World Of Swords

Wowee kazowee! Bruce Lee/Chuck Norris/Jackie Chan was the greatest! My instructor can beat your instructor!

And, now that we have put all those old childish attitudes aside, we can ask ourselves the question, how can you tell if a martial arts instructor knows his stuff. Choosing an instructor, after all, is one of three items in becoming a good martial artist ourselves. The other two things we should pay attention to are whether the system is any good, and whether the student is any good.

The first quality is whether he can communicate. Does he stand off and pronounce from on high, or does he grin right into your face and tell you what he thinks. Cheerful is best, but even abrasive is okay, if he is really talking to you.

Another quality is whether he can get you to understand the points that he is making. When he says circle, do you see circle, or something else? This is especially important when one attempts to share the specialized theory of the martial arts that can get heady and esoteric.

Then there is the question of whether he actually knows anything. Yes, he may be a grand poobah, and know a thousand techniques, but can he tell you how and why they work? Is he a monkey see monkey do instructor, or one that knows the real reasons why the martial arts work or don't work.

Now we come to the all important question, can he knock the stuffings out of people? Okay, maybe I phrased that wrong. But your instructor should be able to make the martial arts work against real attackers.

Now here's one that's going to sneak up on you. Is he too willing to defend himself? Unfortunately, many martial arts instructors breed an attitude which pulls in fights, and it is better to teach people how to fight so that they don't ever have to fight.

Okay, that is what I have to say about it all. You are welcome to disagree, but the fact is an instructor should be able to communicate, have something to communicate, and not encourage people to fight no matter what. Competence, confidence, and all the other martial arts related virtues are their own reward.

Al Case, 4O years instructing martial arts, has written the only bona fide Master Instructor Course in the world. You can see it at Monster Martial Arts.

Okay, you've been studying the School of the Grand and Exploding Dragon. Or, maybe you've decided to start your own school, and you are going to call it the Nine Circling Wombats in Winter. The point that is being made here is that...what's in a name.

A classical school might have a recognized name, like Shotokan, but that just means the garage of Gichen. Or maybe a generic name, like Karate Do Dojo, which says it is teaching karate in a school, but nothing else. But there is a deeper underbelly to this whole scene.

Uechi Ryu is considered hard core classic martial art, but what is this thing called Pan Gai Noon? Pan Gai Noon is a system based on the three original forms taught in a Chinese Kung Fu system. The extra five forms in Uechi Ryu were taught, according to Mattson in his amazing book, for entertainment purposes.

That's right, students needed to be entertained so that they didn't wander away from the, uh, commercial enterprise. This seems like a concept rather shabby in nature, but, apparently, it is a necessary one. And, in truth, while one could fault the school for such curricular changes, and should, one also has to fault the students.

Or, to get back to Shotokan, while it is considered the ultimate legitimate karate school, Gichen Funakoshi apparently passed his authority in matters karate to a school called Shotokai. Apparently he passed his seal and other paraphernalia to shotokai, and Shotokan is (choke) an imposter. Well, one could argue which is legitimate, but both have a right to practice martial arts, and the truth will be found in the individual, not in the school.

But, to continue this profound discourse, kenpo is...not karate. Parker was versed in karate, see his first book, but his teachings ended up being based on Jimmy Woo Kung fu. He called it kenpo karate because nobody knew what kenpo, or kung fu, was.

Commercialism, and other influences, effect the naming of a system or school. Aikido went through quite a variety of different names before being called Aikido. Karate, before being transformed into the high kicking Tae Kwon Do art in Korea, had eight different kwans, or schools.

I suppose the final thought on this is that naming a school can be fun or sordid, and it can mean anything. The truth of the art, though, is whether the system is a solid manifestation of the art, whether the instruct can actually get the student to understand, and whether the student actually has the ability to learn. This is a question beyond names and labels and such, true to the heart of the matter, and what the student must consider when exploring the morass of grand and glorious martial arts names.

Al Case has researched martial arts for 4O+ years. You can Call Him Names at Monster Martial Arts.

Art is the fact of creation. A simple statement with far reaching and profound effects. Art is the break down and synthesis of the old patterns into the new possibilities.

The funny thing is that most instructors don't encourage new students to come up with anything new, to actually create anything. The most popular method of teaching is to have the student duplicate and mimic, exactly and without deviation, exactly what the teacher is handing down. But once one has actually engaged in a fight one quickly realize that a fight is always new and original, and requires the utmost in creativity to win.

Thus, if you are going to win a fight, it behooves you to learn how to be creative. Interestingly, nobody has ever written a course or book on how to be creative. Isn't that interesting, a whole art that has no creativity in it?

To be creative one has to break down the current patterns of martial arts training one is engaged in. Thus, one method for being creative would be to simply take the specific segments of the forms and interchange them to make new forms. Take a pattern from classical karate, say the fourth set of specific movements in heian five, and then do the first specific set of movements from pinan three, then the fourth set of specific movements from pinan four...and so on.

The first item you will probably learn is that these individual segments of art don't always fit together in a pleasing and workable fashion. So, what can you do to make them work together? How can you adjust the geometry of the feet, and rework the armwork, so that the movements fit together and even make sense?

Another thing you are going to learn is that your art no longer works. Doing the blocks in different pattern would never fit the kinds of attacks you might meet. So tweak your movements until they do fit a normal attack, and explore attacks that are weird and not normal, and so on.

Another thing you will find is the desire to do weird and sometimes exotic things. Simply, you are going to start to realize how the process of creation actually works. Your mind is going to start charging along byways that normally would have been closed to you.

AsI said in the beginning of this article, art is the fact of creation. Honestly, you should be drilled to death in your art, until every movement is your own, until the art is in you. But, even more honestly, if you don't start looking at what you are doing and reconfiguring everything, all that drilling is going to be about as good as a death knell.