Matthew Absokardu the author of Ikigaiway blog has recently released a free EBook titled “Surviving a Traditional Dojo” that I suggest to all of my readers.

The EBook describes in great details what a novice should expect when entering a traditional dojo with a lot of information about etiquette, behaviour that people in the dojo will expect from you, as well as what you should expect from them and from the master running the dojo itself.

I believe this EBook will also be interesting for people that are already part of a non traditional martial arts club to understand what and how other martial artists live their training.

If you are interested, and you should really, please go to the download page of the book and simply download it: as I said it’s free but it has a great value!

Posted under book_review, teaching - Please leave a comment for this post

Logical reasoning and common sense are usually great help in everyday life but this morning an event suggested me that it doesn’t apply to everyone.  The three following statements definitely apply to my way of thinking but I was proven wrong:

• Approaching a car in a in a road rage can be anything between very dangerous to lethal.  Any body, regardless their shape, size and background can hold weapons of any kind in a car.
• When I see a man from behind and his bald head seems to be linked directly with his trapezoids (muscles above the shoulders) without any neck, e.g. like Mike Tyson in the good old days, I would avoid fighting him unless I am attacked first.  I cannot see any good reason to approach aggressively a similar looking person, whatever he has done on the road.
• Early morning at 6:30, when traffic in a small city like Cambridge is nearly inexistent, is so it’s unlikely to cause good reasons for arguments.

This morning at 6:30 I was travelling toward my usual Wednesday business breakfast meeting when I stopped, on a dual carriage way bridge, at the red light behind another car.  In the other lane I saw stopping a Ford Focus with a big guy in it and a couple of seconds later a Vauxall Vectra stopped behind.  Nothing wrong until the driver of the Vectra rushed out of his vehicle run the few metres to approach the other car and slamming a big slap on the side window at the driver side shouted “what the f%&k are you doing?”.  This person is in his late fifties to sixties, long haired and slim, wearing shirt, tie and suit trousers: I was between surprised and astonished about the whole scene.

At that point I see the buy guy turning quite calmly toward his window that he is lowering while he is saying something I could obviously did not hear.  I also noticed a little baton, perhaps a kid’s baseball bat in his hands: he was probably suggesting the older man to get away or risking troubles.  To be honest, given the size of the bald man the older driver could have had enough problems evev without a weapon.  Nonetheless the older guy shouted a few more obscenities until I saw the big driver swinging the baton out of his window.

At the point the light turned green, I started moving forward with my car and the Focus’ driver did the same: nothing really happened but the old guy could have spent his morning at the hospital if the big guy decided to get out of his vehicle.

Now, I even like to believe there have been good reasons for this to happen but once more I am convinced, as I wrote recently, that a bit of common sense sometime would avoid lots of troubles.

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I am convinced that getting involved in a fight is something that should be avoided at all times.   There might be circumstances where fighting is absolutely unavoidable and I repeat something I have already expressed before: in a fight or flight the latter should be preferable if you are sure you can run faster than your attacker

What triggers a fight? Many different circumstances and reasons: in any case it takes more than one person to be involved.  Even if somebody is bothering you or threatening you in many, many cases you could avoid the physical confrontation by talking the situation down or simply walking away.  Unfortunately our pride plays bad tricks sometimes and we would love to be like inspector Harry Callahan, being able to state a few sentences and then punish our attacker to be in a way or the other.

The so called self defence should really be applied to situations when you are physically attacked and the only way of getting out of the situation is to stop your attacker with all possible means before he might cause serious injury or death to yourself or your loved ones.  While it is not often possible to turn and offer the other cheek very often it is possible to avoid a fight and walk home rather than risking to spend some time in a cell or in hospital as a result of a fight gone in one way or the other.

