Source: Gisoku no Jutsu
Original post date: 8 May, 2007

All is going well with all my random injuries – my stump is looking better than it has in weeks, and my ankle is feeling great; I get a bit of a dull throbbig pain once in a while, but it’s doing really well. I’m aiming to do a weights session tonight to get me back into the routine, and will be training on Wednesday night providing I don’t do anything stupid between now and then. Hamez is taking a break from soccer for a couple of weeks, so I’ll be taking him along with me, and Tank might be able to make it, also. I’m really looking forward to it, this’ll make it ~2 months since last training.

In stretchy leg news, for some reason my muscles were sore yesterday 😛 The only thing I can think of is that Tank and I were doing some shonky backyard cricket on Sunday morning as Wifey and I headed over to Mum and Dad’s for brekkie/morning tea/eat fest. Given backyard cricket is generally as low impact as it comes, I can’t see that being an issue. Mind you, it possibly didn’t help that I kept on kicking the ball with my foot and instead of knocking it with the cricket bat, Segata Sanshiro style:

*Ahem* Anyway, the point is, shonky backyard cricket should not have resulted in my legs being sore. The only thing I can think is that maybe I stretched a bit too far on Sunday night. Regardless, I’m continuing my stretching routine, probably every second night or so, maybe a little more frequently. It’s the same routine we do in karate… kinda – I don’t spend any time stretching my left leg much, since there’s not much there to stretch 😛 I can’t remember if I went through it before, so here it is for all to consider:

• Shake the legs about a bit to get the blood flowing, then fall gently into the side splits, getting down to the point of slight discomfort and hold it. 30 seconds is supposed to be optimal, I generally lose track of time so I’m probably sitting there like a dufus for a few minutes 😛
• Shift your weight and do the straight splits, right leg in front, and get down as low as possible and hold it. Again, 30 seconds I think is optimal, but I lose track of time. Damn telly 😛 If you have two legs, feel free to reverse the position to stretch out your left leg
• Settle back into the side splits, getting lower and hold your balance on your heels, steadying yourself on your hands (or in my case, knuckles – helps condition them). I read up that the point with this is to keep your hips at an angle and nto vertical, as the former is its natural position. By this point, I can normally do the full side splits with a bit of effort
• I don’t know the name for the next stretch – I face forward wit my front (right) leg bent so you’re almost kneeling, with my other leg behind my for support. Stretches the groin and inner-thigh I think. Hold it for 30 seconds or more to avoid random injuries to your groin muscle
• Finally, return to the side splits and pop yourself down as far as you can go without causing yourself an injury. If for any reason I haven’t managed to do the side splits up until this point, I’ll generally pull it off here

After I’ve done my leg stretches like that, I’ll do 15+ leg lifts front, side then back. Once all that’s done, my leg(s) are generally feeling pretty stretchy and stuff – last night after I did all the above I went and took the wheely bins out for ccollection this morning, and on the way back to our place I started practicing random kicks. You know, crazy flash of inspiration and all that. I want to be able to do two snap kicks in a single strike – lift the leg, strike once (waist), strike two (head), return the leg to the ground. I’m working on something similar with my fake leg, not sure how it’s going to go. If I can develop it, the idea would be a series of two double-strike kicks in succession – double-strike kick with right leg, double strike with left leg. Not sure how practical it would be, but I like the challenge. Once my ankle’s better, I’ll get started on working on the tornado kick and (reverse) butterfly kick. I’m referring to the latter as a ‘reverse’ butterfly kick as I can’t launch off my left leg because, well, there’s no ankle or knee to facilitate it 🙂 I could try, but the best I could achieve as falling over. So I’ll have to see if I can develop it to jump off the right leg; granted, I’ll still fall over, but at least I’ll be able to fall over a little further along 🙂

Oh, you’ve probably noticed that the main page’s layout has been updated. I’m really happy with the result, it came out better than I expected. I’ll be updating the blog’s layout soon as well. I’m just happy that my coding wasn’t too shonky – thankfully, there’s a stack of info on the web when it comes to learning CSS.

I’ll post an update later in the week, hopefully this time with some karate training news. Can’t wait 🙂

Bloginated Tuesday, 17th February 2009 / Karate, MySpace blogs
Tag-isms: 2007 | Karate | Segata Sanshiro | stretching | stupid injuries | training | YouTube videos

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 🙂

Bloginated Tuesday, 17th February 2009 / Karate, MySpace blogs
Tag-isms: 2007 | coding | Karate | stupid injuries

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 🙂

Bloginated Tuesday, 17th February 2009 / Karate, Movies, MySpace blogs, Technique
Tag-isms: 2007 | Karate | mind training | Movies | stupid injuries | Technique | training | YouTube videos

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?

Bloginated Tuesday, 17th February 2009 / Karate, MySpace blogs
Tag-isms: 2007 | Karate | stupid injuries | training

Source: Gisoku no Jutsu
Original post date: 12 April, 2007

Okay, I’m off to actually delivering on my aim to blog like crazy this week! Today I thought I’d touch on my stretching regime, what I’ve found out, and about these new kicks I’m trying to learn!

