C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

C.S. sits on his zafu before a training session. 1 - The Journey Begins When I was a teenager, I had one great love: martial arts.  To be more specific, I suppose, would be to write that my great love was traditional Okinawan Karate-Do, which I had trained in since I was 9 years old.     I was a small kid, tiny you might even say, compared to the size of my fellow 4th-grade classmates.  For whatever reason - and perhaps schools still do this, much to the embarrassment of small boys - my 4th grade teacher would often line up the entire class against the wall of the classroom, boys and girls alike, from shortest to tallest.  I was always the shortest.  Add in the fact that, in addition to my smallness, I was something of an introvert, often bullied, and so my parents thought that martial arts might be a good way to build my self-esteem, not to mention keep me from getting pummeled on the elementary school playgrounds. ...

Can One Be Both a Martial Artist and a Bodybuilder?      Both of my sons have recently taken more of an interest in martial arts—or, perhaps, I should say, just "fighting" in general.  My oldest son, Matthew, who writes regularly enough here, has gotten pretty serious about his martial arts training, with plenty of bag work, sparring, and conditioning, with a fairly high workload to boot.  (If you are going to take anything serious, then your work load should  be high, by the way.  As in the above caption from the great Masutatsu Oyama—one must "train more than one sleeps".  That is Mas Oyama in the picture.)      Yesterday, as we were finishing a sparring session, he remarked, "I just don't think I can do it."  And he seemed rather frustrated when he said it.      "What can't you do?" I asked.  I generally don't like comments that are in the "negative" from my offspring.      "I can't ...