December Talking Meme: Day 8
Dec. 8th, 2020 11:34 pmFrom here, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shadaras asked me to talk about my martial arts experience.
I did Goju-Ryu karate for a period of nine years or so while growing up. Other than math as a function of school, that's the longest period I've spent serious, regular effort on a skill. I got to junior black belt when I was around 13. Quit a few years after that, as a combination of my heavy high school workload and other factors. Classes were like, 90% kids, I wanna say? It was super chill, most of our classes were on the neighborhood basketball court. Like with soccer, coolness and the element of skill made karate an easy favorite. I really liked both kata and sparring. Kata, because memorization comes relatively easy to me, and sparring, because we did not hit very hard at all and so it was a fun game of figuring out how to get a hit off someone, even if they are say, 0.3m taller than you. (I recall an instance where I was told to breathe through the mouth for a kata, and nine-year-old-me very earnestly told Sensei that breathing in through your nose was better for your health...)
For the last year or so that I did karate I also did Kalaripayattu, an Indian martial art. Compared to karate, I found the movements more fluid and the training more strenuous - the kid-adult split was closer to 50-50 here, and so they pushed us more physically. Another difference was the emphasis on falling and rolling safely that we often practiced on mats. Once I progressed a few belts silambam was incorporated in too. That was 80% of the reason I'd even taken up Kalaripayattu in the first place, so I was psyched and really liked that part of training. Still have the staff in my parents' house.
Finally, over a year ago I found somewhere in my current location to do karate again. It's a good place, I liked the training and the people...but I basically dropped off it entirely once they went virtual in March. I don't do Facebook, and even once they started doing Zoom I found myself thoroughly unenthused. I don't really see myself picking it back up until maskless in-person training comes back, and who knows when that'll be. Anki deck's still getting reviewed though.
shadaras asked me to talk about my martial arts experience.I did Goju-Ryu karate for a period of nine years or so while growing up. Other than math as a function of school, that's the longest period I've spent serious, regular effort on a skill. I got to junior black belt when I was around 13. Quit a few years after that, as a combination of my heavy high school workload and other factors. Classes were like, 90% kids, I wanna say? It was super chill, most of our classes were on the neighborhood basketball court. Like with soccer, coolness and the element of skill made karate an easy favorite. I really liked both kata and sparring. Kata, because memorization comes relatively easy to me, and sparring, because we did not hit very hard at all and so it was a fun game of figuring out how to get a hit off someone, even if they are say, 0.3m taller than you. (I recall an instance where I was told to breathe through the mouth for a kata, and nine-year-old-me very earnestly told Sensei that breathing in through your nose was better for your health...)
For the last year or so that I did karate I also did Kalaripayattu, an Indian martial art. Compared to karate, I found the movements more fluid and the training more strenuous - the kid-adult split was closer to 50-50 here, and so they pushed us more physically. Another difference was the emphasis on falling and rolling safely that we often practiced on mats. Once I progressed a few belts silambam was incorporated in too. That was 80% of the reason I'd even taken up Kalaripayattu in the first place, so I was psyched and really liked that part of training. Still have the staff in my parents' house.
Finally, over a year ago I found somewhere in my current location to do karate again. It's a good place, I liked the training and the people...but I basically dropped off it entirely once they went virtual in March. I don't do Facebook, and even once they started doing Zoom I found myself thoroughly unenthused. I don't really see myself picking it back up until maskless in-person training comes back, and who knows when that'll be. Anki deck's still getting reviewed though.