Tang soo do master's book brought me to tears!

Himokiri Karate · Member of the Month

It's a book about the horrific upbringing of a tang soo do master that makes me grateful for my own life. But also it gives me inner strength knowing how others view things. It's called inside u.

I reading this book and observing people and human nature. It gives the impression that people today lack passion to dedicate themselves in long term basis. It seems like everything is flavor of the month.
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bushido_man96 · KF Sensei

As much as we talk about it, I'm not so sure that passion actually existed to the extent we think it did. We see a lot of great stories from "back in the day," but if we look at the stories from our own "day," I think we'll see similar amounts of stories. The things that seem to change are the things people dedicate themselves to.

Anyways, just a thought, but I digress....

Who wrote this book you read? It sounds like he has quite the interesting story.
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OneKickWonder · Purple Belt

I think you'll find many masters tell of hard times and brutal teachers. I think it's just that life gets easier with each generation, and martial arts teachers used to be tough.

I could write a book about growing up in the 1970s and 80s. Having to do a paper round before and after school because my parents couldn't afford to pay for everything I wanted. Training at martial arts in an environment where the teacher could still knock you to the floor and bust lips were common in sparring. No point me writing it yet though. There's still far too many people around for whom all that is normal. Maybe in 30 years when the current batch of weaklings have grown up and many of the old boys have passed.

The 'flavour of the month' thing is absolutely nothing new. Most, if not all styles of martial arts around today are MMA. They just aren't called that. Funakoshi's shotokan is just the formalisation of several styles he practiced, and he chose which bits, in his opinion, we're the best bits to keep. Aikido was founded by a man well versed in many styles, as well as less rigid more practical military combatives. There's another man that chose which bits he thought were right. Some of Funakoshi's students decided that there were elements of shotokan that were not good. So of course they changed things. I may be mistaken, but I believe that wado came about following a disagreement with Funakoshi. There always has been flavour of the month and always will be. And it's right that that's the case. Otherwise martial arts would become useless. If you had a style that never evolved, and it's practitioners never pursued 'flavour of the month',then it wouldn't be long before their adversaries knew exactly how to defeat them every time, because they'd be too predictable, and their weaknesses would become common knowledge.

Himokiri Karate · Member of the Month

sensei8 · KF Sensei

I call it the "Rage of the Page"; what will it be today, that replaces what was favored yesterday?!?! I believe that the ways of yesterday were much more harsher, training wise, than they are of today.

Why??

The root of all evil...Money!!

Yesterday, the training was what it was, harsh or not, but solid quality, whereas, money was, and is necessary, but back in the days, the training was paramount over money.

Today, the training seems to be much more lackadaisical in the fear of losing students, which translate into losing money, which translate one P&L on a down spiral to their doors closing permanently.

An empty school of the MA can be a very quite somber place with no students whatsoever. So, the quality of the training suffers drastically across the board; students become the CI, and that's never ever a good thing for the betterment of the MA student. The students start to get a false security about what they're learning; the effectiveness is tossed out of the nearest window over doing whatever it takes to keep students happy: promote them whenever the student wants to, the absence of integrity becomes the new mindset, and whatever else drives their P&L.

When you look at one of the most powerful video/game rental retail giants that once dotted the landscape, and you discover what else killed them...Exorbitant late-fees, not Redbox or Netflix, but exorbitant out of control late-fees. Most of the late-fees were primarily due to the product being properly and timely checked back into the system...WHAM...now a member has late fees, all because the employees weren't doing their job correctly. By the time that the quality and effective customer service was correctly, the sink was already doomed to sink below the surface of the lost trust of the consumers.

I'm not suggesting that the schools of the MA need to return to the training methodologies and ideologies of yesterday...NO!! What I'm suggesting is that todays school of the MA needs to replace quantity with quality before the word Martial Arts becomes a punch line for some joke told.

Imho!!

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Himokiri Karate · Member of the Month

bushido_man96 · KF Sensei

I think a lot of MA schools that run a cardio kickboxing program do so in order to expose more people to the possibility of what MA training can be. Through that exposure, I think most have the goal of trying to bring some of them into the actual MA classes.

Himokiri Karate, thanks for sharing that information. It sounds like a good story, indeed.
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Himokiri Karate · Member of the Month

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