Category Archives: Andy’s Martial Arts

Turning the Page Last December, shortly after earning my second degree black belt, I decided to stop formal training at my dojang. There were a number of reasons for this, an important one being a strong belief that there was nothing substantial left to learn there, either physically or intellectually. It was time to tryContinue reading “Beginning Muay Thai”

Last week, two days before Thanksgiving, I tested for my second degree black belt.  The test lasted two hours and was as physically intense as I expected it to be.  What I didn’t expect was how mentally taxing it would end up being and what I would discover in myself at the end. The finalContinue reading “Extreme Commitment”

This week I’m going to be testing for my second degree black belt (the rank of “ee dan” in Korean) and I feel compelled to create a post, if only to remind myself of how I’ve trained, what I’ve learned, and how I’ve changed since earning my first degree in February of 2019.  As IContinue reading “On the Eve of Ee Dan”

I’m well into my third year of doing regular strength training in addition to training martial arts and this is probably the longest that I’ve ever stayed with any sort of strength training routine. I played around with strength training when I was in college, mostly during the summer when my schedule was more relaxed.Continue reading “Training for Life”

Recently, while working to break a bad habit I’d identified in my execution of a very basic technique, I became aware of another stranger, and more subtle, bad habit. I blink. And I blink at weird times. While reviewing a video of myself, I noticed that I was targeting my Choi front kick much tooContinue reading “The Blinkin’ Kick”

Since my earliest days of learning the Il Dan Blue pattern, I’ve had a hard time convincing myself that the right (left) foot should finish in the same place as it started when performing the pattern’s right (left) side. I would always finish close to where I started, but always sufficiently far away to leaveContinue reading “A Mathematical Treatment of Foot Placement in the Il Dan Blue Pattern”

It’s been about nine months since I acquired my Century Martial Arts Versys VS.1 free-standing training bag and I thought a short review might be helpful to someone who might stumble onto this blog. TL; DR I like this bag a lot but it is definitely a compromise. Construction The bag is very well builtContinue reading “Review of Century VS.1 Bag”

The il dan blue pattern has been my most challenging pattern to date and given the COVID restrictions on  training and testing in the dojang (imposed both by the health department and myself), I’ve had more than the normal time between tests to work on this one. The pattern goes like this.  Begin in aContinue reading “Il Dan Blue Pattern”

I’ve long been fascinated by people who deliver flawless performances requiring complicated skills and that are executed with seeming effortlessness.  I’m thinking of people like John Baptiste whose hands wander almost absent-mindedly over the piano keys and unleash the most beautiful, improvised music. Or Danny MacAskill riding his mountain bike with such amazing grace andContinue reading “Until I Never Get It Wrong”

For a while now I’ve been thinking about creating a post centered on each of our style’s patterns (kata).  This desire has been growing steadily over the past few “COVID months” as I’ve been spending so much time training alone in the basement dojang; training in a deliberate and conscious manner, trying to identify weaknesses,Continue reading “Musings on the White-Senior Pattern”