Martial Arts ..

I do Brazilian JIu Jitsu and Muy Thai kickboxing.

Love them both.

I would never trade them for Zumba.

I'd rather take up pole dancing.

Muay thai here and I really enjoy it, haven't been going long. I love how during my class I forget about everyday issues and hassles as I am so focused on what I am doing. Awesome workout. there is a martial arts group here on MFP, feel free to join !

I started martial arts a 9 years old. im now 33. this is my story:

Started doing a WTF (no not what the f..., world tkd federation, which is what they do in the olympics) and did it for 2 years and got to 5th Gup (half way to black). Then we moved and i took up an ITF (international tkd federation) style, which was a bit more traditional and (so i thought at the time) more self defence based. I got to 1st Dan in that style but left over a series of disagreements with my instructor, the main ones being that after 5 years at 1st Dan, there seemed to be no intention of grading me to 2nd Dan, some of the people achieving 1st Dan were not good enough IMO, and he was letting them teach before me.

so i quit, and did nothing again for 4 years (worst decision ever). I then took up Shotokan karate and learnt that what i thought was self defence based before, reallywouldnt have done a lot for me in the real world due to the way they trained it (learn all the self defence techniques, but trained with no realism). i got to 1st kyu in shotokan, which is 1 under black belt. At the same time i too up ICHF Combat Hapkido and got to 6th gup in that. ICHF is Hapkido with all the flashiness taken out of it to make it a more street defence style. Once again, i thought the street value of what i was doing was great.

My instructor (for both shotokan and hapkido, he has BB's in multiple styles) started looking at a style called Koryu Uchinadi Kenpo Jutsu (ancient okinawan karate). 2 years later he stopped teaching shotokan and hapkido and started teaching this (after getting his yudansha, which is a black belt but not quite shodan). No for me, this is a real self defence style. It teaches more on principles than specific techniques. Its main focus is Habitual Acts of Physical Violence. ie, learn to defend yourself from the more common attacks, not the super attacks that only other martial artists will do. Also, rather than teaching 'this is a defence against a punch' it teaches defence against straight attacks. ie a punch and a push are the same thing, so you can defend the same way etc. We also train realisitically. Learn the techniques, then train with resistance.

the other thing i like about it is it teaches ALL ranges. ground, stand up grappling, in close striking (elbows, knees etc), punching range, kicking range and weapons range. Majority is taught in 2 person flow drills, so you can get a lot of repitition of a lot of techniques done in a short time. this is good because the sylabus is huge.

for an idea of what it is about there is a video on martialartsadelaide.com (im the larger guy in the video, and this video is the reason i decided to lose weight)

sorry for the long post. but i could go on forever about martial arts. i didnt even go into the seminars and training days i have attended.