Judo and Karate

My Brother-in-Law is a judo competitor, in fact he's qualified to fight in this year's British national championships, which is one heck of an achievement. We were recently "talking shop" (as you do!) and he loaned me a book on strangle technique (shimewaza).

I commented how the number of photos look very much like Karate postures taken direct from katas (not advanced ones either, I'm thinking pinans/heians here). He replied that "anyone with a knowledge of Okinawan Karate would find most of those techniques familiar".

Interesting stuff!

And since my art of choice is wado ryu - a combination of Okinawan Karate and Japanese (old school) Jujutsu then there must be certainly some common threads. Indeed, a UK kata bunkai exponent, Iain Abernethy has teamed up with some Judo guys and they are doing seminars on kata bunkai with an element of Judo too.

I really must check out one of those seminars!

So, if you're interested in the bunkai side of things I recommend getting hold of some Judo books or even take lessons. I'll have a look on Youtube for some suitable Judo clips that might help. Watch this space!

Snake Style!

We were discussing the various animal styles of martial arts after training tonight. We've been doing Chinto kata, which is snake and crane form. I've posted some Crane stuff in the past, so here's some Snake Style!

In the following clip, note the technique at 3:24 - we have exactly the same movement as an interpretation from the first group of movements in Passai kata...



I love this Old Skool stuff too! The old Hong Kong Chop Socky movies -

We did it!

Yay! The Keswick to Barrow walk is over for another year. The weather conditions were atrocious - we had 40 miles of cold winds, torrential rain and hail storms! But we made it to the end.

Here we go!

It's the big day tomorrow.... 40 miles and counting....

I have some articles to get posted up on the blog too, as soon as I get some free time.