Archive for the 'martial arts' Category

How many times have you witnessed heated arguements between normally reasonable people but due to a political, religious or moral view – the discussion digressed into name calling? Whatever the point that started the discussion was lost as soon as they stopped listening to the opposing point of view. How about people treating others disrespectfully leading to undignified actions?

Does this apparent lack of civility, dignity and respect contribute to the apparent willingness of people to commit crimes? I mean if people have no apparent ethics or morals that enforce a code of reasonable behavior, how far behind is raping, plundering and murder?

People are a mixed bag. There are no all good people or all bad people. We all have our demons to wrestle – come to terms with if you will so we can get along well in life. Sometimes good people are tested by the loss of a loved one, loss of a job, growing up in a bad part of town,  or growing up with no real ethical standards. Some think music, video games, movies, and such contribute to this but I do not. What I think does contribute to how a person will react to situations are their own personal strength and their examples around them.

So in this post I am going to try and make the argument that good behaviour starts from within and is contagious. If we all try to work towards civility, dignity and respect of everyone around us – others around us will be more apt to see how this positive behaviour can help them communicate more effectively with those around them. I also think that people will be less apt to do bad things if they work on common civility and we will all have a better community. Here is what one city is trying to do. 

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One Tuesday night back in the late 1970’s I was working out at the school when a couple of Korean Stylists came in and spoke to my instructor (Dick Willett) about doing some sparring. Dick asked me to spar with these guys and I agreed as they seemed to be respectful. I believe that I had my fighting black belt at the time.

In our system, one could do an abbreviated test to wear a black belt early before the official test. The only problem with this strategy was one had to fight 10 black belts in a row and do ok against them to get the fighting black belt. I did it as I wanted to start fighting tournaments as a black belt early. I did later achieve my traditional black belt and beyond.

I fought the guy about my size and did well against him but the other big guy (I’m about 6 foot and this guy was about 6′ 4″) kept saying “Poor Form” as I was kicking his friend. You see I had been fighting lots of tournaments and had the timing down. The first guy I was fighting had some beautiful kicks but they were not connecting like mine were. You see I did not care about form at all… only if my kick or punch connected.

More about these fights later but in this post I will talk about kicking form versus substance and does it really matter? I mean what are the pros and cons of adhering to some long dead master’s view of how to throw a proper kick (no disrespect intended). I’ll finish my recollection of my fights that day in the late 70’s and the surprising (to them) outcome! Here is one video of some of the best karate kicks.

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I learned how to fight as a kid out of necessity but I did not really think of girls fighting. I mean that it did not happen when I was a kid. Girls were the weaker sex and they were too nice. Girls did not seem to have the ‘killer instinct’ boys did to do whatever it took to win, or even fight!

As I grew up I was exposed to the idea of women fighting. Yes girls were weaker than boys but with karate or judo, a few fighting tricks, I reasoned could even up the score. 

In this post I am going to explore the idea of women having the ‘fighting spirit’ necessary to win a fight, I will also look back a bit to the fabled Women Amazon Warriors and then comment about some of today’s women fighters. To get this started here is probably one of my first exposures of a woman warrior – Wonder Woman!

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I don’t know about you but I came of age in the 1970’s. At that time the Kung Fu TV series was airing and the most popular karate movie was Enter the Dragon! It is against this backdrop that I started taking karate lessons. First Okinawan karate at my jr. high school and later I took a couple of years of Lima Lama. I attained my first rank in Lima Lama – ultimately becoming a Blue Belt. Later I went on to learn Kenpo Karate and attained many degrees of Black Belt.

By now most people understand that belt ranks are analogous to grades in school but do the belt systems hold any real value to martial arts students today? That is the question I will ask in this post along with some examination of the expectation and meaning of “attaining rank” in today’s modern fighting systems.

First off, here is a video depicting the belt requirements of some martial arts.

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When I first started taking karate lessons at Tracy’s Karate, I asked Dick Willett how he could teach me to be a good fighter. He said that knowing how to kick and punch was not enough but rather I would learn how to connect the strikes.

What does it take to win a fight? That is what I will examine in this post. Remember the first Ken Norton vs Muhammad Ali? Norton was widely reported to have undergone hypnosis to get the edge in that match. If someone beats you in a match – was he or she just a better fighter? How can you consistently become a fighter that wins opposed to collect a paycheck?

To set the stage lets look at this humorous video of Dolf Lundgren’s.

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Before I begin there are some great fights coming tonight in the WEC! Varner vs Henderson should be good to watch plus the two former WEC Featherweight champs (Brown and Faber) are each fighting others to get back in line to challenge Aldo.

The hardest thing about writing this blog is to stay on focus to the chief point I am trying to make or examine. This post is about how to fight using some type of martial art. One might view this topic as overly broad but in my mind it is easy.

I will first talk about martial fighting arts and some popular contests that portray martial artists fights! I will talk about what is fighting and then how one could use martial arts to fight in whatever venue you select. Finally I will wrap this up with how I fight with martial arts. Here is a quick video from the old Kung Fu series that explains how a wise man behaves.

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I have been reading with interest when martial artists are equated with being a modern day warrior. Say you are walking through a dark alley on the way to your favorite watering hole. All of a sudden you hear a noise behind you and see a couple of menicaning thugs approaching fast from behind!

What would you do? Does the fact that you are a 2nd dan black belt mean that you have mentally prepared for this moment? What is a marital artist in the context of our society. Here is what used to be thought of as warriors from Versus TV.

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Do you remember the last cool martial arts movie stunt you saw! I know there have been some digital animation or such to “enhance” some stunts but there seems to be a trend toward pushing the human body to new limits!

I just figured out that Extreme Martal Arts (XMA) exists as does newer iterations called Tricking. Both of these activities are not what one could call martial arts (read fighting arts) because they seem to focus more on showmanship and totally disregard self-defense and fighting. Still there are martial arts woven into these activities as well as the more traditional martial arts iterations of fighting stunts.

In this post I will briefly review Tricking, XMA and martial arts stunts and speak of the advantages and disadvantages to these disciplines. Here is a video of Pataman Gym Time Trickingschule Berlin for your perusal.

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