why do I see more style bashing?

[AAAhmed46]

All the ##### i wrote up there was specifically for the summer.

During school i usually just go to class as much as i can and then maybe go to the gym once a week.

[Bill Glasheen]

There are a zillion abdominal exercises to do.

First, let me say that in the 28 years I have taught, I have ALWAYS taught where there was a complete gym where the students can do their fitness and strength training. I don't believe in wasting class time on what can better be done in the gym. Class time is for teaching and sparring.

That being said... We have countless abdominal machines and torture devices.

I recommend you do the following, but do it to supplement your main work.

1) Something that works the upper abs. This is a crunch, or crunch-like device.

2) Something that works the lower abs and hip flexors. That would be leg lifts, or myriad other ways where you basically are trying to pull knee to chest with resistance.

3) Something that works the obliques. I like side bends on a slanted Roman chair while holding a weight. There are various rotation machines that also can be mixed in as an alternative.

4) Something that works the lower back. I like back hyperextensions on a slanted Roman chair while holding a weight.

As for your weight training...

Exercise: I used to rely on push-ups and machines for chest and tri-cep strength, but now i realize i have been holding myself bag from increasing my strength exponentially.

Indeed.

The 2 biggest problems I see is that you are training only the upper body, and you aren't doing free weights. Both are absolutely fatal flaws for any serious martial artist, boxer, or athlete in general.

Your strength workout should focus on some bread-and-butter weight exercises that involve multiple muscle groups. Squats, bench, seated rows, etc. are the core. The other stuff is just clean-up, or for vanity. And it isn't about bodybuilding per se. That's a whole other domain. It should be about weight training, which is a means to an end.

When you get a good core routine down, then ideally you start mixing in some olympic lifts. These take you out of the strength and into the power and coordination domain.

You can do quite a bit with just a little bit of equipment. Ideally you join a gym and pay a little bit of money to a trainer to get you started. Believe it or not, many Okinawan Uechi dojos have used junkyard car parts for a dojo weight room. (See Alan Dollar's book) A creative mind and a strong will can take you far.

Don't change everything all at once. Just start tweaking here and there. If you get too ambitious, you'll just quit. Find something you are comfortable with, and stick with it. Once you know what you are willing to do, make a yearly plan and try to follow it. And in that year plan, don't forget to program in the rest periods. Man does not live by...

Have fun!

- Bill

[AAAhmed46]

The MMA guys say i should not do cardio everyday, saying the wieght training it self is enough.

But what if i dont want enough? What if i want to be better?

Im not the biggest guy in the world. Im not small, but im not big either. So i want to have something a bigger guy would not have, i want to have alot of gas.

Anything wrong with this?

[Bill Glasheen]

There are problems with too much cardio. Too much cardio can encourage your body to have some of the "ambivalent" muscle fibers go "slow twitch." Too much cardio can make you lose muscle mass.

You need some cardio. But how much? It depends upon what you are training for. For example, a Marine may have to jog a long distance to a battle with full gear, and then shoot and kick ass. But someone who wants to train for self-defense doesn't really need anything in terms of aerobic capacity. A boxer is going to need to go pretty strong for 3 minutes - repeatedly.

The best thing to do is interval training. Go all out for a period of time, then rest, then go all out again. It burns more calories. It teaches you how to dig down into the phosphocreatine and glycolytic parts of your energy production system as opposed to the lower-energy aerobic system. It hurts like hell, but it's good for you.

You can get some aerobic and/or interval training with your normal workouts. Beyond that, try doing low impact (if possible) so you can save your joints for other hard stuff. Your body can only take so much. The eliptical trainers are great for that.

- Bill

[Jake Steinmann]

The MMA guys say i should not do cardio everyday, saying the wieght training it self is enough.

But what if i dont want enough? What if i want to be better?

Im not the biggest guy in the world. Im not small, but im not big either. So i want to have something a bigger guy would not have, i want to have alot of gas.

Anything wrong with this?

