Continuing Steps in Karate

I had the good fortune to attend a 2-day seminar this weekend with guru Maul Mornie of Silat Suffian Bela Diri.  It's a Bruneian martial art and mostly weapons-based. This weekend, we did knife-knife, knife-hand and machete work.  It was my first time working with machete (apart from my teen years hacking acres of blackberry) and although we didn't progress much beyond the fundamentals with it, I still found it fascinating. We started Saturday with an hour and a half of basic drills - the basic cuts with a knife (over/fore, back, thrust), and the basic defenses against those attacks.  These formed the basis of the rest of the seminar. It was interesting to me that all basics began as knife v. knife.  Everything we did for the seminar (even the empty hand v. knife) went back to this basic premise.  It was also interesting to my uneducated viewpoint (I have done bugger-all knife work before) that the knife was never used to block/check/intercept the incoming kn...

Now that I've been going for a couple of months, my thoughts and attitudes to daily training are changing.   Organisation of time is so important - without my weekly schedule, I would waste each session by frittering away my time wondering what to do next.   But more organisation is needed within session.   Without someone else to motivate me, I need to break my sessions down in more detail so I can actually get maximum benefit from what I am doing.   How to push myself well beyond my comfort zone without anyone else there (either to push me by direction, or through competition) is still problematic to me. One side-effect of my daily training is that I find I now have the time to iron out flaws in what I am doing; a change from only training a few times a week, where I am mostly concerned with learning new things.   One thing I am trying to avoid, however, is doing to much of anything on autopilot - I am attempting to train mindfully.   This is having a f...

A brief update on my New Year's Resolution to train at least once every day of the year.  Well, I have failed.  Not miserably, but I missed training on Saturday. In my defense, I did 6 hours of gardening - shifting soil and mulch, pruning and mowing; and then went out for dinner and a movie.  However, I knew that this was going to happen and didn't plan around it (Actually, I had intended to get up around 6:30 to do some taiji, but my youngest had me up at 1am and 4:30am, so that fell through). So, I have done 74 of a possible 75 days so far - still on track to top 360, and I should break 300 days without any problems.  I know at the start of the year, I thought that would be acceptable, but now I'm in the rhythm of daily training, I will be disappointed if I don't get to at least 350 days.

Karate and Evolution. Over on the Blitzmag forum, I have been peripherally involved in a few conversations recently regarding karate, its efficacy, what constitutes "real" karate, and the concept that much karate that is being done is either not true to its origins (either okinawan, or if talking about okinawan karate, to China), or not true to the principles of "real" karate. What follows are my musings on issues and points raised in some of those conversations, from an evolutionary perspective. None of which, by the by, is of the least importance to the training or practise of karate. (And is, quite possibly, very wrong).  But it's fun to think about. Social v. biological evolution. Evolution in biology is inter-generational and Darwinian - in other words, the inheritance of characteristics caused by genetic mutation and 'favoured' over other characteristics in a population due to the influence of selection pressures.  Individuals cannot evolve; th...

As part of my ongoing efforts to fix my body structure (which can be pretty poor), I have been trying to get my posture correct for sanchin - head being pulled up from the top, no swayback, not hunching.  My problem is, while I have changed my posture in the last little while (and for the better too), my sensei still keeps telling me that I have some of these issues!  And no matter how I try and fix it according to his instructions, I haven't had much success. What I needed was a different perspective.  What I was feeling in my body felt 'right', so I couldn't make sense of what he was seeing.  So, I videotaped myself.  Well, that was a different perspective alright.  It turns out, what I was doing, was very different to what I thought I was doing.  It took me about 5 minutes after viewing my video and doing another couple of takes until I had what now looked like a posture my sensei had described. It felt very strange, but somehow'right'. The upshot...