B.H is a friend of mine ex professional boxer and is surely a guy you would not like to be involved with in a fight.  With nearly hundred fights under his belt between amateur and professional is a person that spent more time in front of somebody that would like to knock him down than most street fighters will ever experience in several lives.  As it happened once a guy thought to have a good reason to punch him straight in the face.  This is a fairly common, not too exciting, experience for a professional fighter: probably similar to have a cup of coffee for the average office worker.  The simple end to the story is that the attacker was so surprised of B. not reacting at all to the attack and simply adding: “it takes a lot more to make me angry, and if I get angry I could kill you”.  This sentence made me think: it is true that a pro sport fighter is in business to harm other people for money (legally).  At the same time he will not necessarily react with anger to the typical situation where most people would go berserk.

Another similar experience happened to me personally: although I never been a pro I consider myself capable of seriously harming the average punter with bad intention that happens to be on my way.  A few months ago I drove out of my driveway in a winter, dark afternoon and somebody in another car was arriving at a distance that I failed to evaluate correctly so he had to slow down.  He blew his horn violently and repeatedly.  As I stopped at the red light a few hundred yards away I promptly checked in my rear mirror where the guy was and I noticed a car behind mine with no driver: in less than a second I noticed the guy was by my side window yelling at me what a “f*&$!%g idiot I was and blah blah”.  He was enraged and ready for a fight, inviting me to get out.  I apologise to him and said I did not see him coming (never mind he was probably faster than he should be), but he kept insulting me… after a 30 second or so and a few more insults he went back to his car, the light turned green and I went on to my meeting.  The guy was scary looking and enraged, nonetheless if he tried to grab me or injure me I could have probably got rid of him in no time, perhaps leaving him in the middle of the road… and then what?  He saw me coming out of my drive way: he could come back there and wait for me with a weapon and/or friends, he could burn my house down or anything else you can think about.  Are all these terrible consequences really worth the fact that he thinks I am a “f*&$!%g idiot”?  Not really, so I left him with his opinion and moved on.

The choices that B. and I took were safer in the end because we avoided, in different ways and circumstances, a fight that could be avoided: for B. being punched in the face is as normal as a hand shake; for me, while I don’t like to be called names, I can conclude that it is simply your opinion and it does affect my self esteem.

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I met yesterday a guy and our conversation drifted very quickly into martial arts (surprise!), specifically about self defence.  I was confused when he stated that he wanted to learn Tao Kwon Do for self defence because a friend of his is a high ranked student of the discipline.  My first reply was: “TDK is mostly based on high kicks, really not ideal for self defence and then, also, you are 37 years old reasonably large and heavy male, TKD is ideal with people with lot of flexibility in their legs and trying to achieve it at this age might be tricky”.  He continued with his explanation that in ideal situation he would like to be able to seize the opponent’s attack and avoid striking but simply locking his attacker in a way that would be impossible for him to hurt any further but without risks of injuring him too much.  I then added that what he was talking about was possible doing Aikido, or Ju Jitsu or other styles not primarily based on strikes… and there he came out with: “oh!, yes, Aikido, I meant Aikido, this is what my friend is an expert of…”.

To me somebody that confuses Aikido with TKD is like confusing a steak with a salad, both food but very different in content. So what are the main differences that a neophyte should look out when checking a class, of either Aikido or TKD?

Let’s list the main ones:

• Aikido is Japanese; TKD is Korean, well no easy to spot by observing them
• In a Aikido class you’ll see most people in white Gi, perhaps with coloured belts and the higher ranked people and the masters will wear a block hakama, a very broad pair of trousers that look like a skirt;  in a TKD class they wear white Gi, with coloured belts but their top is some times a “V” neck long sleeves shirt.
• In Aikido you see people twirling and twisting, throwing and applying arm and wrist locks: people fall and fly around a lot; in TKD opponents are striking each other, mostly with kicks to the upper part of the body (sport rules forbid kicks below the belt).
• Aikido is mainly defensive, e.g. it starts working when an opponent attacks you; TKD is based on attacking with strikes.
• Aikido’s techniques can be subtle and usually require a very long time, several years, to be practiced to a level of proficiency to be useful in self defence; TKD can start to be effective with some of its techniques within a few months or a year of practice.
• Aikido teaches, apart from the bare hand practice, the use of various weapons like sword and staff;  TKD is purely based on bare had strikes.

