Sorry for the silence

-

Recently, I have found that I am becoming less active in putting material on this blog, and wish to apologise to my few readers about this.  The two reasons for not putting content on have been the busyness of work and the birth of my third daughter, which has been hectic to say the least.

Conversely, the birth of my daughter is also the impetus for me to begin posting again.  In order to help with her and her two siblings, I have given up going to formal training for the remainder of the year, and have mostly stopped regular self-training as with an average of 4 hours total sleep a  night I am struggling to find
  1. the energy and
  2. the time in the day, as the only hours I get to myself are after 8pm and before 10pm, and this time is needed to cook and eat dinner and try and maintain a relationship with my wife.

This raises the question of how I can still be involved in progressing in my martial learning if I cannot actually train.  My solution is meta-training; that is the act of thinking about martial arts and exploring the possibilities and principles as an intellectual pursuit.  And this blog can let me do this.

So stay tuned, as I intend to become more regular and prolific, and occasionally turn out something that might even be vaguely worth reading.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DIY Training Equipment #1 - Punching Bag

-
Image
Being of a frugal and handy nature, I have made many of my training aids myself.  One of the first that I constructed was a heavy punching/kicking bag. New ones of any size cost around $150-$250.  This is money I don't have, and couldn't really justify at this point in time anyway.  So I scrounged around and found enough material to make a functional bag. I used an old brazilian hammock (without the wooden spreader), a 25kg bag of sand, a couple of rubbish bags, lots of old curtains and a couple of rolls of duct tape. To construct it, I taped up the bag of sand into the rubbish bags securely, then wrapped it in about 10cm thickness of old heavy curtains.  This gave me the core of my bag.  I folded the hammock in half, and placed a large wad of curtain in the bottom of the fold.  Then, I hung the hammock by its ends from the garage ceiling and tightly wrapped it up with duct tape, stuffing more curtains around and over the top of it.  Finally, I did a second layer o
Read more

Seienchin Part 2

-
Image
This is now a multi-part series.  You can find Part 1 Part 3 Part 4  here So, finally, I have found some time to think some more about seienchin. As usual, my reason for doing these posts is to help myself make sense of what is happening in the kata and to explore different possibilities.  I am expecting to make mistakes and to pursue leads which go nowhere, but that's what happens when we learn. I took a video of myself doing the kata, and have attached it here.  As is usual, I have noticed quite a few things wrong with it and have fixed them up somewhat as a result (after all, isn't that the whole point of video-taping yourself?), but haven't had a chance to tape myself again.  Some things to note are that my arms are pushing too far forward in the double triangle "block" in Section A, and my hands are meant to be sweeping across high and low, not along a single mid-line in the two backward steps in shikodachi at the start of Section C. I will
Read more

Kata as part of an oral tradition

-
  This way of looking at karate is influenced heavily by Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982) and Lynne Kelly’s Power and Knowledge in Prehistoric Societies (2015) and The Memory Code (2016).  What follows is where my thoughts on kata's purpose and structure have gone, based on the issues and concepts these texts cover.  Kata were created within the context of oral knowledge traditions as a means to retain, recall and transmit knowledge. They are a tool, a vehicle through which knowledge is conveyed, rather than being the knowledge itself.   Having said that, in order to use them effectively, we also need to have knowledge of the kata itself and the ability to recall and demonstrate it/run through it automatically and faithfully. In this regard, kata are a mnemonic device, with particular structure and knowledge features.  They: Are memory prompts - they do not demonstrate/shadow-box complete sequences of movement, just those bits that need recall or are the most important fo
Read more