The A.M.A recently held its 5th annual charity multi-style martial art Seminar, with this year’s good cause being the Derbyshire Cave Rescue.
Each year this event just keeps growing with even more styles on show taken from many Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Filipino forms, bringing together the finest of martial artists in the regional for a very worthy cause and raising much needed funds for local charities.
This year’s event was once again held at the Leeds Metropolitan University state of the art Sports Centre Carnegie in Headingley Leeds, which is going to be hosting two Olympics teams during the 2012 Olympics.
This year seminar boasted eleven different styles on show, so there was plenty of choice for students and instructors alike. The seminar ran on a carousel system with students moving to a new mat area every 35 minutes.
Learning from masters such as Mick Padgett for Shotocan Karate, a true gentleman of the martial art world, a man with great presence and grace on and off the mats showing us some very smooth punching and kicking techniques as well as the use of Kata.
Then we moved mats to an old favourite of mine from these seminars, Sifu Andy Norman of Praying Mantis a very large imposing man with a broad Yorkshire accent, who’s heart and soul is that of a pure Chinese martial artist. Andy showed us endless defences which were followed with a surprise string of a pressure point strikes which definitely kept our attention! Andy also did a second teaching session in the afternoon showing double dagger techniques. My favourite was where from an attack he blocked the dagger with his left hand cutting open the wrist of his attacker, and at the same time striking with his other dagger cutting open the throat of his would be attacker {definitely not a technique for the faint hearted!}
Next we had the pleasure of be taught traditional Ju-Jitsu by Sensei Dawn Gardener from Leigh in Wigan, a lady whose techniques were highly practical and free flowing, whether in defence and attack or from throws to take downs, all of which looked amazing to bystanders as sensei Dawn, who isn’t the tallest of people, dropped some extremely large gentlemen with the greatest of ease to everyone’s entertainment.
There was also the highly entertaining Terry Rooke from Hartlepool teaching Shurite Jitsu, a style I have never come across before, which is a cross between Karate and Ju-Jitsu which apparently has been around for several hundreds years. This style that uses more punching and kicking than normal Ju-Jitsu, but still uses all its throws and locks and an element of Jeet Kune Do with all its sticky hand movements – a style I totally enjoyed and will look deeper in to in to the future.
We also had Reg Jones of Leeds Freestyle Kickboxing and his team of able assistants consisting of Andrea Jutrzenka and Edward Irish. Andrea and Ed helped demonstrate various punching and kicking techniques to each group starting with an initial warm up involving stretching, before pairing the groups up for a hard workout on pads making it a most enjoyable and physical work outs. When it came to the children’s group, he put them in to two teams keeping the children highly entertained with many different combinations of hand and foot work against pads, later making it in to a competition which the children thoroughly enjoyed.
Then we moved on to Escrima with Dave Whitley and his son from Beverly near Hull, a true master of this Filipino form, showing many single and double stick techniques as well knife work and teaching us that there is so much more than just the stick side to Escrima which most people associate it with; this made it much more interesting for me.
Afterwards we moved over to Ian Reynolds from Taekwondo in Leeds, who totally impressed us with some brilliant flying kicks and some excellent punching and kicking exercises. He also put across a philosophy and strategy for fighting which I was greatly impressed with and found it refreshing for someone to be open with these views.
Next was Judo with Clive Greenhouse from York teaching us not just the basics of Judo but keeping us all highly entertained with many kids games on the mats such as Bull Dogs etc. I much admit, this was a nice break and was something I really enjoyed; it also which went down really well will all the other adults.
We had Sensei’s Peter Beaumount and Matthew McHale from Tai Jutsu in Leeds teaching us an array of ground fighting techniques from competition ones to out and out mean street ones, which I much admit appealed more to my evil side, but all were highly enjoyable and effective.
Finally we were meant to have our Okinowan Kobudo session, but our instructor unfortunately let us down at the last minute, so our replacement turned out to be the organizer of the seminar Sensei Sean McHale of Tai Jutsu Leeds who turned out to be true master of Kobudo.
Sensei Sean gave us a choice of what weapons we wanted to learn and the majority asked to learn the Yawara Bo (Kubotan) – who would have thought a six inch piece of wood which looks like a cricket bail ,could give so much pain (and I have the bruises to prove it)! After ten minutes and six Yawara Bo techniques later, Sean took pity on us and asked for our next choice of weapon.
The majority once again spoke and went for the safety of the Bo staff, after all what harm could a brush handle do? WRONG! Have they never seen Monkey? Sean apparently has. His first technique was to duck under a punch and hit the ribs with the end of the Bo staff, then with the same movement swept the closest leg away , a brilliant technique, there where bodies everywhere! After several more Bo techniques and with time running out Sean asked us for our final choice of weapon and for one brief moment it fell silent, feeling like we were playing Russian roulette, where our next move may kill us, but then some one from the back shouts “Nunchakus.”
Let just say no more about the pain!
But on a more serious note, for all the discomfort of the techniques, he was an excellent teacher and a really nice guy who I would most certainly train with again. But I still wouldn’t like to meet him in a dark alley.
As we did our cool down it crossed my mind that I never realised how much hard work and preparation it most have taken to it make it such a excellent day for us all, and it was really refreshing to see not just the students enjoying themselves but our instructors also.
A highly successful day and thank you to everyone involved. I look forward to next year’s seminar, which is in August for Help For Heroes.