Revised martial arts wishlist

Even though it's still probably a half year away before I could start attending, I'm back to thinking about what martial arts place I want to go to. Back when my brother visited me, we tried checking out this Black Crane style kung fu class, held at the local high school. Unfortunately, the whole thing seems to be defunct: no one there, and the instructor doesn't respond to e-mail or his cell phone. (In hindsight, I guess I should have checked ahead. But I'm so used to reading blogs and doing online commerce that it never occurred to me that a live website might represent an expired entity. Besides: how many people would look up a hardware store (or etc.) in the yellow pages, and then phone ahead ''just to make sure they're still in business''? I wouldn't.)

Anyhow, that's a real shame, as it seemed to fit all of my criteria: reasonably local; a mix of punches, kicks, and joint locks/takedowns/''controlling'' moves; an emphasis on self-defense (rather than tournaments or esoteric ''traditional'' things that don't directly relate to protecting one's self); and a general avoidance of formal ''forms''/kata (I only have a limited amount of class-time and brain-space available: I want to focus on learning effective moves on real people - not memorizing an archival mnemonic).


My remaining three choices seem to be a local ju-jitsu school; a Korean martial arts place (I'd take the hapkido); or a mixed-style martial arts place that's largely derived from Jeet Kune Do and kali/arnis/escrima.

I'll have to look in to the details. From memory, the ''mixed-style'' school may be the priciest -- but they're also in the progress of moving to a larger, closer (to where I live) location.


A new criteria, which I just thought of today, is that I want a style where they do roundhouse kicks (and front snap kicks, for that matter) with the ball of the foot, rather than the top of the foot: sooner or later, you're going to catch something hard with your kick (like a hipbone), and leading with the ball of the foot just, structurally, makes more sense. Something for me to ask, when I sit on the sidelines and observe.


--GG