What a brown belt has learnt
Due to my training partner doing evening bar work to help pay for his mortgage I have found that I haven’t had anyone to train with which meant I have had to help teach.
Now I have helped teach when many of my training partners have been sick/busy/on holiday etc before but that was actually quite rare but more often or not I have been the guy my sensei has used to demonstrate techniques. However, this time I have been teaching properly
Thanks to Coronavirus, like most people, my martial arts training had to stop. As lockdown eased we could return to partial training which was no contact training which is quite hard to do with Ju Jutsu so we practiced striking and worked on our fitness.
I have to say I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. As I mentioned in my last post, I was unemployed so doing some pad work really helped to release a lot of frustration in a positive way. This is one of the things I love about martial arts is the positivity. If you are willing to work hard at it you will get more out than you put in. Now I will brag here that I lost 4kg in a month practicing striking and working on my fitness and the better news is that I have yet to put it back on!
It has been 5 months since my last blog post which is a serious neglect of my blog. I did have a good reason which was job hunting. I got made redundant in November 2020 which although wasn’t a shock caused meant we had only one wage earner. Then the Coronavirus pandemic hit and the world went into lockdown and made job hunting very difficult. We were a lot luckier than most as my wife was earning a very good salary so we were able to get by and I effectively became a house husband (I learnt looking after home and family while your partner is working is not easy and you don’t have have as much free time as you may think) so I’m not looking for any sympathy.
In Ju Jutsu there are a large number of throwing techniques which meant I had to learn to throw a training partner and get used to being thrown by my training partner when practicing these techniques.
As you can imagine getting thrown is an unnatural thing to be done to you and can be nerve wracking when you are not used to it. It took me a long time to get used to it. I often consciously and subconsciously resisted being thrown in any throw where my feet. My body would move away from my training partner and my weight would sink making it extremely hard if not impossible for me to be thrown.
I’m going to start this post with a mind blowing thought “CORONAVIRUS SUCKS”. Is your mind blown? I thought not. To get through the pandemic we have given up a lot that we have taken for granted. Sadly some of us have lost friends and family to coronavirus.
Before the beginning of the First World War Great Britain wasn’t a hugely democratic country. Until the 1867 Reform Act most men didn’t have the vote. The Reform Act changed this but women still most certainly weren’t allowed to vote.
We have all been in a situation where no matter how hard you try, you just can’t get a technique right. Even if your instructor or training partner is being very compliant and helpful.
Ok you have been doing martial arts for a while now and gone through the belt system a bit and you are now doing very some very technical techniques which have a some danger to them so you are definitely not a newbie anymore. This means you can handle yourself in a real fight, right?
Netflix recently released the documentary Age of Samurai telling the story of the end of the Sengoku period or Warring States period from 1467 to 1615. The documentary dramatises the story, with commentary from historians, of the rise to power of Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu and their eventual unification and control of the whole of Japan.
Most martial arts have a some kind of belt system where you start with either a red or white belt and work your way up possibly following a curriculum and when your instructor thinks you are ready you take a grading exam and you get a different coloured belt until you get to black belt and then you get various degrees of black belt. However, is it needed?
Not Quite A Black Belt