(no subject)
Friday, October 5th, 2001 04:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerA good day -- we did a demonstration of hapkido for the kids at the local school which went off well,
and encouraged about a dozen of them to sign up for a self-defence course we're
going to run. OK, I now have a bruised foot from falling badly, but what the
hell. The problem with performances is that your sense of timing gets speeded
up, so that Philip was throwing us at one-and-a-half times normal speed (I
not?ced the same thing when I used to play in a band -- we'd do a concert
thinking we were playing normally, then we'd listen to the tape and find
everything was speeded up to a ridiculous extent).
I'm really excited about the self-defence course. A problem I have with martial
arts is that it generally attracts the kind of people who don't actually need it
that much, or that those who do need it get scared and give up. I know
in films like Karate Kid you get a sickly kid who
meets a martial arts master and learns to defend him/herself, but in reality the
kind of wimps who really need self-defence training (and I include myself here,
or at least myself as I was twenty years ago) either don't have the confidence
to go to a martial arts school, or get hurt and give up. Of course there are
the internal or "soft" martial arts like t'ai chi (which is my main area of
expertise), but there you have a different problem: most people teaching t'ai
chi are New Age flakes who know as much about fighting as I know about crochet,
and even if you do find a genuine t'ai chi teacher (i.e. someone who can
actually fight), you still need to study for several years before you can put
what you've learnt into practice.
What we're trying to do in this self-defence course is strip hapkido down to a
core of techniques that will work for fifteen-year-old girls against big strong
guys, and, perhaps more importantly, teach some attitude. Most confrontations
are resolved before they get to the physical stage, and the attitude that
wins the confrontation is something like "OK, I don't know how good you are,
and I don't care-- you might be able to beat me, but even if you do, it's going
to hurt you bad." ("Hurt you bad"? -- my English is getting really
Americanised!)
Well, we'll see how it goes, but at the moment I am feeling that comfortable
sense of moral rectitude that comes from thinking you've done "the right thing".
This means that tonight I can forget planning my English courses and drink as
much raki as I want with a clear conscience, heh heh.
and encouraged about a dozen of them to sign up for a self-defence course we're
going to run. OK, I now have a bruised foot from falling badly, but what the
hell. The problem with performances is that your sense of timing gets speeded
up, so that Philip was throwing us at one-and-a-half times normal speed (I
not?ced the same thing when I used to play in a band -- we'd do a concert
thinking we were playing normally, then we'd listen to the tape and find
everything was speeded up to a ridiculous extent).
I'm really excited about the self-defence course. A problem I have with martial
arts is that it generally attracts the kind of people who don't actually need it
that much, or that those who do need it get scared and give up. I know
in films like Karate Kid you get a sickly kid who
meets a martial arts master and learns to defend him/herself, but in reality the
kind of wimps who really need self-defence training (and I include myself here,
or at least myself as I was twenty years ago) either don't have the confidence
to go to a martial arts school, or get hurt and give up. Of course there are
the internal or "soft" martial arts like t'ai chi (which is my main area of
expertise), but there you have a different problem: most people teaching t'ai
chi are New Age flakes who know as much about fighting as I know about crochet,
and even if you do find a genuine t'ai chi teacher (i.e. someone who can
actually fight), you still need to study for several years before you can put
what you've learnt into practice.
What we're trying to do in this self-defence course is strip hapkido down to a
core of techniques that will work for fifteen-year-old girls against big strong
guys, and, perhaps more importantly, teach some attitude. Most confrontations
are resolved before they get to the physical stage, and the attitude that
wins the confrontation is something like "OK, I don't know how good you are,
and I don't care-- you might be able to beat me, but even if you do, it's going
to hurt you bad." ("Hurt you bad"? -- my English is getting really
Americanised!)
Well, we'll see how it goes, but at the moment I am feeling that comfortable
sense of moral rectitude that comes from thinking you've done "the right thing".
This means that tonight I can forget planning my English courses and drink as
much raki as I want with a clear conscience, heh heh.
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no subject
Date: 2001-10-05 09:39 pm (UTC)At least you're still learnting things.