“Karate is a way of life, and it has been for me,” says Jim Price. “It’ll always be that way until the day I die.”

Mr. Jim Price is a black belt instructor with more than 40 years of experience in the martial arts, having trained since he was 20. He teaches Mr. Matthew Schell, who I podcasted with a few months ago.

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Jim Price, Phillip Koeppel, Matthew Schell circa 2011 (Facebook)

First impressions of karate in 1974:

“What always impressed me was I couldn’t get over the power and strength the teacher had, and the control. It just surprised me.”

Mr. Price relays a story of being in a horse stance – kiba dachi – and his instructor kicked him out of nowhere. The drill-sear

“It was nothing to go home (from tournaments) with blood on your uniform. You made contact.”

“Some of the teaching, I really agreed with. But a lot of it I didn’t.” He talks about teachers who instructed their students to lay flat on the ground so that the could jump on them. The students, then, would need to kiai to demonstrate tough stomachs. “That’s the first time I wound up getting two cracked ribs.”

On control: 

“That’s what it’s really about.” He says one training method is to hang a weight from a string with chalk on the string. If you touch the line and flick the chalk powder off the string, Mr. Price says you demonstrate a lack of control.

Why switching from Shuri-ryu to Matsumura Seito Shorin-ryu was difficult:

“We were brainwashed” into thinking Shuri-ryu was the only true way in karate. “They didn’t want you questioning things in the Shuri-ryu system.”

“I fought it for about a year,” he says. “I really did care about the Shuri-ryu system.”

Mr. Price relays a story about performing a Shuri-ryu kata – Go Pei Sho (one of my favorites!) – at a tournament without knowing Mr. Koeppel was watching. “It really bothered me a lot … it was almost like I hurt my teacher’s feelings.”

On competition:

Embarrassed by performing a Shuri-ryu kata as a Matsumura practitioner, Mr. Price spent a year and a half honing his forms and competing all around the tournament circuit.

Mr. Koeppel asked why he was spending so much time practicing for competition.

“I want people to know what we’re all about,” he told his teacher. They’d see many other styles, but “they don’t see Matsumura Seito.”

On the importance of getting younger people in leadership positions at organizations and tournaments:

“It seems like nowadays people are more around my age and into the 70s. Honestly, we need to get younger people involved … we’re not going to be around forever, and someone’s going to have to step in.”

On why Mr. Koeppel is a great martial arts instructor:

“When he’s teaching us stuff, he’ll teach us so much. But he wants us to branch out there and think about what we’re really doing, come up with our interpretation and talk to him about it. He guides us on that right path.”

“He’ll be the only teacher I’ll ever have,” he says. “I’ll never have another.”

It’s fun producing a podcast, but it’s hard to squeeze all the great martial arts content I see on there. That’s why I’m introducing my new feature, This Week in Martial Arts.

In case you missed them, here are a few cool – and fun! – martial arts videos and articles I found this week.

Worried about being attacked by a chainsaw? Read through this StackExchange thread for some tips, I guess. It keeps coming through my weekly digest, so it must be important, right? The highest-voted answer contains a real gem in it, I think: “If you find yourself in this situation,” he says, “you are likely going to die.”

“Try to not be an asshole sometimes.” Bullying takes many different forms. This Cracked video shows some instances where people meant well, but wound up coming off like jerks anyway. Think before you act. Try not to be an asshole sometimes.

Here are 10 ways you might not have known that Okinawan karate is different than Japanese karate. If you’re considering joining a martial arts program, look at Jesse Enkamp’s blog first. Or, if you’re like me, and you’ve only done one nation’s version of the art, gain a different perspective.

New to chin na? So am I. This book will help you get started.

Karate and wushu are looking to enter the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, according to Yahoo. Karate has lost previous bids for the 2012 and 2016 Games.

Every move in kata has a purpose, says Kris Wilder. If you train in forms, kata, poomsae, whatever, read this. This book (written with Lawrence A. Kane) opened my eyes to the depth and breadth of martial arts when I was 16 years old.

Master Ken is back this week to show us how to catch two punches. “Luckily, if you know Amerido-te, it ain’t no big deal.”

Rules can change styles. Jack Slack takes a look at styles such as MMA, sanshou, lethwei, and how their rules have influenced their development over the years. And if you don’t know what those styles are (like I didn’t before I read this), this neat article introduces you to them. (VICE’s Fightland)

I’ve been to two Iain Abernethy seminars, and during one of them, he talked about a martial artist doing a form that had a hop in it. Iain asked about the hop, which didn’t appear to have any practical self-defense application. After some investigation, he found out the hop was included because the person who developed the form had a pole in the middle of the workout area – the hop was to move away from the poll before proceeding with the next move of the form.

Rules can change styles, and so can environments, it would seem.

On my upcoming podcast, I welcome Sensei Jim Price. To be among the first to know when it’s published, subscribe for free to The Martial Arts Podcast.

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Dr. Yang, Jwing-Ming’s Tai Chi Chin Na Revised: The Seizing Art of Tai Chi Chuan is exactly the type of book that Okinawan karate needs for its forms.

Over the past several years, I have been working with my karate instructor to develop extensions on the basic applications of each of the forms in my style. These extensions incorporate locks, holds, throws, chokes, sweeps and the like.

In Japanese terms, then, we are moving beyond the omote bunkai and into the ura bunkai and perhaps even the honto bunkai.

