Van Canna wrote:Marcus is a full contact fighter with considerable experience under his belt…and now a skilled Uechi student.
Hi Van thanks for the kind comments, please if you post this on the forums pass my best to Jim Prouty good to see him around.
My best, as always Marcus. My distant clansman!

Here is a quote from one of my students that is a traditionalist karate-ka having trained with me for over 20 years; he received his shodan while in Okinawa at the Jundokan and a few years later when assigned there again by the USMAC received Shodan grades by Seikichi Odo and has since branched off training BJJ with Saulo Riberio in VA. He trains Judo w/ my Sensei Noriyasu Kudo when in the New England Area which is every other month.
He teaches daily for several hours teaching the USMC MCMAP program and again teaches each night on base at Camp Lejeune. His fights now are more in the NAGA events rather than MMA fights.
Darrick: What does a typical training session for you consist of?
Phillip: One and a half hours of cardio and abs in the morning - then three and a half hours of kickboxing, grappling, and MMA in the evening. I train five to six days a week.
Source:
http://www.mma-id.com/DarrickPatrick/?mod=blog&uid=5647&blid=895That being said, one can see what that there are different ways to train for both cardio and strength.
On the other hand, back at the dojo Jay, who has a degree in Physical Education (He's just a gym teacher

as we call him) for adaptive PE have assisted me in developing plyometric exercises somewhat like the following:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adnxy7sfQhY&feature=player_embeddedBelieve me, besides cardio, it really works the student's legs etc. that allows for quicker muscle reactions. ( I will leave the deep explanation to Bill for this.) If you do not have the plastic step up platforms, I often have one student kneel like a turtle position and they kick 2 mae geri and jump over the guy on the ground twisting the body to face back towards where he came from; then 2 two kicks over the guy's body and back. The guy in the turtle position gets up and then its their turn.
But, I digress from the original question of seniority. I agree with many of the posts thus far discussing an instructor's ability to stay in shape. Yet there are several good instructor's that have been injured throughout the years and cannot perform as well as before due to various health problems. A friend, due to a degenerative nerve problem is now in a wheel chair put continues to teach a few days a week. Despite his inability to demonstrate he has some excellent students because he knew what was going to happen to him and focused a lot on his senior students making them teachers rather than just black belts that know a curriculum. Chinen a long-time diabetic over looked the doju kun that also says "Take Care of Your Health" but remains a world class instructor. See article on my linked in docs- this is the link to peruse the info:
https://www.box.net/shared/joc2l005in8o751jsqceI believe that it was from Peter Urban's book "The Karate Dojo" wherein he wrote: "Young masters are respected but the old masters are venerated".
http://youtu.be/Gd1bCPCbB_A Shugoro Nakazato, Katsuya Miyaharo, and Yuchoku Higa all had the same teacher (Choshin Chibana) yet formed different associations. Would one deny their seniority because of their age? Or question their knowledge of kata and its applications due to their infirmities? Yes, the number of arrogant statements of today's students that I have deleted over the years from this video and several similar videos commenting and deriding these teachers are but one example of karate-ka of today misunderstanding of ''seniority'' and the term ''Shihan or Hanshi'' because of the watering down of many different karate dojo that have the 25 year old "Shihan" running them.
More later, Yoroshiko, JP