It’s getting late and I have an early start tomorrow, but wanted to post at least something remotely worthwhile before I went to bed:

The Martial Explorer: Project Natal
Jesse over at The Martial Explorer has two posts (here and here) on Microsoft’s new Project Natal tech they demo’d at E3 last week-ish. Being a bit of a nerd, I didn’t really take much interest in it at first, but I’m now intrigued with the possibilities. Mind, the same promises of this kind of control were made with the Powerglove, Sega Activator (I bet nobody saw that reference coming!), EyeToy, EyeToy 2 and the Wii, so we’ll see how it goes. MA stuff could go quite well if the canned footage is anything to go by, and it’d be nice to see some more XNA love for indie developers and this kind of tech getting filtered onto XBLA or something. I guess time will tell!

Wim’s blog: Martial-intent, Maori-style
Wim’s got a great post on martial intent and its importance in training, with some great demonstrations of the precept in action. It’s gotten me to thinking that this might be something I have traditionally missed during previous sparring training, and will keep in mind as I continue my training. I’m sure I can find it somewhere, surely it’s lurking somewhere amongst my general placidity 😛

Oh yeah, and Wim’s giving away free stuff as part of promoting his mailing list. Click here for more details and to sign up if you’re interested! Free stuff is always good 🙂

Black Belt Mama: Karate from an Outsider’s Perspective
I’ll keep this one bookmarked – BBM’s invited Lauren Balogh (of travel blog Get Fox’d) to give a guest post on the BBM blog. It is a brilliant piece on the nature of a martial arts as an art, and on karate in particular. The next time you get a funny or awkward look from a friend/colleague/family member/dude on the street when you tell them you do karate or martial arts, point them in this direction. Thanks to Lauren for posting her thoughts, and for BBM for giving her the stage to share it with the rest of us. You can read the post in full and leave comments here.

Oh, and Lauren gets extra points because she thinks Australia is awesome, even if she neglected to mention that I’m of course one of the contributors to this country’s inherent awesomeness.

Mind, I’m also prone to moments of delusion caused by illusions of personal grandeur. Keep this in mind when considering the previous comment about my personal level of importance and/or awesomeness in relation to this country 😀

Well, that should do it! I’m off to bed now, good night!

Bloginated Friday, 12th June 2009 / Blogs/websites, General training
Tag-isms: E3 | martial intent | Outside views on martial arts | Project Natal | Technique | training | Video games | XBox 360

It’s a bit belated, but oh well – better late than never!

Last week’s training went well – put in as much effort as I could on the night and really felt good afterwards. I love it when you have a training session, your gi ends up getting soaked through all the persperation, you feel knackered, but you come out of class on this crazy natural high. Gotta love it 🙂

Anywho, the theme of last week’s session was two-person drills – one blocks, one attacks, swap arms, then swap sides. I was a bit unco at first (I get the feeling this is a personal feature rather than something I’ll eventually get over :P), but eventually I got into the rhythm of things and it went well. The cool thing is that the session ended up being a good way to start working on conditioning the arms, in particular the forearms. I remember in the school I used to train at before my current one that Jyastin-kun and I used to go full-on with blocking and striking drills, and it used to be a regular thing going to work the next day sporting bruises all over my arms. I must have gotten out of practice though, as I was struggling towards the end of it to put in the max effort on each block knowing what was coming 🙂 It’s taken my nearly a week, but I’ve finally come out in a weak bruise on my right forearm, so there wasn’t even much to show for the pain 😛 Ah well, gotta toughen up and start working on this – my forearms used to be able to take much more punishment than this, so hopefully Sensei will start doing this regularly.

Aside from the frills, we also did kata – I’ve asked Sensei to start being very particular with my form so I can work on the small details to really round it out – I let my age-uke slip a little higher than usual (a bit of a goju habit I think), so I’ll be paying attention to that, and my stances as there’s bound to be a grading coming up, and I’m keen to push myself hard to try and make it, and do a really good job at it. I’d feel disappointed if I went to a grading but only kinda slipped through with an average record, I want to push to really achieve a strong grading. Otherwise I don’t really think there’s much point at all.

Bloginated Monday, 1st June 2009 / Karate
Tag-isms: Conditioning | kata | training

Okay, bit of background on this theory – when I seriously mangled my stump back in… early 2006, and had almost a year off from my training to recover from the damage, I found myself trying to transfer those skills to my existing condition and start to work on theorising how I could transfer the techniques and knowledge I had gained from learning karate as an amputee into something I could do on one leg — literally, as this was when I couldn’t even wear my prosthesis.

This seems a bit odd – karate (and by extension, martial arts in general) draw from the body’s natural synergy insofar as the body’s symmetry is concerned – that is, you have a left-hand side and a right-hand side of your body, and it’s by using both sides and all four limbs together that you can extract maximum performance, strength, efficiency and so forth. Training in a martial art with one leg whilst wearing a prosthesis presents challenges to the body’s natural equilibrium, but what happens when you remove the limb altogether?

That’s what I started to investigate. My early experiments were seeing if it was possible to control techniques whilst on crutches. As time has gone on (three years if I’m not mistaken given its 2009 now), I’ve tried to move beyond this, and try and transfer at least some techniques to performing them on one leg. I think I’ve started making a little progress at this stage, and as amateur as it may seem, I might have to get my wife to take some photos so I can post them up on the blog. The main difference is that it is significantly more difficult to transfer powerful techniques on one leg, and the amount of energy required to keep up is absolutely incredible. When doing standing reverse-punches, you have to shift your center of balance slightly, but with practice you can start to pull off techniques with a high degree of hip rotation to start achieving effective technique.

