Continuing Steps in Karate

I have been attending some silat seminars recently and, with my sensei becoming increasingly involved in learning silat, I have made myself some training knives. It seems a waste to go to a seminar and then not practise the techniques or principles learned - a waste of money, of my time and of the instructor's time. So, at the last silat seminar we did some golok (machete) work - no "techniques" as such, just basic stances, basic cuts and some djurus/flow drills with the basic counters to the basic cuts.  At the seminar I only had a stick, which is less than optimal as it is hard to get the correct feel of blade direction through the air. So, after looking at some of the goloks that others had at the seminar, I made a couple out of 12mm plywood, with polypropelene rope handles. They are modelled on a machete I used as a teenager to hack through blackberry and ragwort on my parents' property.  The blade length is my fingertip-elbow length.  They are a little l...

I have made a makeshift makiwara, loosely based on designs garnered from the internet, but also from Mike Clarke's book "Hojo Undo".  Compared to some of the makiwara out there, it's quite springy, and compared to others, it's a bit woosy.  I like to think of it as "my-first-makiwara", and the intention is, once I've broken myself in to using it, I'll replace it with a stronger one. It is made from a spare mountain ash plank I had lying around.  I sawed it into two lengths, one shorter than the other, and dug a hole to put it in.  At the base of the hole, I put a large rock just in front of the planks and as I filled it in, I placed another rock about 2/3 of the way up behind the planks.  I packed all the dirt down, angling the board a little forward of vertical (about 10 degrees). The idea behind the two planks was to give me a poor-man's way of angling the wood.  In a traditional makiwara, it is made of a single piece of tapered wood - ab...

This is actually the first piece of DIY training equipment I made.  It's just over a year old now.  I have long been attracted to the mook jong (wooden dummy of Wing Chun kungfu, and have often thought it would be useful somehow to a karateka.  But until I started doing goju, with its emphasis on close-range technique, I hadn't been able to quite work out how.  While the primary inspiration for me was the Wing Chun mook jong, I actually based the main part on the Choy Lay Fut mook jong which has a counterweight arm.  Under this, I put Wing Chun-like lower limbs, creating a hybrid I felt would be useful to practice the range of karate technique I wanted to. Then, in doing some research, I came across Mario McKenna's blog (listed on the left) in which he makes mention of the kakete.  Right! I thought, it's a valid thing to do for karate! (and it has a name into the bargain)  So I set off to make one. It's very, very hard to get an untreated round pos...

I first got the idea for this from an article by Michael Clarke in Blitz Magazine , and have since refined it after purchasing and reading his book " Hojo Undo - Power Training for Traditional Karate " (a book I would highly recommend, by the way). It's a wrist and forearm conditioner.  You hold it between the hands, and roll the weight up, then down.  After 2 or 3 times doing this, while trying to keep it steady, you can really feel it working.  I use it with hands in the sanchin ready pose, both palms up and palms down, which gives the shoulders and lats a bit of a workout too. Construction was from a scrap of 30mm Mountain Ash dowel I had lying around, some 4mm polypropelene rope and 5kg in dumbbell weights.  A hole drilled through the dowel, and voila, a makiage. The makiage is one of my favourite tools, probably because I like to get close and offbalance/interrupt my opponent by grabbing and pulling, pushing or turning.

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.  Final...