Enter The Guardian

From the very start most of you should recognise easily that martial arts has always played a very important role in my life. It seems from the first days of me walking I was kicking and punching.

Unfortunately as things are however I never had the discipline while I was young to complete each school of karate or martial arts that I started. I moved from school to school as I grew older and have had a variety of experiences with many different forms. One of the quirks of american martial arts is that many schools have implemented several different styles and then tried to combine them into one.

Some schools have more success with this than others, This type of thinking we can all attribute to the great Bruce Lee with his introduction Jeet kun do. This being said however not every instructor that has had experience with several traditional styles is going to be able to place them in a way that every student will be able to do integrate them well. Pride becomes a large part of many instructors mentality which is fine but it may well cloud the ability to move beyond what is already known to experimentation with more styles or a continual evolution within the school's teachings.

I started my quest on a Kenpo based style. I was very young perhaps eight or Nine years of age. The school was good as most kenpo based schools have been in my opinion. However when you are this young it is hard to understand that skills that are being taught can be used outside of the school and put together in a real scenario. Though a martial arts student may learn to strike and block, they may not have the mental game down on how to trully use the technique in a real situation when it is necassary to use it.

As I grew older I encountered other schools and immediately saw the popularity of a Korean martial art known as Taikwando. Taikwando can be very glamorous and exciting to watch due to the fluidity and grace of the high kicks which are used within it. Because of this and the influence that taikwando has had on the movie industry many schools have taken many of the kicks from them and then implemented them into once again one or more traditional styles.

If you kick someone correctly you can easily stop any fight short. Most of the schools that I enrolled in after this were heavily taikwando based. Most of the schools also were heavily kata based. Katas are one thing that I absolutely hated when I was growing up. They are not on my favorite list these days but I see the importance in them now. Fludidity in motion, visualisation, focus and concentration are essential to pull them off well. Katas have greatly helped me find focus and are great meditative tools for any energy work I now do.

Recently I have come to the school that I plan on completing my black belt in. Its a freestyle karate school. We have integrated Taikwando and blended it with a lot of different styles. Quite a bit of the kung fu Wing Chun is influencing the teaching though it has been modernized in order to keep evolving with the times.