeps the moves on the beat. Also allows you to do some pretty cool things when doing the pattern in a group: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eos9sP0_KvU (but in team patterns sine wave gets over-emphasized and the movements slowed down to make sure the group looks identical) In terms of rhythm, all I described above was "normal motion". There is also "fast", "slow", "continuous" and "connecting" motions and when I explain these to beginners, I personally talk about fitting it to full-beats and half-beats. In all honesty, it'll probably be over-emphasized right through the colour belts because they'll want to see you using your legs. Then as you progress beyond, you'll learn to make the movement more concise. Its not all that bad anyway. Regardless of whether you really like it or not, there is a lot more to the style than the sine wave. You'll most likely have to do sine wave to grade but you'll get a lot more out of the style than just this funny movement.

Awesome Dobbersky, welcome to the family Who you training with? As an ITF-ist I try and give you my take on things, but this is only what I know and what I think when I'm training. --------- Originally sine wave got introduced early on as a way to try to generate more power and for political reasons. Check out page 144 of A Killing Art by Alex Gillis: Even over my short 10 year training time, its changed in how we do it as there's more understanding of body mechanics and as the movement gets refined to something more useful. Over my training time, we've changed from a massive up/down to a more lateral forwards/backwards movement (never understood this one) to the now more subtle motion. Up/down is never going to add more power going forward and if you know anything about mechanics you're crazy to think so. (You do get a lot of ITF students and instructors saying up/down does, but its a misunderstanding on their part of what the're doing themselves). Sine wave has changed and is all about relaxation. Its not really an overtly up/down action. I like to think of it as natural sine wave and created sine wave. Hard to explain w/o pictures but when stepping between stances, sine wave comes into play as a result of natural movement. Its to do with relaxation. If you're going from a deep stance, eg walking stance and stepping forward into another walking stance, you are going to go up and down a little. I mean you take two people the same height and get one person to do a walking stance and the other to just stand there, the one in the stance is going to be lower. To take a step, you've either got to make a conscious effort not to come up or you will naturally raise as you go through that non-stance-just-standing there phase. To illustrate, watch a crowd walking: its almost imperceptible but you can see that they bob slightly. If they were taking longer steps i.e. the size of a walking stance, the wave would be more pronounced. In practice, we get a slight down up down movement. Using an example of going from walking stance with the left leg forward and stepping through so the right leg is now forward: When we land in the left stance and finish whatever strike or block we were doing, the stance should be locked out. To transition to the right stance, we first relax the legs and the back leg will go from locked out to bent slightly. This also results in a slight downward motion. Push with the back leg to go to the neutral "non-stance" stance (feet both under the body). Of course you're going to raise up unless you make an effort to bend your legs to maintain the low height. From the neutral position you now drive forward into the second stance and end up going down. That's all it is. Excessive downward or excessive upward motion is totally counter intuitive as you waste time for no increase in power. The neutral position serves as a transition position. The left leg is loaded and the weight is on the ball of the foot. This allows you to pivot and push the weight, allowing you to either step forward or you can step back, to the side, shift, slide etc. Translates straight over into sparring as this is where you keep the weight when moving. Only time weight goes onto the full foot is that instant when you're landing a strike/block and need to fix the stance. So why not just keep it all level as power is more effectively transferred in a straight line? Relaxation. Must relax everything between techniques, including the legs. Have to be able to change direction or reverse the movement at any time, including halfway through the movement, i.e. the neutral stance position. Created sine wave is a little different but taking the 1st 2 moves of Do-San, block-reverse punch in a walking stance. Sine wave is not bend the back leg down, then push up onto the ball of the foot and then punch. The back leg should be locked in the stance as you finish the block. To transition into the punch, you relax the back leg and inevitably get a slight bend in the back leg. This tiny downward movement is the "down" part. Hardly that noticeable. You don't physically force the bend and lowering. The weight shifts slightly onto the ball of the back foot, (but you're not wearing imaginary high heels ). This frees up your hip a bit more so you can pull it back and then snap it back into position as you fire off the punch. Coming onto the rear ball of the foot allows you to pull the hip back a bit more and the leg naturally turns a bit too. End up with a slight upward motion and you then use your leg as well as hips to drive into the technique. It is slower than what you'd see in Karate kata but when you learn more patterns you'll find that there are variations on the movement to chain together techniques and combine this action. The only time the sine wave should look "over the top" is when the legs are assisting in the technique. So take a scooping block in a sitting stance. The idea is you are lifting up and parrying an opponents attack (like a kick). You come up in the stance so that your legs are assisting with the upward motion of the arm. You're then using your big quad muscles and not just relying on your arm to be able to lift the leg out of the way. Similarly with any technique when you want to pull them into it. You can make it a bigger movement and use the dropping of your weight to assist with pulling them in. There are more nuances to it than this but I hope this serves as a very basic idea of how to do it. The problem really comes from people misunderstanding and/or trying to make it more aesthetic. In essence people want to make all moves the same with the same amount of sine wave action to it (and this is the reason why tournament patterns are so bad for it). If you're going to do it, you have to be smart and ask yourself why you're doing it and what the technique is for so how do you use the sine wave? The other issue is that "Master X" visits your school and decides that you're not doing it right so spends ages with you exaggerating the movement to make you understand the mechanics of it. But then Master X goes away again and the instructor misunderstands and thinks bigger is better. Its like how we teach our beginners: big arms for blocks and strikes so they get the movement down. As they progress the movements become more conservative and shorter. It really is something that's better shown rather than explained so I hope your instructor does this Dobbersky.