Practising multiple styles?

[bushido_man96]

I think that we get caught up in this with two martial arts, but not with other things. Musashi was also an excellent calligrapher, was he not? No one ever said that his swordsmanship ability began to wane because he was also a penman, right?

Because he was great, doesn't mean he wouldn't have been better if he'd have spent more time on it. Then I guess comes the argument of balance. How much should we balance out the various activities in our lives. In this particular instance, I think it's fair to say he was finding the balance between MA and other interests, but two different MA's I don't believe fits into this category.

FYI - My father was once disciplined for going to the gym. He was told, "If you have time to go to the gym, get in the dojo".

So does that mean we shouldn't go lift, because it interferes with dojo time? And if this is the case, we should all quit spending time doing anything else, and go practice forms or something.

[alsey]

it depends on what exactly you want to achieve. if i want to be the absolute best i possibly can be at shotokan, i will train shotokan at the expense of everything else. that's not what i want though. i want to study two or three complimentary arts and improve my fighting skill as a whole, while still having time to do non-MA related things. with this attitude i'm never going to become a grandmaster or anything, but i don't really want to.

[koryu]

As far as studying different styles go, i've done a few. I started in goju-ryu and have studied similar styles that either goju decended from, or styles that formed from a goju basis. This way, the basics are similar, but i learn some new technique and adapt my training. I think I would personally get confused if I strayed too far from my original style.