From the phone

Friday night my computer broke. So this blog is frustratingly being typed from my phone. I also cut my thumb and have a bandaid on so my phone typing is slower. Therefore I'm going to keep this one short. Fridays class was a lot of fun, I'm sporting bruises on my forearms and bisep from the elbow block techniques. I felt exceedingly proud to be sporting new bruises, which I find to be kind of hilarious. I like how us martial artists wear bruises like badges of honor.

I watched the UFC fight and was disappointed by just about every fight. I don't really follow UFC very much but when I  do catch a fight they never seem to be all that great. At our table was a friend of a friend, who I don't know all that well, throughout the night he kept throwing out random martial arts advice. Now I  am  95% sure that this guy has no martial arts training at all so I felt a bit awkward sitting there  listening to it. Nothing he said was particularity wrong mind you. He told my one friend that you should punch with your first two knuckles, true enough. He talked about how he does lots of push-ups and the benefits doing them, which again I agree with so I didn't say much. He told my friend that he  owns a punching bag and encouraged him to come over for a bag workout, yeah fine..

Then he  told my friend how  he could teach  him some punches and kicks. At this point I really began to feel  uncomfortable . Having  someone, who I'm pretty sure  knows very little offer to teach my friend while I, a guy with 10 years  of experience , sits there  listening  did not seem appropriate. I don't know if it's justified for me to feel annoyed . Basically I think it bothered me because i felt like this person was  acting like a poser. I don't think this person knows I train and  I never spoke up to say I do.  I felt like if I did it would be only  to stroke my ego and to  say if you  if you are going to listen to anyone you should listen to me. Anyway it was an odd experience.

They talked about wanting to join a place called the Panther Gym in edmonton but that it was too expensive. I don't know anything about panther gym so I had no opinion to give. Then my friend mentioned he was thinking of joining Krav Maga. At that point I couldn't keep quiet anymore and told him that he would be better served joining pretty much anything but Krav. From what I've seen, it's essentially a glorified "self defense system" that teaches you moves to beat other moves. I saw an interview with an instructor who teaches Krav Maga in edmonton. At some point in the interview he said something like, "we only spend our time working on techniques that work" and that they only spend time working on techniques. Then he showed some demonstrations. It only took me about 10 seconds of watching this guy move awkwardly to know he didn't know what he was doing because he had no fundamentals.

I guess I'm kind of ranting here. It just really bugs me how ignorant people are of martial arts in general. How they are so quick to jump onto things MMA related or whatever's being advertised with the most hype. I guess that's why it's so important for us to promote our art.

Sifu Wetter

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