Chicken coops plans

I have tried, in many of my articles on this web site, to reset your expectations about martial arts training. I think that one of the reasons that so many people join Karate clubs and schools only to quit a few weeks later is because they expect A but they get B. If we set our expectations accordingly, we are less likely to be surprised and disappointed with what we experience, and we make a more informed decision about whether or not to take up lessons.

There are many reasons that people take up karate lessons, some of which I have discussed in other articles. Some articles cover why those reasons might not be the right reasons for you. Many people doing Shotokan today will disagree with me strongly for zeroing in on the negative aspects of taking up Karate. For more than ten years they have been howling with protest that I am doing a disservice to the very concept of Karate as an art. Some say that I am disrespectful of “the Shotokan Community.” A few chuckleheads have even tried to invoke Buddhist ancestor worship and have claimed that I am smearing “The Legacy of the Masters.” Let them gripe and complain. People who are heavily invested financially in selling Karate lessons and supplies, and people who are emotionally invested in receiving their self-esteem from their sense of being an authentic Karate expert want people like me to only say and write very positive and uplifting things about Karate.

I think that it’s fine to stay positive. Focusing on only the negative aspects of something like Karate can ruin it as a hobby for just about anyone, including me. We should acknowledge the good things and talk about how we enjoy them. But I prefer not to be dishonestly positive to the point that I am basically spreading my own rationalizations and denial. I am not going to spread only promotional and marketing materials about Karate. Good lord, we have enough of that already. I don’t mind contributing my honest opinions about the things that are good about training Karate, but let’s not white-wash the bad and pretend it isn’t there in the name of encouraging people to sign up for lessons. Let’s be honest and tell it like it is.

I probably shouldn’t worry about people who read my articles and accuse me of obsessing over the negative aspects and ignoring the good. Those kinds of comments usually come from the people who aren’t even interested in what I write unless it gives them a thrill by making them upset. They just ignore the positive and uplifting things and focus in on what they are interested in: the entertaining off-beat articles that irritate or offend them. And, statistically speaking, these volunteer advocates and lobbyists are unlikely to be doing Shotokan next year, so their complaints do not really concern me very much as long as they don’t take up space where more articulate and reasonable people might present their thoughtful remarks.

I think that my comments, when weighed against the marketing material you read in books, see on television, watch at the movies, and hear from a typical sycophant of Karate, Inc., will help contribute to you to make a more informed, intelligent decision about what you are doing. Any decision that is easy to make is an uninformed decision, so I hope I have made the water more muddy and stopped you from just leaping right in without testing the water. A good decision usually comes after much wrestling with both sides of an issue, not from getting excited and jumping impulsively at the first opportunity.

Following are pros and cons of taking up Shotokan. Rather than simply present a theoretical set of benefits and negative impacts, I thought that I should share with you my actual experience. I have been involved in Shotokan almost all of my life. Interested in what the view is like once you have trained for a couple of decades, traveled to Japan, and passed tests for multiple dan ranks? Here’s how I feel about my experience.

* I enjoyed the competitive nature of free sparring. Competing against and defeating your friends in matches is the height of individual sport. You don’t just get a victory, you cause a personal defeat. When I beat some jerk in a tournament, it was a high that no drug could possibly provide.

* I liked having the ability to do Karate techniques. Yes, I admit it. It is neat to be able to perform a round kick to someone’s jaw, tap them, and snap my foot back faster than they can say “Damn!”

* I was able to take advantage of the Shotokan method and defend myself with it on several occasions.

* It’s fun to be able to whip out any of the old kata and perform them for personal satisfaction or crowd pleasing. Performing a kata in a tournament or in public to the ooos and aahhs of an audience is nice.

* Shotokan has kept me from getting overly fat although as I have aged and my technique has relaxed, karate provides less and less exercise benefit, it seems, even though it still makes me just as exhausted.

* I’ve met a lot of great people that I am proud to know and call friends.

* I’ve helped some abused women by directing them to the proper organizations and away from me and my karate school.

* I lived in Japan for two years, thanks to my interest in Shotokan

See? I did enjoy my Karate experience, and I still do. These days, if I don’t enjoy Karate training, it’s my own fault, because I do whatever I want to. If I feel like training in my underwear on the wooden floor in our den while watching TV, then that’s what I do. If I feel like lifting weights and then hitting a heavy bag at the gym, that’s what I do. If I want to do Kata in my basement, I do that too. I’m responsible for my own experience, so I enjoy it thoroughly.

But that doesn’t mean I always enjoyed every experience I had while taking Karate in every situation I was in. Sometimes I stayed in a bad situation because I felt I had to in order to get skills I wanted too much, and sometimes I caught on pretty quick and took immediate action to lessen my suffering.

* Karate tournaments are pretty boring to me, and they are expensive. You spend 3 hours waiting around getting stiff for every minute you compete. The victories are few and far between. It’s frustrating to be a nervous wreck for three days, and then get into a ring and end up ousted from the tournament in under 30 seconds.

* I still can’t beat up Mike Tyson, and I’m still afraid of big, muscular, mean looking people who look like they do not have anything to lose in a lawsuit. I have a good job, a house, 2 kids, and a pretty wife. I cannot afford to go to jail for a few nights and lose a civil lawsuit over a broken nose. The chances that I will hit you are pretty low. I would have to feel pretty threatened before I would become violent, so the skills mostly go to waste in terms of practical self-defense.

* Typical start and stop Shotokan Karate training isn’t that great for your health. I still have to lift weights and jog on the side in order to stay in shape. When I drop the other activities, I start putting on the pounds unless I train two hours a day every day. Karate just isn’t aerobic enough, at least not the way I do it.

* I’ve met some annoying would-be-televangelists-for-Shotokan that have made me regret our nation’s freedom of speech more than a few times.

*I have had to learn to defend myself against people who mistake me for someone who wants to learn from them.

* All of my personality perfection, of which there is obviously not much, has been due to my heeding my wife’s criticism and taking determined action to work on my weaknesses. Karate did nothing for my character. In fact, I think some of the training I received and some of the people I was around had a negative impact on me.

* The damn children! And even worse: Their parents! Arrrggghhh!!!! Parents seem to be of two extremes: either they are over-protective and try to bully everyone around them into giving their child some unfair and undeserved advantage, or they ignore their children and let them hang out at a karate club with roaches running across the floor. I weep for the future.

* I have had to tell students to go home and bathe, wash their uniforms, brush their teeth, and not drink milk during practice.

Shotokan has been good for me and bad for me. It has taught me how to do things and how not to do things by painful example. I’ve learned many lessons, some of them at the feet of fools who taught me things they did not intend to teach me.

And I think that is a good thing. I have learned in life that there are sometimes no finer instructors than the people who’s lives basically serve as an example of how not to do something. Like a teenager mumbles to himself about how he will never mistreat his children the way his abusive father treated him, I have had so many fine examples of human failure and inadequacy to flip around and turn into personal growth goals that I will never achieve half of the many things I aspire to be.

And I have also learned that sometimes, not always, but sometimes, I was wrong in thinking I could do things better or differently, and I found out later that the reason some of my teachers had particular habits wasn’t because they were jerks, it was because they had learned the hard way that an instructor needs to protect himself from his Karate dojo taking over his life and not get over involved in the melodrama of students.

The most important thing I have learned is this: Martial arts training can be fun if approached as a physical activity that I am realistic about. The minute I start hoping for super powers, Zen mastery, the Spirit of Japan, or osmosis of personal excellence, I put a flashing sign on my forehead that reads “Sucker.”

Volvptates commendat rarior vsvs. (In all things moderation)