Other than the assumption that big guys can't have cardio? (not that I'm a big guy either, but I've know big guys who go like the friggin' energizer bunny...)

Oh, and what Bill said.

[sgoss1]

Bill,

Thanks for the congrats! (I realize it's out of the scope of this thread).
And I'll pass on your greetings to the rest of the unruly West Coast bunch.
And BTW, (I noticed on the former thread)--Happy Birthday! Not bad for an "old guy" (age is relative here!!)

Keep stirring up the controversy--even though I don't participate much, I sure enjoy it!


SG

[AAAhmed46]

The MMA guys say i should not do cardio everyday, saying the wieght training it self is enough.

But what if i dont want enough? What if i want to be better?

Im not the biggest guy in the world. Im not small, but im not big either. So i want to have something a bigger guy would not have, i want to have alot of gas.

Anything wrong with this?

Other than the assumption that big guys can't have cardio? (not that I'm a big guy either, but I've know big guys who go like the friggin' energizer bunny...)

Oh, and what Bill said.

No, but he has stuff like size and strength and generally wont have to really stress it(unless he is a pro fighter or something) i dont, so i need a 'trump' card, understand what i mean?

[Rick Wilson]

Amazing how a difference of opinion has become tantamount to betrayal, distaste and/or trolling and warrant insults in return...

"Why would anyone who doesn't agree with all our views want to discuss things with us?"

Huh?


Sorry to “disagree” with you Jim as you seem to dislike it but what I read is not disagreement with approach etc but posts that drip with distaste for how Uechi and Uechika do things.

Distaste is not disagreement in my book and you can rewrite my opinion as "Why would anyone who doesn't agree with all our views want to discuss things with us?" all you want but it will not alter what I see as facts nor will your distortion of my words alter my opinion.

And just for clarification I was not referring to your posts. I considered your posts on this thread discussion.

[JimHawkins]

Rick,

I didn't mean to quote the sentence that you wrote, which is why I did not tag the quote with your name.. I quoted how I interpreted the message.

There seems to be a very thin line, but, I see certain questions, disagreements or examples on certain points on this forum being labeled as "off limits" or as insults when IMO they are often legitimate questions or issues that should be open to fair debate.

[AAAhmed46]

Ill admit for myself, yeah i tend to dislike many things WC guys do.


But the thing is, the style isnt bad.......

Im just scared that some of the widely practiced bullshido in wing chun will soon eclipse and consume it's true use and application.


And im scared the same will happen to uechi. There are some theories in wing chun that are widely practiced that i suspect IS NOT a part of the style.


And essentially some of the harshness in my posts on wing chun comes from this actually, the horrible reality of practitioners stupidity wrecking some really good ##### in wing chun.

In britain, some really succesful WING CHUN MMA guys are coming out with a WCK base, so there is hope.


Same with uechi-ryu

[JimHawkins]

"In danger"

It's way past that point dewd..

Just talking WCK.. About 99.5% of everything I've seen out there ***** the ^$#%$@$%..

I don't even tell folks to do WCK anymore, unless I can suggest specific teacher, because I know what is out there..EVERYWHERE.

On an aside: I don't see all "Hard WCK" as all bad, sometimes HARD is good--that from my karate training and personal experience. But the soft is illusive.

I don't think I'm Master Po but I know what is good, I know what the folks I trained with can do and they are good. Most of what is out there just ain't good--and that's the truth...

But as I have posted many MANY times this is to be expected. There simply isn't any way to control what proliferates.. "The many" were never intended to be "the few".

Why are the best folks I've seen not on the web?

I have no idea except perhaps they don't give a crap..

Each art has it's own issues and this really deserves it's own thread.

[Andrew Heuett]

Although some posts in this thread can probably be safely ignored, I agree with Jim (EDIT: referring to the reply before the WCK one). However, there are some replies to valid questions and comments which are pretty hostile, considering the questions and comments were clearly written without malice. In particular, regarding the idea that perhaps all is not in Sanchin.

