Archive: Brief update

Source: Gisoku no Jutsu
Original post date: 27 April, 2007

Just a brief update this time – the ankle/foot is slowly getting better, as is my stump. I’m hoping to continue doing the light stretching and other stuff over the coming week, but I’m not sure if I’ll be ready to jump around like a silly karate boy by next Wednesday; besides, the car is going in for an overdue service next Wednesday, so it would be a bit of a rush picking it up and stuff and still making it to karate. Tank said he saw Sensei R at a recent pub crawl he went to with Uni people (anyone see the drunken Uni students with ‘Teenage Mutant Binja Turtles’ on their tees in the CBD? That was them :P) and he asked how I was going, and then got started on Tank to get back into training again 🙂 The random kicking of the boxing bag last week’s had a good effect on Tank though – Wifey and I caught up with my side of the family last night for dinner, and it looks like he’s been working on some kicks, which is awesome 🙂

Hmmm, in other stuff, I saw a bulletin in my inbox thingo about someone heading away from MySpace land – was that you Renato? If you ever get back onto MySpace, add me back on your friends list – it was cool discussing different martial arts stuff and responding to your blogs.

And a final note – I’m going to give my site a bit of a make over, inspired by McAdam’s recent visual awesomeness. Mind you, he’s an accomplished graphic designer and does all this cool stuff that I’d have no idea how to do, so that makes sense, but I’m still going to jazz up this pocket of the world a little bit. I’ve been considering colour schemes and stuff and want to make the adjustments by hand, but my CSS is really crap, so we’ll see how it turns out 🙂 Admittedly I could simply apply a pre-made layout, but I’m keen to do it by hand – it’s fun, a challenge and helps me learn stuff. Not sure when I’ll have it done – I’ll be firing out an assignment for Uni this weekend – but it shouldn’t be too far away – only a couple of weeks I reckon. I’ve changed some of the table colours on the main page, but I’m still nutting out the code, so I’m not 100% sure on how to achieve the effect I’m aiming for… possibly because I haven’t worked that bit out yet!!

Until next week, the non-adventures of Sean-o will continue ^_^ Oh, and shouts to Miguel – I hope you’ve managed to work out how to get to my blog by now and read up on stuff. Leave a comment, it’s fun 🙂

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Archive: Latest update

Source: Gisoku no Jutsu
Original post date: 24 April, 2007

Well, it’s been a week since I did the sensible thing and rolled my ankle. To be honest, not a lot has happened over this period of time – I’ve been icing my foot and Wifey’s been helping me strap it each morning. The biggest problem I had was that, with the foot a bit stuffed, it put a huge amount of pressure on my stump, and by Wednesday I could feel the blood vessels on the end of my stump get pushed to their limit of how much more abuse they could take, and not surprisingly the bloods vessels burst, bruised the end of my stump and its had to scab over to heal itself up. I’ve been taking the leg off at night, using my suave and sophisticated walking stick during the day at work (though I had to head home early on Wednesday last week – ended up taking the leg off at work because it was so sore and left the office at 2pm), and have tried to get around on crutches without hurting my ankle 😉 It’s been a bit tricky, but in the good news – the ankle is all better, it’s just the outer edge of my foot that took the brunt of the fall and waiting on to heal up, and my stump is almost healed up at the end. This is definitely a good thing – it doesn’t sting when I walk now. I’m hoping to get back to karate next week if my foot’s ready (’cause I’m pretty confident my stump will be fine before the end of the week).

Not surprisingly, there hasn’t been much in terms of training happening. I started again on doing static stretching on Saturday night (splits and stuff) and keep my leg in good shape (plus it helps with my knee as well), and I’ve decided to start focusing ony mental training. In a couple of books I’ve read on karate or martial arts in general, the authors have commented on the benefits of mental training. I’ve found that by taking my leg off I can sit in the Lotus position, so I’ve decided to start concentrating on my breathing and focusing my chi. One of the books I read most recently was one of Jyastin-kun’s, and the author referred to a study where a group of athletes divided their training in varying degrees between mental/physical training, with the former involving picturing the execution of their technique mentally in a meditative manner. Apparently the group that spent 25% time on physical training and 75% time on mental “image” training outperformed those who trained 50-50 75-25 and 0-100 on mental-physical training.