I have chosen and selected 2 videos to show what Aikido and TKD look like.  It was harder than I thought as many are dispersive and not representative enough.  Please keep the volume down and ignore the part of the TKD video from the boxing ring onward:

Posted under self defence, styles, video_review - Please leave a comment for this post

I have been practicing Wing Chun (WC) on and off for several years and I was lucky enough to be exposed to 4 different lineages of this art, each of them slightly different and each of them asserting to be the best.  My deepest knowledge is in the Austin Goh system that I have practiced regularly for nearly 4 years.  I consider myself an intermediate practitioner of WC and I enjoy training it occasionally and using some of its basic principles in everything I do when practicing martial arts.

When I first heard of WC, in the early nineties, I was at the beginning of my exploration journey in different martial arts.  Growing up in a small provincial town with just a Judo, Karate and Kickboxing school there wasn’t much to learn about other martial arts.  And while videos were simply not available (or unaffordable) there was no Internet that allowed having a look around.

In 1991 while speaking to a colleague from another town I found out about the existence of WC.  The description I received about this martial art was somehow confusing and the concepts described were just not possible to be visualized, at that time.  The fact that many school teach to their students to avoid giving demonstrations or in depth explanations of what and how they practice doesn’t really help, does it?

Description

If you have experience in various styles of Kickboxing, Karate, Tae Kwon Do, Tang So Do and Kung fu you will realize that, more or less, kicks are kicks, punches are punches and stances are stances.  More emphasis here or there but you can see a common line of evolution and many commonalities.  Discussing WC you hear concepts like sensitivity, touch reflexes and central line and that can be a bit disorientating.  The guards and the stances are initially awkward but every makes sense once you get used to it and you have a full grasp of the whole picture.

A fundamental concept of WC is contact training: the average distance of two people practicing with each other is about the one of their elbows extended forward and when practicing you are always in contact with your partner.  You always work with both hands keeping in touch with your opponent’s arms and each technique is always meant to strike: even when certain moves are erroneously classified as blocks they can always be used to attack.

WC is ideal for short distance fighting and for this reason the expert practitioner will seek the short distance by bridging the gap (distance when opponents cannot touch each other) and get to a distance where kicks would be difficult to use.  Being a martial art orientated to fighting and self defence kicks are minimally used and limited to the waist and below (groin, knee cap, leg in general).  Depending on the style there is more or less emphasis on kicking techniques but literally negligible compared to other styles.

History (inspired from the WC Federation site)

WC is a subtle and complete system of Chinese Kung Fu, developed over hundreds of years, with its roots in the Shaolin Temple tradition. Legend has it that in 1645 a Bhuddist nun by the name of Ng Moi devised the system and taught it to a young girl called Yim WC, who successfully used her newly learned skills to defend herself against a local bully who attempted to rape her.  Originally a very secret system, the sophisticated art of WC was only passed on to family members and close, trusted friends. It was only when the legendary Grandmaster Ip Man (now sadly passed away) arrived in Hong Kong that the style was taught more openly.  Ip Man happened to teach to the early Bruce Lee that started to teach WC as soon as he arrived in USA and then it used it as the basis for his Jeet Kune Do and he depicted the art in several famous movies.

What I like about WC

Here are the main points on which I advocate WC to be a great martial art:

• WC is a no frills, very immediate and direct martial art: it can be practiced effectively by people of any shape, body shape and size and it can be very useful ad a practical self defence system.
• The contact training allows metabolizing the adrenaline and stress of fighting at a very short distance: you learn to cope with fear and minimize your reactions to any kind of attacks.
• The way techniques are usually taught help relaxing and most muscles in a position and status that allow maximum reactivity at fast speed while instinct would suggest stiffening and becoming slow.

What I don’t like about WC

There aren’t many things I don’t like about WC as a martial art but, to keep my tradition in “My Thoughts about …” I will list a couple:

• The level of fitness required to practice WC is substantially lower that other more physical styles: this means that while it will keep your body in decent shape you will have to integrate WC with something else if you want to be super fit.
• I also dislike and disapprove the too many political actions between the various schools, driven by mere personal interest of a few top guys.

