A Warrior's Thougts on the Martial Arts

Today, the " Shinergy Youngstars[battle] Spring Cup 2011 " took place. From my school, there were 5 competitors, all of whom took home one or more medals. At the end of the day, my 5 students scored a total of 7 medals. The Shinergy Youngstars[battle] is all about speed, agility, precision and coordination. There's no actual fighting there. This is due to pedagogical reasons. We (that is, the Shinergy instructors) don't really believe in kids beating the hell out of each other in front of their cheering parents. I strongly believe that trainers should focus on building a strong athletic base with their younger students before having them fight in a competitive environment. Yesterday's battle was split into three events: Agility Parcours Power Punch Flying High Kick Let's take a short look at the details of those competitions: Agility parcours The agility parcours is just what the name implies. A parcours was set of, consisting of 3 standing bags, a couple of j...

On Saturday, 19th of march, the Shinergy[battle] spring 2011 took place. From my school, three competitors entered the challenge and fought their way through the tournament. The Shinergy[battle] is a full-contact event that follows an action/stop ruleset. The basic idea is to combine the best aspects of pointfighting and full-contact fighting without having to bear with their downsides. You see, semi-contact pointfighting, where the action is interrupted after each hit, has the definitive advantage over other forms of fighting that it places great demands on an athletes tactical skill, speed and precision. On a negative note, obviously, most of the techniques that score great points in semi-contact fighting are utterly useless in every other form of combat. Just watch some of them fights and you'll see what I mean. Full-contact fighting, on the other hand, has the big advantage that it comes pretty close to actual fighting. It is not fighting, mind you, it's still a sport. Howe...

It's been a while, but I've been quite busy preparing for my first full-contact bout. Here in Austria, the ISKA was recently replaced by the WKF ( http://www.wkfkickboxing-austria.net/wp/ ). Rules are a bit different than what I was used to, but that doesn't matter as I never competed in full-contact fights before anyways. Since my long-term goals are rather MMA-oriented, I decided I first need to spend a lot of time in the ring. So, I decided to compete in the " austrian newcomer ring-sports championships " ( Österreichische Neulings Meisterschaft im Ringsport ). My plan was to fight under lowkick rules, without knee and elbow strikes. Now I won't go into great details regarding the event's organization (which was awful), suffice it to say I was the only competitor in my class (Lowkick, middleweight -75kg). Therefore, I was offered a fight under full-contact rules without lowkicks, as there was another middleweight competitor without an opponent there. Ob...