(Personally, I’m not huge on relying on a foreign language to describe martial arts techniques. I’ve read too many blogs and heard too many instructors say we as Westerners continue to fudge up the term when we translate it to English, hence we I’ll refer to “extensions” over “ura bunkai” and “honto bunkai.”)

All that is to say that the extensions in Okinawan Shuri-ryu karate, from my understanding, are not readily apparent.

This books gives clear options for a certain posture or set of movements.

For me, the most significant portion of this book is when Dr. Yang goes through the Yang-style tai chi chuan form. He shows the basic postures, then gives a few possible applications for each. Despite showing the pictures, often times the details are hidden in between frames.

Dr. Yang also explains and explains the eight basic moving patterns to give us possible chin na applications, and he also gives us some pushing hands exercises to try.

I have no doubt the applications would work. However, my only real complaint with the book is the attacker in the picture often looks like he would be in a position that doesn’t seem realistic for an aggressive person to be in. He’s got a deep stance and is generally square with the attacker. I’ve never been in a fight, but all accounts I’ve noticed point to them being messy affairs. In short, the pictures seem “too nice.”

I guess that’s why YMAA also has a companion DVD.

This book is a phenomenal resource for anybody practicing the Yang style of tai chi chuan.

(Disclaimer: I received a free review copy of this book.)

Most martial arts feature forms. Kata. Poomsae. Patterns.

Whatever you want to call them, these prearranged series of movements exist to serve as libraries for self-defense from which we can draw.

As a way to get myself ready for my next promotion in karate, and to continue developing in tai chi chuan and Hsing-i chuan, I came up with the idea in late 2013 to do a form every day in 2014.

I’d felt like I’d started to slack in my training, and at some point, I’d remembered a story I’d heard about how Jerry Seinfeld became successful as a comedian. He told a budding comedian to get a calendar with the whole year on one page, and mark a big red X on each day he wrote.

“After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.

I wanted to create a chain of my own with my martial arts forms. “Whether’s it’s an hour or a minute each day,” I told myself, “I want to be practicing at some level.”

So I created a Google spreadsheet as opposed to a calendar. At the end of 2014, I wanted to be able to count all of the forms I did and do some analysis with it.

Each column was a form, and each row was a date. If I missed a form for a day, I’d mark the whole row red as a reminder of how recently I’d missed. I also kept all of the red rows to further motivate myself that I couldn’t let the rows keep increasing, which indicated breaks in the chain.

Looking back through this spreadsheet, I notice two most significant gaps in the chain.

The first was on Thursday, Sept. 25. After more than four months, which included trips to Washington, D.C., San Diego, Wisconsin, two trips to Las Vegas, and three trips to the Chicago area, the chain broke. It was my parents’ anniversary, and that morning, my friend’s mom had called to tell me that he had died. It was also the night of the last karate class I would hold for the foreseeable future, as I’d decided to cap off 21 months trying to build a karate school with a pizza party for my students.

It wasn’t until the next day, after wrapping up the party and visiting with my friend’s mom the rest of the night, that I’d realized I’d broken the longest chain I’d have for the entire year.

But that was okay. I had my priorities that day, and sometimes, you just get thrown off your game.

The next (and longest) gap in the chain came just days later, from Oct. 1-10, when I came down with a strain of the enterovirus. The illness forced me to miss being the best man in a friend’s wedding, and it kept me from the visitation and funeral of my friend that had died. It was a frustrating period, and in looking back, the lousiest stretch of 2014 by far. It would take more than a month to feel better after the virus left, as I rehabilitated myself with DDPYoga to work through the incredible aches I had in my hips. As I write this, some of those after effects still linger, but through DDPYoga and martial arts, I have been able to work through them.

For what it’s worth, I had 26 breaks in the chain. But, I also had 339 successful links.

If you have been struggling with staying motivated in your martial arts training, try this method. It’s a unique way to stay dedicated because you commit yourself to doing it. You have to focus on keeping your chain connected. And you’re held accountable when you break the chain because you can tell when you broke it.

Don’t break the chain.

Get ready to listen to us eat pizza and talk martial arts on this edition of The Martial Arts Podcast.

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This podcast features the Karate-Kung Fu Connection of Eddy Parker and Michael Brand. Sifu Eddy Parker and Couri Fu represent SOCA (School of Combative Arts) in Peoria, Ill., plus Sensei Michael Brand from Brand’s Martial Arts in Fairbury, Illinois.

Eddy Parker, Couri Fu, Michael Brand talk on The Martial Arts Podcast

The episode runs just under 60 minutes.

Here are a few snippets from the show…

• On open tournaments - “What they really mean,” Brand says, “if it’s a Japanese style, it’s open to all Japanese styles… You’d think after all this time, it’d be a little more integrated than that.”
• On the connection between karate and kung fu – “Use what’s useful and discard what’s not,” says Parker. “You’re not going to use a crane technique against a guy trying to punch your face off.
• On traditional katas and beautiful moves - “Practice and train deep, but fight narrow,” Brand says. When you’re fighting, the style doesn’t matter – “It all looks the same,” he says.
• On using muscle vs. technique – “No power until point of contact,” says Brand.
• On Star Wars - We discuss the influence of martial arts in Star Wars.

Contact me if you want to sponsor The Martial Arts Podcast – maybe you want to promote your school or an upcoming seminar or tournament.

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