Conclusions

WC is a great martial arts; it teaches very clever concepts that can be applied to the practice of many other martial arts.  I would suggest to anybody, whether she is a total novice or an expert black belt to give it a try, with an objective view.  Make sure to find the right school though.   Some of them are not too friendly and they have a very arrogant way of positioning themselves: I was lucky enough to meet some of the good ones but I heard of some very bad…

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High kicks have an arguable use in self defence although they display excellent athletic performance and look great.  In combat sports, particularly in full contact ones, many people have adopted techniques that limit kicks level to the waist and below.

Bill “superfoot” Wallace retired in the early eighties as undefeated world champion in the middle weight of full contact kickboxing: his combat strategy was always based on fantastic kicking techniques that often caught by surprise his opponents and knock them KO.  Wallace was not just good and superfast in kicking but he could shoot double of triple kicks with a single leg, using these techniques in the same way most boxers faint punching techniques.

In this video he shows some stretching for kicks, one of his legendary training exercises to help improving the central split particularly useful for round, side and hook kick.  Please enjoy the view and leave a comment:

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Boxing is about punching: boxers have a reputation for amazingly strong punches, well known among all fighting sports.  The reality is simple: boxing is limited to 4 basic punches to be delivered with large padded gloves and that has helped the techniques and the training to evolve to its maximum efficiency.

On the other hand Tae Kwon Do is a martial arts (and fighting sport) that is nearly fully based on kicks.  TKD fighting allows full contact for kicks and, quite strangely, controlled contact for punches to the head.

For a long time I kind of assumed that if someone could do boxing training and then TKD do training would be a good puncher and then a good kicker, therefore a good kick boxer.  A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to realise that my thinking was flawed when LK joined my club.  He was fitting perfectly to the above description: 2 years of TKD and over a year of boxing.

While in principle this person knows how to punch and kick very well I immediately noticed a peculiar behaviour in his approach to sparring: he would either kick, nice combinations, while maintaining a pretty poor guard, typical of TKD fighters; in other circumstances he would get close and punch like a real boxer.  It then occurred to me that his training, his knowledge of fighting, was lacking a fundamental part of what kick boxers rely on: articulated combinations of punches and kicks so he would do either or but never combined.

Ultimately, because sparring should be spontaneous and without thinking his subconscious either relies on the punching combinations he known from boxing or from the kicking combinations from TKD but he never mixes and bridges between the two.  It will be a while before alternating kicks and punches will be natural to him.

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I recently coordinated and performed in three demonstrations at the Martial Arts Festival UK organized in Leicester by Kwoklyn Wan, a well known martial artist and Jeet Kune Do instructor who runs a number of schools based in and around the same town.

Choreographing a demonstration always requires some level of preparation while I personally prefer avoiding a complete rehearsal of the whole thing. Punching, kicking and blocking, attacking and defending is something we do in every lesson so my basic strategy is always to have a script about what will be done but leaving the interpretation to the individuals in order to ensure the performance to be more realistic. Ultimately a fight cannot be rehearsed.

I believe that the main objectives of a demonstration are:

• To give a basic idea of the main techniques in terms of kicks, punches, stances and guards for your particular school or style;
• To be interesting for the person from the general public that doesn’t have even a basic idea about martial arts as well as gaining respect from fellow martial artists;
• To show the level of skill of your school or club;
• To be catchy enough to inspire passers by to stop and watch.

Given the final results and the video we managed to produce I am very happy of the overall experience: all CARISMA members that were there truly enjoyed it themselves.

A point I always try to make in my demonstrations is that we must remember that martial arts are about fighting, personal development, controlled actions and well harmonised attacks and defence. Movements should look smoothly and effortlessly performed, otherwise we risk to be looking too much like street fighters. On the other hand the demonstration should be and look realistic: for may taste a bit too many schools were running shows that appeared too much like dancing rather that expressions of fighting arts.

