Yes, you read right. This blog is coming to an end. After a bit of mulling over I have decided to close the Urban Samurai Blog down for good. It didn’t take me long to come to this decision and in fact the decision more or less made itself, which suggests to me that this little soapbox of mine was ready to be respectfully dismantled anyway. It has, for me, run it’s course and it is time to move on.
At this point in the proceedings I wish to devote most of my time to other things, like my martial arts training and my own personal development. I just feel that I’d be better serving myself and others by devoting my time to those two pursuits and the fact of the matter is, running a blog is quite a bit of work and it eats up quite a bit of time and energy, two things I need a lot more of at the moment in order to pursue my training goals and my own development as a person. Besides that, I feel that I’ve went as far as I can with this particular blog and I can’t envisage it growing any further.
This is not to say you won’t be hearing from me again in the future. In fact I’m already formulating plans for another site, but one with a different focus and one which reflects where I am at now and will be in the future. At the moment, I can’t say when this new site will appear. When it’s good and ready too is my honest opinion on that and not before.
So now I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have followed this blog from the start and who have taken the time to read and comment on the articles I’ve published here. I’ve learned a great deal from the experience and I’ve enjoyed conversing with all of you this past year or so. It’s been a blast.
This is a guest post from Oscar Del Ben. Oscar is the publisher of Freestyle Mind, one of the classiest personal development blogs on the web. In this article he talks about internal motivation in the martial arts and touches upon some of my favourite subjects, including fear and visualiztion. I hope you enjoy it and don’t forget to check out his site.
I have been studying martial arts for nearly two years now, practicing for the most time sanda, which is chinese kickboxing. I really love the martial arts world and I really think studying a martial art is one of the most rewarding thing in life.
However, when I go to my gym I often see some people who are there just to do some physical exercise, with little or no motivation to really learn the art behind what they are doing.
There’s nothing wrong with doing some exercise to remain fit, but sometimes you’d really like to go to the next level. I’m talking about the path between the “I have to go to the gym tonight, let’s hope it’ll be easy” to the “Can’t wait to go to the gym tonight!”. Let’s face it, it would be better to start a training session with that kind of motivation, right?
Thanks to my previous post on the importance of learning and continuing to practice the basics, a few people have asked why I think it is that so many martial artists are quick to neglect the basic techniques when it comes to training, so I thought I would try and answer that question here in this post.
I have also posed the same question to some of the other martial arts bloggers out there in the blogosphere and you can read some of their answers by clicking on the links at the end of this article. I think you’ll find some of them quite interesting.
Why I Think The Basics Are Often Neglected In Martial Arts
First and foremost, if people are neglecting the basics in martial arts it is mainly for two reasons:
It can be argued that the most important part of learning any martial art, no matter what the style, is properly learning the basics, and by basics I mean the basic techniques that go to make up the framework of the art- stances, footwork, striking, timing and distance etc., the bare bones of any fighting art.
I often look around and deplore the fact that too many people try to run before they can walk. I see it in my own students on a regular basis when I’m training them in Ju Jitsu- they often want to learn advanced techniques when they have yet to even master the more basic ones. Such a desire is quite prevalent amongst students who practice styles that have a great number of different techniques in them. It sometimes feels, when training students, like putting a kid in front of a huge table full of sweets and other tasty goodies and the kid doesn’t know what to grab first so they end up sampling a bit of everything on the table, never really savouring the taste of any particular sweet.
The other night at training one of peers was taking the class and he had us doing an arm lock in response to a double lapel grab. The technique involved taking control of your opponent’s wrist and then taking the elbow and whipping the arm. If done correctly, the whipping movement will break your opponents arm.
As I was practicing the technique however, it quickly became apparent that the defense had weaknesses and that one could easily counter attack before the lock had been applied. In a live situation, no attacker was going to stand there for the couple of seconds it took to apply the lock; they would likely continue their attack unabated. A lively opponent would not make it easy for you to apply such a technique.
Static Training And The Freeze Syndrome
The situation brought home to me once again the problem with this kind of static training, a problem I have come to label “the freeze syndrome”. It’s a problem shared by most traditional systems and can be summed up thus:
Incredibly folks, I’ve somehow managed to reach my 100th post on this little blog of mine, a feat I never thought I’d manage when I first began back in April of last year. But here it is, none the less and to celebrate this milestone of mine I have a put together a compilation of all the best posts so far that is ingeniously titled The Best of Urban Samurai Vol 1, and it’s available to you for download right now. All you have to do is click the book image below and it’s yours.
Before I go, I’d just like to thank everyone who has supported me on this journey of mine, from all the other bloggers to anyone who has ever took the time to read my articles and leave comments. This year is going to be great and I’ll be going out of my way to continue to write to my very best for you all.
So happy New Year to all of you and I hope 2010 is a happy and prosperous one for you.
You ever wonder why the drop-out rate amongst martial arts students is so high? Is it because the training is hard? Is it because it is repetitive and at times hard to enjoy? Is it because students realise that they really want to be doing something else? Or do they quit when their dreams of being like Bruce Lee after three months training don’t materialise?
The Value of Persistence
Most likely all of these things play a part in the high drop-out rate but in my opinion, the reason that most people quit is because they lack persistence. They fail to see that success can be theirs if they just stick at it but often times, their perceived lack of progress and absence of faith in the learning process and the ways of the universe make it all too easy for them to become pessimistic about what they are doing and their once strong resolve caves in under the pressure of all that negativity and of course they quit.
Multiple attackers are very difficult to deal with. Let me tell you a story that illustrates my point.
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, my Dad is a bouncer as well as being my Sensei. He has been bouncing now for almost twenty years and has been training in the martial arts for nearly thirty years. Despite the fact that he is a couple of years shy of being sixty, my Dad is in great shape. He’s physically fitter than most of the students he trains (including me) and he has a bullish physique that makes him very strong and imposing when he wants to be.
Over the course of his bouncing career my Dad has had many, many violent confrontations with people, as you can well imagine. Hardly a night goes by when he’s on the door that some kind of incident doesn’t crop up that he has to deal with by getting physical with someone. All in all he’s not really a man to be messed with (as many have found out to their cost) in any way, shape or form.
So two weekends ago my Dad is working the door as usual. It’s a Sunday night and there are only three bouncers working, including my Dad. Sunday nights at the club are slower than Saturdays (there is usually a dozen or more men working Saturday nights) so the owner cuts down on the staff.
Anyway, half way through the night a gang of fourteen guys enters the club. They were all well known to my Dad and the other two bouncers as being drug dealers and general thugs. These were bad people with not a conscious between them. Violence was their answer to everything.
A group of performing monkeys taught in the art of Taekwondo have turned the tables on the man who trained them and taken their long-awaited revenge.
Yes, it seems the martial arts primates knew exactly what they were doing when they went along with the strict training regime concocted by Korean trainer Lo Wung (42), whose plan was to whip the sneaky monkeys into shape so they could entertain the crowds outside a shopping centre in Nshi, in eastern China’s Hubei province.
The furry fiends obviuosly took exception to being kidnapped from their home and being turned into the monkey equivalent of a cute Duracel bunny for the amusement of the hairless ones with their stupid facial expressions.
