We practice, investigate, challenge, learn and share what we discover. This makes all of us, and the karate that we practice, better and stronger. According to Shoshin Nagamine, from his book Tales of Okinawa’s Great Masters: In Okinawa during the old days, students spent years meticulously learning a single kata or two… later…without ever understanding their respective …
We train in a tradition. Not in a museum. We practice, investigate, challenge, learn and share what we discover.
…don’t let strangers twist your head… It is up to you personally to stay in control of your training…
…That kind of fantasy moves through the minds of untrained and inexperienced people when they think ahead to the possibility of violent confrontation. They think they will do something they saw in a show. Or that they will \”just do it.\” Or that, with right on their side, and innocence in their heart, that they will somehow be able to win. Not bloody likely…
In renzoku our energy will follow a complete pathway, making a firm connection between the waist (the koshi and the hara, the mechanical and energy origins of the techniques), the foundation, and the target contact point – unifying our body, tactics and will in purposeful combative motion.
From my book True Karate Dō: The time to decide what your life is worth is now. If you wait it will be too late. The world is changing. Everyone knows it. We try to stay on familiar ground. We try to orient like we always have. We hope the world we knew will come back. …
As karate was modernized and popularized some styles did narrow the technical range and made it more suitable for matches and more accessible to people who wanted a sports and fitness experience rather than combative self-defense.
Today is a good day to train. We train where we are. Sometimes in beautiful and nearby places. Sometimes not.
Walking home, late at night, you hear something behind you. A sound, unexpected, out of place. Pulling up to your house, in the driveway, in the dark. Something looks wrong. The window shade never looks half-open like that. Or the front door is not quite closed. Someone you know well says something, casually, that seems …
Researcher Steven Kotler writing in the Harvard Business Review, listed four conditions that produce a flow state – intense concentration, goal clarity, feedback as to how well you are doing, and a properly matched challenge to skills ratio. We use these continually in martial arts training. If the challenge level is set lower than the …
The science of high-performance – of advanced states of body and mind known as “Flow” – confirms what we discover in traditional karate training: Training the hara is essential to effective martial arts. In one sense the “hara” refers to the center of the body – our center of gravity, the center of our energy. …
Mountain Karate, Saluda, NC Congratulations to Mountain Karate’s three new Yudansha! Promoted during our Sixth Annual Seminar, following four days of testing in the dojo and the mountains, (and after years of training), showing hard-earned strength, endurance and skill. And congratulations to those who promoted to higher dan ranks, to kyu ranks, and to all …
Geoffrey Hinton just resigned from Google, where he was a leader in the development of Artificial Intelligence. He resigned so he could speak freely. One of his concerns is that AI will flood the internet with fake videos, photos, and news, so that people will “not be able to know what is true anymore.” We are already …
What we do is the opposite of addiction. We move forward, like a river. We continue, following our course, with purpose. We change. We meet obstacles, we adapt, we move on. Sometimes our course is smooth and clear, and then maybe with no warning, narrows, cascades, cataract, whitewater. We deal with it. We continue. Our …