I was highly impressed by the organization of the show itself and I congratulated several times with Kwoklyn about location, quality of staff and their competence, the great variety of martial arts being showed and the workshops run. I firmly hope I will be invited again to be part of the second edition of MAF-UK next year.

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I bumped into these videos and I decided to create this post for a few simple reasons:

• The drills are well explained starting from the correct posture and stance all the way to their complete execution;
• The performer continuously refers to boxing techniques and shows how the weapon attack can always be adapted to the bare hand strikes;
• Using Eskrima/Kali sticks is a great workout even if you are practicing other martial arts.

The only little problem is the low quality of the audio and the interference from various vehicles passing by.

Enjoy!

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When you see a person who is active and among the top performers within your school or club have you ever asked your self what took that person to be what she is now?  We surely cannot assume that anybody was born capable of punching, kicking or performing any other martial art move in a seamlessly fashion: these are acquired, learnt skills.

I tend to think that many qualities all have an input to the final performance of a martial artist but I am willing to develop and discuss in this post the top ones:

• Talent
• Physical fitness that can be split essentially in:
  • Agility
  • Strength
  • Speed
  • Flexibility
  • Coordination
• Observation skills
• Mental flexibility
• Wish to succeed

Let me now see these and briefly expand on them:

Talent

I define somebody talented when she walks into the training room for the first time and she naturally performs anything shown in a relatively easy and natural way.  Talent can be natural or built on previous experiences, non necessarily in martial arts: e.g. dancers and gymnast can naturally perform many martial arts moves.  Talent opens up doors and a number of possibilities to the performer.  Doing things is easy for her so she tend to quickly get to a decent level and often moving on to the next challenge without seeking excellence in its current shape or form.  While I am not stating that talented people do not stick around, in my experience they get easily bored and need continuous new challenges.  I have seen a relatively high number of talented people to get to some level of proficiency in martial arts but a much greater number dropping off within a few years.

Physical fitness

Regardless the martial art you practice there will be some physical fitness involved and being fit or developing a certain level of fitness will help your performance.  In my experience most people will develop over time the level of fitness for their required or expected performance, regardless of their initial fitness level (exceptions do apply).  This is to say that people naturally or initially fit will have an edge or a small advantage over the less fit ones but this will not affect most people in the long run.

Observation skills

I define observation skills when somebody can see a technique performed by another person and she can quickly understand and replicate it without need of deep explanation of the single movements involved.  I consider observation skills a great tool for the martial artist to improve her own performance and gradually absorb other people skills without constant assistance of an instructor or coach.  In my experience the person good in observation skills will be careful in how different people perform the same technique and find her own way to master it.

Mental flexibility

I define mental flexibility the skill of being adaptable in your approach to learn and perform a technique or a combination.  In general there are physical, mechanical and safety rules about performing techniques but often there isn’t a right or wrong about using that or the other technique.  While physical flexibility can be a great skill for certain martial arts, mental flexibility is great for all of them because it allows adapting to what works and what doesn’t.

Wish to succeed

A person with a strong wish to succeed will fuel her enthusiasm to perform.  The wish to succeed will ensure this person will:

• train regularly and often: this will have the most immediate effect of increasing the number of hours of training per month or year; her mind will get more and more involved with the training becoming a second nature.  Let’s try to remember that the mind and the subconscious are what we mostly train when learning and performing a martial art: muscles and bones simply move in the direction and with the speed and intensity that the mind dictates.  The secondary effect of this is that instructors and senior students will see this person around more than others and default to her more and more of their attention.  This will help this person to get slightly better than other and keep an advantage over other, less committed people.
• train with the most challenging people in the room trying to be as good or better then them
• Participate to seminars and other external activities organized by her school or club – visit events organized by others

I will conclude this post by simply stating the following: at whatever point your martial training started or will start your wish to succeed will be the most valuable component and likely the quality that will be pivotal in your success in martial arts.  Other qualities, even the ones I did not mention here will all matter but just as long as your wish to succeed is there.

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