Blocks and grappling are a bit restricted, but if you use measured effort to hold your balance, there is a degree of light technique that I’ve been able to achieve at this stage. Whilst my holds/grappling skills are pretty weak, I think there is a huge potential here to investigate different options, as the lack of a limb theoretically gives you greater access to monkey-style grappling where you can easily grapple with relative agility around/over your opponent. I think it would take an experienced jujutsu/BJJ or grappling fighter to really harness this, but I think the possibilities are there. If ever I learn groundfighting styles further down the road, it would certainly be an interesting exercise to work out how to transfer those principles to this style of technique.

Kicks obviously are pretty much non-existent unless I’m on my crutches, but at that I’m only really limited to thrusting kicks which only have a certain degree of utility. To be honest, it would probably be far more effective to separate the bottom shaft of the crutches and wield them like kali sticks than rely on the crutches for support in doing a thrusting forward kick.

So yeah, just a few thoughts there. Like I said, in a couple of weeks I might get Wifey to take some snapshots whilst I investigate techniques and demonstrate a few techniques I’ve worked out for when I’m without my prosthesis. This train of thought was inspired in part because I’ve had issues with my stump this week and it got me back to thinking about what’s possible in such a condition. Definitely something to think about.

Bloginated Saturday, 23rd May 2009 / General training, Prosthesis or amputee stuff
Tag-isms: stump | Technique | training

In awesome news, I managed to get my prosthetic foot enclosure fixed yesterday! Is very awesome, I’m extremely chuffed! While the fusion they did to hold the busted one together has actually proved to be extremely good in light of things (especially seeing it yesterday off the foot – I’ve got it as a just-in-case [better to have a busted enclosure than none at all]), that inherent weakness in the toes has now been eliminated.

This was all very good in the grand scheme of things, as last night I ended up doing an impromptu karate training session. Normally between classes I’ll do weights and some light bag work, but last night after doing my usual warm-up and strengthening exercises, I was really getting into the bag work and had a good look at my surroundings where I train at home, shuffled some things around, and started doing my basic drills as I had enough room to go up and down 5 paces as per the usual class stuff. After doing that, I shuffled a couple of other things around, and ended up making just enough space to accommodate a slightly cramped kata. I know that I need work on focus, breathing and technique (I’ve got the pattern down reasonably well at this point), so I deliberately took it slow and methodical in approach. Turned out to be a really good session – after one or two run-throughs I started hitting that quasi-meditative state you can find when doing kata, constantly practicing slowly but with an emphasis on correct, deliberate and focused technique (and breathing – the neighbours probably weirded out if they were able to hear me :P). I’m not sure how often I repeated my kata, but on the last two I sped up the sequence in order to move into a more dynamic form. At the end of it I came inside exhausted, sweaty but definitely stoked 😀

The cool thing is that hopefully my little re-arrangement of some of my equipment will mean I can do this more often, which will be a huge help.

In other news, the weekend saw some back-to-back movie awesomeness – Saturday night saw Wifey and I sitting down to the schlocky awesomeness that is Best of the Best, and on Sunday I indulged in the utterly sublime Kuro Obi (Black Belt). Will dedicate some posts to both of these films during the week, as they offer extremely polarised takes on martial arts in films 😉

Bloginated Tuesday, 28th April 2009 / Karate
Tag-isms: kata | mangled fake leg | Movies | training

Had training again last night – went really well. We covered the usual gear – basic warm-ups (including the new hip strengthening exercise we learned the other week at the seminar), basic drills (which I’m getting the hang of now), kata and kata applications. I thought I was going well with my kata, but last night I had a mental blank getting the sequencing correct on the second-to-last part of Heian Nidan where you finish up your four shutos and move to your central line of blocks/strikes/kicks. I’m going to study some of Kanazawa’s kata videos and make time over the next couple of weeks to hone my technique.

There’s a grading next month, and I’m not sure if I’m ready to grade yet – I’ve decided that I’ll continue to practice hard and see how I go, and talk to Sensei about it and get his thoughts on the matter. I found that particularly during 2008 I wasn’t applying myself anywhere near enough in class to achieve more frequent gradings (not that karate is only about gradings, but for someone like me who tends to be very goal-oriented, they’re a great stimulus to progress with gusto), and I decided at the start of this year that I’d put more focus into my training. Whatever happens, I’ll post updates on the blog.

The other thing we did last night was kata applications, via 2-person continuous kata drills. This was really cool, and will no doubt help me when it comes time to apply bunkai to my grading. I’m still having trouble looking outside the most obvious application for bunkai though, but I think what we’ve been doing the last couple of weeks is gradually removing the pre-conceived notions of how each technique could be applied.

In fact, this whole discussion encouraged me to check if bunkai is on the list for grading – I just checked the website, and it looks like I don’t do it until the grading after this one. Sanbon (or Sambon, depending on which romanisation you take for Japanese phoenetics) tsuki is on the list though, along with geri (kicking) combination techniques, neither of which I’ve done a lot of in class so far this year. With all this taken into consideration, I’ll definitely have a chat with Sensei and gauge his thoughts on where I’m at. I also think I’m going to have to start training my basic drills and kata between classes for at least the next few weeks if I’m going to attempt a grading next month.

Bloginated Thursday, 26th March 2009 / Karate
Tag-isms: kata | training