In the book on Japanese fighting arts I recently read, I remember coming across something similar, this time a story of how the great Masutatsu Oyama (founder of the Kyokushin style of karate) experimented with two training regimes on two of his students – one was trained purely in the physical degree of karate, whereas the other was given less physical training but was subject to mental training also. At the conclusion of the experiment, the former was better developed physically than the latter, but when the two of them sparred, there was no comparison – the latter soundly bettered his fellow student.

It’s always difficult to differentiate fact from fiction, so that’s why I’m giving this technique a go. I’d talked in a previous blog about the difference my breathing and focusing my chi has made in the past, so since there isn’t a lot that I can do physically at the moment, I thought it would be a good time to work on this side of my training. For the moment, I’m going through my kata in my head while I focus on my breathing, and will continue the same training with going through my regular techniques in my head also. As always, I’ll post up what I find comes about from this. I know there has got to be a way to develop that incredible inner power and technique masters of the martial arts develop despite their height or size; given I’m short and of medium build, I’d say this might be that extra something that helps me become a better martial artist. I hope 🙂

Oh, before I close off – I watched the truly woeful American Ninja on Foxtel last night:

It was soooooooooo funny, I’m not sure if the lead guy actually has any martial arts training – he spent more time rolling around like a stunt man than anything else 😉 And everything blew up, it was cool. Because it was so, so bad. I love 80s action flicks – they’re so shonky! And yes, I subjected Wifey to it – she had trouble breathing when the evil French guy was showing off his army of ninjas training in fluro yellow, orange and blue ninja gis, just randomly jumping and diving and falling around this uber dodgy obstacle course. And I loved how these guys in ninja outfits come running out of the jungle in broad daylight. Because, y’know, ninjas really blend into the jungle scenery in the middle of the day. If the movie had a dodgy pash/shag scene, it would have completed the atypical 80s ninja/martial arts action flick mould. Ah well, I’m sure there’ll be more opportunities for dodgy flicks as we go – Bloodsport is on later this month, and there’s always room for a blog on Showdown in Little Tokyo 🙂

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Archive: I belong to the international order of stupid

Source: Gisoku no Jutsu
Original post date: 17 April, 2007

Alright, let’s quickly recap on what’s happened in the last 24 hours shall we? Number 1: Awesomeness – my brother and his wife are down from Sydney, yay! Uber, awesome, golden, all that. Wifey and I went over to Mum and Dad’s last night for dinner as a big family thing, and Tank was showing Miguel (that’s my older brother’s pseudonym for the purpose of this blog :P) the boxing station Wifey and I got him for his 21st. And so, being boys, we all started punching it and kicking it and so forth. And I gave it a few impressive kicks. So impressive that my groin muscles are now sore because I laid into it without stretching or warming up. Thankfully we’re not talking super sore, just a little tender. I should point out that by groin muscle, I’m talking about the muscles on the inner-upper-thigh. At least I think those are the groin muscles. Maybe. If I’ve gotten them wrong, then that makes this a very amusing blog. Y’know, ’cause the word “blog” isn’t amusing enough on its own, assuming that it isn’t only Australians who use the word “bog” when talking about the delicate art of taking  dump.

Hmmm, I think the quality of this journal has suddenly taken a nose dive. Let’s correct that shall we!

Okay, so stupid thing number two for the last 24 hours? I got to work today, stepped out of the car and rolled my ankle and fell over. Now, the falling over bit I don’t have a problem with, as it’s possibly very amusing that I fell over. It was also a very clever falling over, as I rolled onto my back (which covered my shirt with yellow thingies from one of the nearby trees, but they brushed off so that’s okay), and didn’t land on my artificial leg and tore a hole through my trousers, which would have been bad. Anywho, I rolled the ankle, and it hurt. I swore at it, but that did’t seem to help it get any better. It’s not too bad, but it’s a bit tender. And about 5 minutes ago I was faffing around the compactuses (if that’s a real word – I think ‘compactus’ takes care of the plural, if there is one) and turned using my ankle, and it’s sore again. Not one to learn terribly quickly, I swore at it. As you can imagine, this didn’t exactly help the situation, but it did give me an excuse to add a few more sentences of waffle to this blog.

Okay, so it’s not too serious on either account, but the bugger is that I use my right ankle like crazy when I do karate… in fact, only having one ankle, I twist and turn on it an awful lot to compensate for having only one leg. So that knocks out another week of training. Maybe next week, eh?

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