Jesse over at The Martial Explorer has tagged me in an awesome bit of blogging tomfoolery. Being rather chuffed to be picked out for this (despite the fact he tagged my almost 2 weeks ago!!!), here ’tis:

The meme works as follows. You post five things about yourself. Four are untrue. One is true. All are so outlandish, implausible or ridiculous that no one would be inclined to believe that any of them are true. And despite the pleas from your readers, you never divulge which is true and which are fabrications. You then tag five other people (four seriously and one person you are pretty sure would never participate).

1. During a home training session, I caused irreversible damage to both myself and my boxing station
2. When I was much younger, inspired by pop culture icons The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I performed a jump kick while waiting to get picked up from school and snapped my leg in half whilst mid-air, sending the other half flying across the road
3. My brothers and I used to break into my Dad’s tool shed when we were kids and fight each other with spades, rakes and sticks in the spirit of Monkey (or as it was locally known, Monkey Magic)
4. When I was still in primary school (which is elementary school for those of you on the North American continent!), I used my newly-learned Taekwondo techniques to successfully defend myself in a classroom scrap
5. I can still effortlessly perform vertical axe kicks with my prosthesis

There are elements of truth in all of them, so good luck!

Should they happen to drop by (and haven’t been tagged already!), I’ll tag BBM from Black Belt Mama, Wim over at Wim Demeere’s Blog, Patrick from Mokuren Dojo, Jon at EPIC Martial Arts, and brother Tank (who can leave a reply in the comments if he’s interested :P) 😉

Bloginated Monday, 14th September 2009 / Karate
Tag-isms: History | humour

Matt over at Ikigai posted an awesome and humble post on the importance of keeping an open mind when approaching the study and practice of martial arts. There really isn’t a whole lot more to add to what he’s covered, and I can see my journey through a lot of what he has said. While I don’t have anywhere near the knowledge and experience he has, it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who has put the walls up and have tried to tear them down in trying to learn about martial arts wholistically as time has gone on.

For me, I have found that posting in good, open-minded martial arts forums (like OzBudo) have been one step in getting my mind out of the comfortable space it had setup with regards to martial arts, and attending seminars and training with people of varied experience also helps. While there are systems I still have a personal preference for over others, I’ve found I have really started to lower the irrational prejudice I had towards other styles, especially since at times they were petty or ill-informed, and to see things as wholistically as possible.

So this is a tip of my hat to you Matt – I’m committed to making it a habit to empty my cup 😀

Bloginated Monday, 14th September 2009 / Karate
Tag-isms: martial arts | open mind

I was reading a post over at EPIC Martial arts on padwork earlier (I’m trying to finally get back to reading up on what my fellow MA bloggers have been up to, they’ve been busy!), and it got me to thinking – padwork is awesome 😀

In my current style, we haven’t done a lot of padwork, but Sensei has mentioned introducing it a bit more recently. In my previous style we had the opportunity to do a bit of padwork, but it was mainly working on focusing/learning targeting for kicks and punches. Jon’s post discusses the effectiveness of training with doing padwork with real intent on both side of the equation – not just one person hitting a target continuously, but moving around, applying pressure, making you fight on both sides.

I see this as having plenty of benefits – first up, it helps train stamina, which is an essential attribute you need as a martial artist. It teaches you to target and focus under pressure. It makes you learn that fights are two-way interactions with your opponent, you can’t just fire out technique after technique without considering all the variables involved otherwise. And finally, it lets you practice heavy contact in a sparring scenario with relative safety.

Hopefully with all this I haven’t missed the point of Jon’s excellent post, so please drop by and have a look, it makes for great reading! I’m going to make a mental note to talk with my Sensei about this later on this week to see if we can do it, as I reckon padwork is awesome 😀

Bloginated Monday, 14th September 2009 / Karate
Tag-isms: padwork

So to wrap things up, I also thought I’d share something about my new kata.

In the past, I’ve really struggled with learning the pattern of kata, but this year I’ve been trying to go about learning kata a bit differently. First up, I’m trying hard to apply much greater focus in class and keeping myself from getting distracted or relaxing or taking things too easy. When I first started learning my previous grade-kata, I experimented with this and found that I was able to pick up the kata much faster than I usually would. Following my last grading I’ve been working on my focus even more and am trying to make every session of regular training as intensive as possible, trying to match the same dedication and effort you typically put into a grading but in an everyday class scenario. And the same goes for my kata – focus-focus-focus.

And strangely enough, it appears to be very effective – last week was the first time learning my kata, and by the end of the lesson I’d managed to memorise the basic pattern. True, my form was pretty poor, but I was still managing to work on my breathing and put in focused energy into some of the techniques. It was actually kind of amazing, as I entered that tarnce-like state of awareness you can often get when performing kata despite the fact I was still very early on in my understanding of it.

As a result, I came away feeling really chuffed that I’d manage to make such a productive first step in learning my new kata. True, part of being able to pick it up relatively quickly can also be attributed to greater experience and being able to tune into the patterns in other Heian kata, but I also think my attention to detail and my focus were big parts of this, and it’s always nice to find that, despite what you may think sometimes, you are improving as time goes on, you are evolving as a martial artist… even if you habitually look a bit unco 😉

Now I have to hope that I’ll be in good form next week! Will have to put some time aside between classes to go through the sequences, I don’t want to put this good start to waste.

Bloginated Friday, 11th September 2009 / Karate
Tag-isms: kata

So, continuing on from my previous post, at training last week we started focusing on improving mawashi geri technique as it’s now formally graded as part of my syllabus, which means more practicing and more focus on improving the technique. Unfortunately for me, my mawashi geri is pretty rubbish, especially when kicking with my right leg (i.e. the real, whole one :P). Since you’re required to rely on extra flexibility and coordination with your standing leg for this one, I’ve always struggled with it as it’s really difficult to balance on my fake leg. Then you add hip movements, shifting weight using your knee and ankles, adjusting pressure with your foot – all this I can feel when balancing on my right leg and kicking with my left, so it’s hard trying to compensate for such a difficult series of complex, subtle movements.

So following class, I’ve been breaking the technique back to basics, and as I do my infamous “karate-around-the-house” habit that drives Wifey up the wall, I’ve started incorporating mawashi geri in stages. For the most part this has been in volving my lifting my right leg with the leg drawn back, but with my bent leg held parallel to the floor and hold my balance. I felt that part of my problem was that I was having trouble gracefully moving into the motions of the mawashi geri, and by working on the first step in performing the technique, I’m aiming to improve part of the foundation for the technique.

The next challenge is controlling the whipping-out/whipping-back motion so that the technique can be performed as close as possible in light of my situation. Stupid me forgot my recent post on how to do a better mawashi geri, which of course contained that extra bit of info I needed to overcome the lack of control with the fake leg – use the torso and the arms to make up for the difference. I then put it all to test while walking around the house last night before going to bed, and it made a world of difference.

But seriously, trust me to forget something I actually wrote about that would have been hugely helpful in this case 😛

So, next training I’m hoping to show a reasonable degree of improvement with this technique. Unless I forget it again, which is entirely possible 😛

Bloginated Friday, 11th September 2009 / Karate, Technique
Tag-isms: kicks | mawashi geri