The Power of Youtube

If you really enjoy a sport and this concept is new to me since I only started getting fit seven months ago, but regardless, it's fantastic to watch 'The Best'. In life, if you are serious about doing anything well, then get yourself as close as you can to the very best people. You may not become as good as them, but they will drag you someway closer to their level. In my case, being a middle aged, late comer to the sport of karate with only modest talent, 'The Best' will avoid me like the plague. Fair play to them, they have better uses for their time. Enter Youtube. With Youtube 'The Best' are in my kitchen with me where I can watch them, pause them, serve dinner to the kids and then watch them again. Possibly better than the real thing and undoubtedly less resentful. Now there's always a lot of rubbish on Youtube and regardless of your starting search title, after you've watched the first clip, the suggested follow on clips inevitably contain porn. If you wish to avoid this and a lot of other rubbish clips, I would suggest sticking to the WKF videos at least initially and then follow up a certain person of interest as required. It's great for kata - for example, our Sensei demonstrated the kata Annan the other day - we spent a full hour on it - one hour later at home I could remember exactly three moves in sequence and ten that definitely occurred somewhere in the kata and the other minute was a blank. If you have one of those Sensei who has a box set of DVDs and a fantastic website with video clips in your exact style - congratulations. Mine has an unforgiving sense of altruism and refuses to profit, or even generate anything that might be looked upon as money making. So I trawl Youtube for 'The Best' to do it in something near to his style, so that I can at least look like I know the moves for the next class. There's a lot of bad, no terrible, kata out there, so WKF is a reasonable starting point. As for kumite - it's great. You can memorize a sequence and try it out next session.

http://www.youtube.com/user/WKFKarateWorldChamps