Kimuras, Crucifixes, 300 Kms
Quite a few hours of training and a lot of travelling with John Will last Saturday with only a very short moment, between destinations, for a cup of coffee.
Imagine working in an office or any other job where everything becomes routine and nothing new happens. Your mind switches off and and that’s when you start to feel bored. The great thing about the martial arts is about mind stimulation ie gets it thinking again. John Will injected a little more stimulation into my mind when I was half way through this blog. If the martial arts were just simple and routine then the same boredom can creep in. Checkers is far easier to learn than Chess but it’s the Chess people who we give credit to because of the complexity of the game. It’s the same in martial arts – we need complexity otherwise it can become boring like playing checkers. The self defence component of the martial arts is only a small integral part of our training but what keeps us there is the exploration and acquisition of new techniques and skills.
The seminar at our school was truly remarkable with a couple of guest Black Belts, Sean Kirkwood and Simon Farnsworth, also attending. It is not only the new techniques and ideas that made it a great seminar but also the approach and understanding of them. John Will's motivational talks gives us reasons why we love to train the martial arts. Many thanks to the students that came along for the support and share my passion for the martial arts. Although, they may not remember all the techniques in their entirety but there was so much they learnt ie the little steps in between the start and end of each technique. It was also great revisiting some of the basic moves because it was like re-igniting the flame. No excuse in the world will patch things up for missing out on a seminar because the exact presentation can never be repeated. When John and Richard Norton put these things on, they are injecting over 20 years of their experience into these seminars.
To turn some of our students' faces red, Darren Grieve, our Qld Head Instructor, had come down for the weekend to train with John Will. On Friday night we trained at the PCYC and Darren was spellbound with some of the variations. But that’s what happens in BJJ – where things seem to constantly evolve. Credit must go to Darren for flying down here for the seminar. I guess not everybody can be like him.
GA