Okay, first thing’s first – stretching. The big thing that gets bandied about in martial arts circles/the general public is the ability to do the splits, whether they be front splits or, more dramatically, side splits (aka ‘Chinese splits’). So, with my previous style of socket on my fake leg, I could do the full side splits and front splits, but since moving to the different style of socket last year (as well as having 12 months off from training :P), things got more difficult – the way in which the new socket holds onto my leg gives my stump less movement within the socket itself (which is a good thing – less stress on the skin), which means it places more stress on my tendons/muscles/what-not when I stretch; to summise it simply, it means I can’t get away with being able to stretch as easily as I used to.

Anywho, when I first started doing karate I was determined to be able to do the splits, so at least five nights a week I’d take the time to go through our leg-stretching routine we did at karate, and after about 2 months, I could do the full splits (yay!). Despite the fact I’ve had only limited time to train over the last 5 weeks, I’ve been trying to make time to at least work on my flexibility. I’ve been working hard on pushing my body, and I’m stoked to say that I’m almost at the point of being able to do full side and front splits! While some may question the utility of this style of stretching (I’ll get into that below), I’m finding that it helps strengthen my legs and relaxes the muscles in my real leg, and is helping take pressure off the knee as a general rule of thumb; I feel stronger and more in control when I walk, which is in and of itself an awesome thing.

Now, in the pursuit of information (as you do – I’m a librarian after all), I started looking up ways in which to increase power and flexibility in kicks, and I found out about these different types of stretching, at first via Wikipedia, then by a handful of other great websites. It turns out that while the splits is beneficial to flexibility, it isn’t the most efficient way of stretching for the purpose of kicking, for example; this is much better developed by Dynamic Stretching. I found another great website that I can’t find the URL of that contained a massive amount of info on the entire subject of stretching, which then got me onto reading up some more on the best way to achieve the best kicks in martial arts, and all of them pointed to Dynamic Stretching. In the case or martial arts, it appears that simple leg lifts are the best way to achieve real flexibility and strength in your kicking technique. The gear I’ve read recommends performing front, side and back leg lifts as high as you can go, gradually increasing the height as you go conservatively – obviously you don’t want to overdo it until your legs are ready, or else you’ll do some serious damage.

The reason this is deemed effective appears to be owing to two points – number one, because you’re using your leg in a kick-like manner, it is re-enforcing the stretching movement as directly related to the act of kicking; it is developing neuro-muscular coordination. Secondly, doing leg lifts can actually be more beneficial in preventing injury should you be suddenly placed in a scenario where you need to use the technique to defend yourself, as the dynamic nature is apparently better at prepping your muslces/tendons/etc for spontaneous action that static stretching doesn’t employ. Or something like that. Some of what I’ve read notes that by doing dynamic stretches for 8 weeks (I’m assuming maybe five times a week or more for only 5 minutes or so for each session?), you can achieve the extent of what your body is capable of.

As always, the proof’s in the pudding, or in this case, kick – I’ve done combination split stretching + leg lifts in all four directions over the past week, then tried a couple of kicks – the results were certainly evident. I was kicking higher and with more control and power than I have in a while, and I’m going to make it part of my stretching routine to add these in, and I’ll also be sure to do extra leg lifts before class each week. Since I need to hold onto something to balance while I do the leg lifts, I can’t really partake during class when I’m lined up with all the other karateka, so I’ll take the time to balance myself against the wall prior to class and get started. It is very awesome 🙂

I mentioned some techniques I’ve decided to study. Now, they may not necessarily be the world’s most effective techniques, but they test your form, strength and agility… plus they look cool, and appear to be pretty tricky for people with two legs, let alone someone with only one… so I’m taking it as a challenge 🙂 The first move I’ve decided to tackle is the modern Wushu technique that most people refer to as a Butterfly Kick; click the link and you’ll see a happy animated GIF file showing an awesome one being performed in motion (there are some good ones on YouTube though – I’ll post them in a later blog). The technique requires the martial artist to jump and spin the body with kicks from each leg while the body is kept almost parallel to the ground, then land facing the same direction you were when you started the technique. The tricky bit (well, aside from the inherent trickiness :P) is that the technique appears to require you to leap from your left leg in everything I’ve read on it – since I have the equivalent of a pole instead of a functioning leg on my left, I’m going to have to learn how use my right leg and work on the torque, control and leaping high enough. Since I want to avoid a serious injury, methinks I’ll work on it where I can safely land on a padded surface 🙂

The Tornado Kick is probably a bit more realistic to achieve – it involves spinning your body 540 or 360 degrees to launch a round kick that uses the momentum/force of the action to deliver a powerful strike. The Wikipedia article’s a little light on images, but there’s a great vid on YouTube showing someone demonstrating the technique from a Taekwondo background:

Hopefully that one worked 😛 My HTML is still a little dodgy, so I hoped that all went in ok! So yeah, that’s the other technique I’m working on.

That pretty much covers the kick/new technique side of things (hopefully that helped Renato!) – I’ll post something up tomorrow, either some comments on martial arts movies, or some YouTube/Google Video stuff.

Bloginated Friday, 13th February 2009 / Karate, MySpace blogs, Technique
Tag-isms: 2007 | butterfly kicks | Karate | stretching | Technique | tornado kicks | training | YouTube videos