I’ve been having fun with this karate blog for the last couple of days.
I finally figured out how to plug in videos, and there is a wealth of video material about karate and martial arts, so I get to have guest instructors like Sensei Nakayama appear at this virtual dojo, and Sensei Nakayama is available to teach 24/7/365, which is very good indeed.
I also have a platform for my opinions about traditional karate, Shotokan karate, supplemental training exercises, and my opinions about the efficacy of Shotokan karate, Tai Chi and Aikido and boxing and MMA and wrestling and the Fairbairn techniques as self-defense.
And that’s fun, particularly when I remember the mere five books (six, if you count the two-volume set twice) that were available to me when I started my martial arts travels after a rough year in 5th Grade at Emerson Grade School in Phoenix, AZ.
But don’t think that mere knowledge can help you in a situation requiring self-defense skills; you are going to need practice of some kind, and the more the better, because your mind may remember pictures you see on the internet, but your body remembers what it has practiced.
One of my next projects is to contrast short learning-curve technique sets with Shotokan, which has a technique-rich syllabus, and a very long learning curve.
Critics of Shotokan karate suggest that it takes too long to learn the syllabus.
I agree that it takes a long time to learn the syllabus in Shotokan; I’m still working on it, and I will be for the next twenty years or so.
Since I enjoy the training, the extended and extensive syllabus is a feature to me, not a flaw.
But for no other reason than fun, I plan to discuss some short-learning curve technique sets, including the Fairbairn Syllabus, and a version of Prison Fighting Techniques on DVD that impressed me (actually, about half of the techniques impressed me), and the LINE System used for a while by U.S. Marines, the combatives systems (similar to Fairbairn’s) taught by the great, late Carl Cestari and five or six other shorter-learning-curve self-defense systems, and contrast them with Shotokan.
And I’m interested in the current version of Krav Maga being taught in Israel, so I’ll take a look at what’s out there, because it gets field tested on a daily basis in a way similar to, but far more extreme than, mixed martial arts.
So there’s more to come, and we haven’t scratched the surface of Shotokan, at that!
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