Guh, I've looked at 5 different martial arts schools around my area and I found:Originally Posted by Bartrim
+ School A: Observed one class, thought it was rubbish. I know someone who's a black belt at that school and he once told me that 70% of what he learns is BS.
+ School B: Can't seem to make up their mind what style of martial art they're teaching. Tried a lesson, wasn't impressed.
+ School C: Claims to teach traditional martial arts, but in reality their training is more focused on MMA. I actually trained with them for over a year as it was the best school I could find in my area... they did have a few self defence classes which were ordinary, but better than nothing. Their fitness training was quite good actually. This school's since closed down.
+ School D: Participated in 2 classes, not impressed. I've talked to 5FDP about this school too. Everything martial arts "do not" that you can think of, they do.
+ School E: A gym-based school. Completely competition focused. Tried a lesson with a friend who's also a martial artist, neither of us were impressed.
So yeah, this is the 6th martial arts school in my area that I've found. There's another school that's a bit further away that I haven't tried yet, but anyway, the reason why I'm currently sticking with this school is:
1: Their style is similar to what I've already done. If I went to this other school, it's a completely different style and I would have to start from scratch. It may also be counter-intuitive to what I've already learnt, i.e. I may have to "unlearn" my previous training in order to learn a completely different style.
2: No annual membership fees, no uniforms, no belts, no grading. Only have to pay for lessons. I'm guessing they don't have to pay for insurance since nobody ever does freakin' contact training! But having said that, their lesson fees are just as (if not a bit more) expensive than other schools that DO have contact training/sparring (although again, they don't have annual membership fees, which is what schools usually collect to pay for their annual insurance).
The actual forms/techniques their learning are traditional and workable, as I've read and heard a lot about it before. The problem is I don't have, from my perspective, a good teacher in terms of someone who can teach me how to USE the techniques in a fight. What I wanna do after I've learnt the forms is to find someone else who's learnt it and show me how to bloody use them!
But you know what's interesting... because most of the students at the school don't care about using their forms, I find most of them are really sloppy (even the teacher sometimes) and just not as well coordinated as myself and one other student who have done other martial arts before (there's another guy there who has a black belt in Karate and practised it for 20 years). Both myself and this other guy tend to pick things up faster and are able to "predict" how the forms should go. Just last week we were learning a form and the senior student who was teaching us veered off on a weird 45 degree angle off course, and didn't realise he'd done so until much later on when he realised he was facing in the completely wrong direction. Both the Karate guy and I knew what had happened. The head instructor came along to 'troubleshoot' and she had trouble figuring out what happened. The Karate guy spoke up and said that this appears to be a linear form and that several steps back we'd veered off.
Several times before I've recommended that people should use linear reference points (e.g. line on the ground, relation to the walls etc.) as visual guides to their movements during the forms. I mentioned this again, but was duly ignored. (-_-) Although the teacher can see that I'm picking the form up quite well and last week told me that if I keep progressing this way I could become her "star student" and now she's keen to push me along to collect them all! But I'm not interested in collecting forms for collecting's sake... I want to be able to use them.
Anyway, I'm going to decline her offer to learn the weapons forms for now and just focus on learning the unarmed forms... practise it until I'm confident, then find someone to teach me the apps. Then after that, I might consider learning weapons. Cos learning weapons forms is just something you do for fun, it's not gonna be condusive to self defence. And it's more expensive cos you gotta buy the weapons! (and then I might need to acquire permits etc., I once put myself down as a reference when this Karate instructor I knew was applying for a permit for Karate weapons). Getting the Megatron permit was a pain in the rear enough as it was.
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