My Journey on the road of Martial Arts

here’s my blind breaking - I had my eyes closed while the holders set up so I didn’t know what I’d be doing. I was just told I had to use one hand technique and also had to break all five in succession without stopping.

The part where I went uhhhhhh was because I was going to do a spinning hook kick but the holder had the board too low and I didn’t know if I could make him raise it, so I just did a roundhouse kick instead.

My sensei was talking to the class after jujitsu tonight and he mentioned something I feel not many young, competitive martial artists realize.

We had been rolling for the first time in about a month, and we had a specific goal, either to sweep someone or to get to a dominant position, depending on which person we were. WInner stayed in so it was basically my sensei staying in the whole time

At the end, he said, “This is not real life. This is the Dojo. The dojo is where you come to lose. This is where you can get rid of all the losing. If you have a stack of hay you can either surf through the stack and hope to find the needle, or you can grab a handfull of hay, and throw it away until you just have the needle. That’s what the dojo is for, losing.”  

I want to hear about your experiences and feelings of training martial arts only once or so a week. It’s still better than nothing, right? Right. 

(per previous dramatic post, update: I feel it is financially possible to continue training during this season.) The problem though is that with the physical demand of my job and varying levels of introversion and social anxiety (say that three times quickly), the best I can manage is one night of jiujitsu a week. Maybe two. We’ll work towards that. 

I have no problem working out at the gym in the office because it’s in the same building, so I’ll try to do that more than once a week because my body is still getting used to weight training again. But watch out. In a few months, prepare for thiccness. 

So do any of you currently or have in the past been limited to training only once a week? I’d love to read about it. 

Anyone with a name that starts with a “Z”, ends with an “i”, and isn’t some kind of Italian pasta, IS SERIOUS

For a long time, archeologists didn’t know how greek women did their high-piled braids and hair. There was a word that translated to “needle” in the descriptions. They went, “seems like we’ll never know.” Then a hairdresser took a fucking needle (big needle) and did the fucking thing you do with needles, which is sew - and by sewing the braids into place, she replicated ancient styles.

The Egyptians had diagrams of construction steps for their pyramids. Archeologists went “oooh, ancient primitive people, how they do this?” LITERALLY MYTHBUSTERS OR THE OLD DISCOVERY CHANNEL or someone went “what if we did the thing the pictures said they did” AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.

Also that thing with native Americans saying squirrels taught them how to get sap for maple syrup, and colonizers going “that’s a myth sweaty”

Because the sources left by Romans always just said to mix with water. Because, if you were a Roman??? Obviously you knew that you used seawater for cement. Duh. That’s so obvious that they never really bothered specifying that you use seawater to mix it, because it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew that. 

But then the empire fell, other empires rose and fell, time passed, and by the time we were trying to reconstruct the formula the ‘mix the dry ingredients with seawater’ trick had been forgotten, until chemical analysis finally figured it out again. 

It’s sort of like the land of Punt, a ally of Egypt that’s mentioned all the time, but we don’t actually know where it was located. Because it isn’t written down anywhere. Why would they write it down? It’s Punt. Everyone knew where Punt was back then. It’d be ridiculous to waste the ink and space to specify where it was, every child knows about Punt.