Post #6
It's funny I consider myself a pretty peaceful person but at the same time there's this part of me that just has this desire to fight. Don't get me wrong I've never picked a fight in my life. Never been a bully nor a brawler. At the same time I've always felt the desire to learn how to fight. I've been pissed off at my local Good Life lately because they don't have a heavy bag.
Next year I'm thinking of dropping the whole gym membership thing and opting for martial arts again. I could go with Karate again but after 7 years of Karate I don't think there's a lot I would get out of a class. Plus to be quite honest with you I learned more about fighting in a year of Muay Thai than I ever did in Karate. Judo is just not my style. Sure it's great that you know how to throw someone over you shoulder but getting them to stand there and let you do it just isn't likely. Tae Kwon Do always seemed to be too much bark not enough bite. Big flashy kicks but lacking the practicality of simpler strikes. Kung Fu would be cool if it wasn't ridiculously expensive to go to a decent school.
I'm thinking something different this time around, something in the realm of Jujutsu or Aikido. I have pretty good hand and leg strikes but my ability to do joint-locks and pressure point manipulation is non-existant. Either way I figure a little diversity never hurt anyway, who knows maybe I'll be snapping necks at a Steven Segal level in no time!
If Good Life would just let me kick the crap out of their personal trainers that would be the ultimate workout. Have I mentioned I hate personal trainers? By the way, I hate personal trainers.
Showing posts with label Martial Arts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martial Arts. Show all posts
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Monday, December 18, 2006
Hiiiii-yah!
Like every white kid growing up in the 80s, I wanted to be a ninja. I mean lets face it in the 80s a ninja was about a freakin’-cool as it got! That was a weird time for martial arts as a whole giving rise to such completely untalented martial artists as Eric Roberts and Michael Dudikoff of American Ninja fame. This was long before North America really saw the martial talents of Jet Li and Donny Yen and a little after the reign of Bruce Lee. Regardless of the quality of the martial arts I saw I knew that I wanted to do that stuff. My local karate club was the only martial arts establishment within miles and they didn’t train little kids. So basically I watched a lot of ninja movies, got 2nd hand training from my teenaged neighbour to get a leg up and once I hit age 9 I joined Karate.
The style in question was actually Shotokan Karate. Shotokan is often classified as a “Simple”, “Linear” or “Brutal” form of Karate. The emphasis is dispatching your foe with often as little as 1 punch. Most 9 year old kids took about 2 months worth of classes and quickly got bored with the constant block, punch, block, punch of training. I, however, had a dedication to my training. Even without a Mr. Miyagi I spent 7 years waxing on kicking butt. Over my years in Shotokan I won 9 medals in sparring and 4 more for kata (forms.) Despite living in a rural town in Newfoundland my training was quite authentically Japanese. Our classes were taught in Japanese and my Sensei would even hit me with a bamboo shinai. However, like all martial arts in North America sometimes the message gets watered down.
Interestingly enough I was chit-chatting with a co-worker of mine who is also a Karate practitioner of the Goju-Ryu school. Lately she’s been dabbling in Shodokan as well and has been very impressed with the brutal efficiency of the style. In the course of our conversation she mentioned a book Shotokan's Secret: The Hidden Truth Behind Karate's Fighting Origins" which outlines a lot of the sources that created the Shotokan style. We chit-chatted about the application of a lot of the techniques from Shotokan and the discussion brought back a lot of that old 8-year old desire to be a ninja. I’d love to take martial arts again… if only there were 36 hours in a day and 10 days in a week. Stupid time!
I was a ninja once
The style in question was actually Shotokan Karate. Shotokan is often classified as a “Simple”, “Linear” or “Brutal” form of Karate. The emphasis is dispatching your foe with often as little as 1 punch. Most 9 year old kids took about 2 months worth of classes and quickly got bored with the constant block, punch, block, punch of training. I, however, had a dedication to my training. Even without a Mr. Miyagi I spent 7 years waxing on kicking butt. Over my years in Shotokan I won 9 medals in sparring and 4 more for kata (forms.) Despite living in a rural town in Newfoundland my training was quite authentically Japanese. Our classes were taught in Japanese and my Sensei would even hit me with a bamboo shinai. However, like all martial arts in North America sometimes the message gets watered down.
Interestingly enough I was chit-chatting with a co-worker of mine who is also a Karate practitioner of the Goju-Ryu school. Lately she’s been dabbling in Shodokan as well and has been very impressed with the brutal efficiency of the style. In the course of our conversation she mentioned a book Shotokan's Secret: The Hidden Truth Behind Karate's Fighting Origins" which outlines a lot of the sources that created the Shotokan style. We chit-chatted about the application of a lot of the techniques from Shotokan and the discussion brought back a lot of that old 8-year old desire to be a ninja. I’d love to take martial arts again… if only there were 36 hours in a day and 10 days in a week. Stupid time!
I was a ninja once
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