Not only am I not well-versed in Uechi, I have NO experience with Uechi. As an experienced martial artist, but still a person outside the art, it sounds like a pretty big claim. I'm not in a position to come to any conclusions about it, but just think what it sounds like to others without Uechi experience. All is in Sanchin and Uechi? There's a few reasons why this may be hard to conceive:

- the concept of having all martial motion contained with a limited amount of forms

- the perceived inference that Uechi has their material, plus all of yours as well in whatever you are training

- that if all is in Sanchin that one can unlock it efficiently enough to be more at least as useful as training an approach similar to the end goal that is more readily layed out for that approach

Just in case it needs saying, these statements are made out of curiosity, not spite for your approach or its practitioners.

Before this gets further, a few rough definitions will help those like me who are shaky at best with your terminology. Sanchin--is this just that rooted stance, or is it referring to a kata or something else too?

[JimHawkins]

I trained for a short time in a Uechi variant school and have learned much from hanging around here since then, talking, meeting and hanging with Uechika and also researching on and off as part of my general MA interests..

Hopefully that qualifies me to answer as follows..

Sanchin is a kata.. The primary one in Uechi, the first one.. It's means Three Battles or Three Conflcts..<Mind Body Spirit> It is thought to be an internal or meditative kata..and the root of the entire style of Uechi...

Sanchin Dachi is the stance in Sanchin.

The present form in Uechi was changed around quite a bit from the original as taught in the Wakayama dojo before Kanei revamped the style into its present form.

More here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanchin

[Bill Glasheen]

Andrew

Things said by Uechi practitioners and even things stated by me on this thread can be badly mangled by outsiders who don't understand what was meant and/or have an ax to grid with folks from another system.

"All is in Sanchin" does not mean you can derive Maxwell's equations after a lifetime of doing a Chinese form.

Here is my personal understanding:

1) All the lowest common denominators of movement of the other seven forms of the system can be found in Sanchin. In fact it's extremely important for an instructor constantly to go back to Sanchin postures and basics while teaching advanced forms. By doing this, the instructor reinforces the very simple set of principles that encompass what the style is. The student doesn't need to learn much "new" when doing a new move. He/she only needs to take the new combination of root movements and put them together. Sanchin shows you the bounds within which you are supposed to operate.

2) Sanchin is such a general and simple set of principles and methods that it's possible to bring "it" in many different directions. Mike K was the one who once called me "The Borg." When you see someone like me who can be like Milton Berle...

I know a good joke when I steal it.

...then you are witnessing someone who "gets" Sanchin. I use the kata as a kind of pnemonic device to assimilate more moves, more techniques, and more methods of energy generation and absorption. My students at UVa who stayed with me up to about shodan and then went off elsewhere and had to study another style told me that they picked a new style up pretty quickly and yet couldn't figure out how they learned so much faster than the next person by them. I did, but then I've been doing Uechi for 32 years.

It's not a lot different that training someone well in phonics before teaching them how to read. My second son was such a person, and I was amazed when at the age of 5 he picked up Orson Well's War of the Worlds and was able to read words he had never seen before. I totally got why he could do it, but I had never seen someone so well schooled in the basics do it the way he could. Another good example is teaching someone the piano before having them pick up another instrument. Still another is to teach them Latin before teaching them other Romantic languages.

As such, the Uechi system is a great "core" system to start with. You can take it in any number of different directions - physical or spiritual - as have many of my students who have scattered to the wind.

All this is predicated of course on good instruction from people who know what they are doing, and know how to work with people from all walks of life. That takes a lifetime to develop in and of itself.

- Bill

[MikeK]

I too picked up Orson Well's War of the Worlds as a child, but that's because it was a radio drama and entailed me to do nothing more than sit in front of a radio on Holloween. Now H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds is a book and I'm impressed if a young boy read it. As for me, I did read the Classic Illustrated version in high school.

I look at things a little differently than Bill, but it is impressive to see how he relates both old and new things he's learned to his core Uechi-Ryu. If you see how he does it, it makes sense. Though sometimes squinting may be needed.