Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Originally it was not at all clear that I'd be able to attend the seminars but in the end, all worked out, and I got to spend Wednesday evening at the Mohawk YMCA doing two seminars with Mark Shuey of Cane Masters. He's done two sets of seminars for us in the past (once in 2002, and then again in 2003.) I like working with the cane, and I was pretty sure I'd enjoy this evening.
Grand Master Mark Shuey Sr.
Got to the Mohawk YMCA with a little time to spare and hung out waiting for things to begin. After a while we lined up and Grand Master Crandall introduced Grand Master Shuey, who then tried to give us some background on his system and discovered that the acoustics in the Mohawk YMCA gym are terrible. So we reorganized in a circle around him and he spent a few minutes talking about some of the aspects of using the cane for self defense. From there we spread out and worked on swinging our canes, including some twirls, flips, and figure-8's. I'm fairly rusty, but much of it came back pretty quickly. It was both funny and a little nerve wracking to hear canes clattering on the floor around the room as people dropped them. Funny because I've been there, many times - and nerve wracking because in some cases they were whipping through the air when dropped, so there was always the possibility of projectile canes!
After that we spent the remaining time working on self-defense techniques with a partner. I was fortunate to pair up with Senior Instructor Eric Stalloch, who works extensively with the cane and is very, very good. We covered 4 or 5 techniques in the remaining time - nothing too different from what we had done at the previous seminars (we did do one technique that resulted in putting a fairly viscious arm lock on the attacker - very cool!) The first seminar wrapped up with a brief discussion of using exercise bands to strength train with the cane.
self-defense training
Following a short break we jumped into the 2nd, black-belts-only, seminar. Much of this seminar was spent going through the Natural Walk Cane Kata developed by Grand Master Crandall and Eric Stalloch for AMAI. It was nice to finally get a chance to start learning that kata - the one time we were able to get Eric down to Albany to teach a cane class, I ended up loaning my cane to a student so he could take the class instead of me. We managed to get through the whole thing and then spent a few minutes "working on our own" (ie. demonstrating just how little I could remember.) The 2nd seminar wrapped up with Grand Master Shuey taking us through some exercises using our canes and the exercise bands. It seems like a very useful and effective method to strength train, and I'm going to try to do some each week as part of my goal to add strength training to my workouts.
kata training
strength training
Overall, the seminars were decent. Both Grand Master Shuey and Eric did a great job teaching - I just wish the seminars could have been structured better to help retention of the information they were sharing. The attempt to teach us the cane kata in the 2nd seminar seemed very rushed, and I can't say I remember all that much of it (and I have a reasonably good memory for katas.) Grand Master Shuey's presentation in the 2nd seminar also seemed rather rushed. The first seminar had the opposite problem - it seemed like we spent a lot of time on each technique during the first seminar; personally I would have liked to have spent less time and done more. Perhaps we needed two groups - one for more experienced cane-users and another for beginners?
All in all, I think it was an evening well spent, despite the parts that could have been better. Hopefully we can get Eric down to Albany sometime in the not to distant future to teach a cane class, and I would gladly take another seminar with Grand Master Shuey.
JMH
(photo of Grand Master Shuey courtesy of http://www.canemasters.com/; seminar photos courtesy of www.amai-eaglestyle.com )
