Wen Hsiu Quan

Weird as this may sound these days- Judo was the not only the first martial art that I took up, but it was also the first "soft" martial art that I have learnt. With the standards of competitive grappling having gotten really high we hardly see anything that appears to be soft in Judo these days. Then I won't even mention anything about the Founder's maxim of minimum effort, maximum effect. Judo nowadays seems to be about: I was happy to learn my first throws and found that some worked even on people that were bigger than I was at the time. Still- I have found that I easily got toppled sometimes by a completely untrained person. Well... as you all know by now I have found the bugs, fixed it and wrote a book about it... The first major bug-fix came from Karate. And- it was not even Japanese Karate, but an Okinawan-based style, Shukokai (a style that was derived from Shito Ryu). Karate taught me the value of a good stance. Now... the stances that...

Hello, everyone. How are things in your country? Is your dojo open? Are you training at home? If you are a student living in a country under lockdown like ours, I am sure you have a lot that you can do. The number of things that you can practice at home is virtually unlimited with online classes and instructional videos abounding. I am also sure that if you are studying an art like Karate you have enough forms to practice anyway. Plus- many of those exercises that you normally have to do in the dojo can be done at home. If you are a teacher, however, you may feel derailed now. You had this or that competition lined up for the next month, maybe a grading around the corner... Now those plans have been derailed, right? So- what is left to do? Well... How about teaching martial arts? :) But- you may ask in disbelief- what have we been doing all this time? Sure- you have been teaching martial arts. Most likely it was the syl...