Episode 35 - November 19, 2015
November 19, 2015 - Episode 35
sparring-gear-glove
Motivational poster martial arts
Featured Product - whistlekick Sparring Gloves. More comfortable, cut shorter & more durable than the competition. Check them out at our store.Kids Kicking Cancer - remember we've already confirmed with the founder to be on the show. Look for that in the next few weeks.If you haven't already, please check out Monday's episode with Mr. Richard Osborn. We talk a lot about competition and how it's shaped him.Movie pick - Ip Man, available for streaming on Netflix.Lastly, here's the quote and the image I mentioned: Martial Arts is one of the rare pursuits that will give back exactly, and only, what you put in.
Show Transcript
You can read the transcript below or download here.
Jeremy Lesniak:Hello everyone and thanks for tuning in, it's episode 35 of whistlekickMartialArtsRadio. The only traditional martial arts podcast now served up twice a week. I'm your host Jeremy Lesniak and I'm also whistlekick's founder. Here at whistlekick we make the world's best sparring gear and some great apparel and accessories for traditional martial artists. I'd like to welcome new listeners and thank all of you returning fans. Don't forget you can find all of our past podcast episodes show notes for this one and a lot more at whistlekickmartialartsradio.com and while you're on our website go ahead and sign up for our newsletter. We offer exclusive content to subscribers and it's the only place to find out about upcoming guests on the show. Listeners may notice that my voice sounds a little bit different yes, I am sick. Despite 14 hours in bed last night I still feel terribly but I made a commitment to all of you to making sure that this show comes out the second show of the week comes out every Thursday and it is now Wednesday passed the point in time where I really can't push it back anymore so I'm giving you an episode. I hope it comes out okay and if it doesn't then we're going to blame the little bugs floating around inside my body making me feel terribly. I wanna thank everyone for the feedback that they sent in on last week's episode the first we'll call it attempt at a non-interview show. I wasn't terribly happy with it, I thought it could've been better and so I supplied a lot of my own feedback but I actually got a lot better feedback from all of you a lot more positive response than I expected so thank you.Let's jump into it. By now some of you have probably seen the piece we've put out on social media about the organization kids kicking cancer and this just popped out at a random search on google news for martial arts stuff and actually the news article was from Israel and it's an organization it's a nonprofit that has I think 5 locations in the United States for internationally and their purpose is to teach martial arts to children with cancer and that sounds kinda hokey I know but I dug into it a little bit and it's actually a really neat organization at least the way they present themselves, the whole idea is that this group works with kids in a no fee set up, none of these kids ever have to pay for the services and they've got strong ties in the hospitals and if I remember correctly the places they're teaching were actually in hospitals and they're not just teaching kids martial arts but they're teaching some of the stuff that we associate with martial arts that's not directly striking and what not the breathing the meditation stuff like that and this all came from a gentleman who lost his I think 2 year old son to Leukemia back in 99 and so he started this organization he has a black belt in a Korean martial arts not Taekwondo but I'm gonna have the links to all this stuff over on the website and I just like you to check it out and I've already reached out to the organization and they've agreed we're gonna have this gentleman on as a guest because I wanna hear more about his story I wanna hear more about what brought him into doing this. At this point I'm not going to say that I'm donating to this group, I do wanna learn more and I would expect the same of you but my whole 03:35 this is what it claims to be and it's something that I wanna put whistlekick's efforts behind because I don't know about you but I've known some people with cancer, I've known some kids with cancer and there's nothing worse than a sick kid, it shouldn't happen and I think we all know as martial artists the benefits that martial arts can bring to us and if we can help some kids that aren't feeling so great to feel empowered and to make their time with this illness easier then I think we all should do what we can to make that happen but like I said I'm gonna have that guy on, this gentleman who founded the organization. You will absolutely know when it's there because you're listening to the podcast. So just have to confirm some dates and that's it and if you're not getting the newsletter that's how you would know when that episode's gonna come out that's the only time that we generally announce upcoming guests once in a while we'll do something on the private Facebook group which honestly, I don't know that I've ever talked about that your all welcome to join that. If you search for whistlekick martial arts radio on Facebook we have a closed group where we have some discussions with the guests sometimes they will jump in and join the group and it's a lot of fun so it's not super active, you're not gonna see it fill up your Facebook feed but you're all welcome to jump in there and if you didn't check out Monday's episode with Mr. Richard Osborne you should definitely make time for that. I think the thing that struck me most about Monday's episode was how strongly tied to competition Mr. Osborne is and if you've listened to that episode you know what I'm talking about. This man grew up competing and traveled all over the Midwest competing and now he runs a tournament he runs a school, he's still competing, he's students are competing and I don't know too many people who have spent that much time in their martial arts career as competitors for a lot of people they burn out and this guy just he loves competition and I love competition I love seeing what it does for people is go check that interview out, that's episode 34 and let us know what you think. If you remember from last week we had a movie pick ad we're gonna do that every week least we'll run out of great movies to share, hopefully that will never happen. But as I was digging around I realized that one of the movies that comes up as a recommendation that I bump into a lot of people that haven't seen it is Ip man and if you haven't seen Ip man first of it's on Netflix for streaming and it's this kind of loose biography of a guy from China name Yip man who not only was he Bruce Lee's Wing Chang instructor but he sort of credited with being the guy that helped Wing Chang spread worldwide and it's a great great movie, Donnie Yen is the star he's a tremendous martial artist wonderful actor and the movie's just fun. It's one of these movies that even though it's subtitled it doesn't take away I personally I hate subtitles the first subtitled movie that I was able to sit through was Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon but this one you don't even notice it because there's so much action and most of the time when there isn't the action you can just follow what's going on because it's not super dramatic super involved acting. Like I said fight scenes are great, if you haven't checked it out you owe it to yourself. Check it out and let us know what you think in the comments or on social media. One of the things that we try to put out a lot on social media is positivity, we try to share motivational quotes and things like that and they're actually very well received so hopefully you're not in the minority that doesn't like that but if you are tough cause we're gonna keep doing it but as I was putting together this show one of the things that I wanted to talk about was the social media piece that we put out last week that was really accepted well and there's a story that I found that kinda ties into it I'm gonna read this and maybe you've all have heard this it's really short. A young boy traveled across Japan to the school of famous martial artists, when he arrived at the dojo A young boy traveled across Japan to the school of a famous martial artist. When he arrived at the dojo he was given an audience by the Sensei "What do you wish from me?" the master of the said martial arts academy asked. "I wish to be your student and become the finest kareteka in the land," the boy said. "How long must I study?" "Ten years at least," the master replied. "Ten years is a long time," said the boy. "What if I studied twice as hard as all your other students?" "Twenty years," replied the master. "Twenty years! What if I practice day and night with all my effort?" "Thirty years," was the master's reply. "How is it that each time I say I will work harder, you tell me that it will take longer?" the boy asked. "The answer is clear. When you have one eye fixed upon your destination, there is only one eye left with which to find the Way." So, like I said many of you have probably heard that story that anecdote before fable it's probably a better word for it. I'm not gonna tell you what to take away from it because I think that that's on you but the social media piece that we put out there was this we do these motivational posters, I know you've all seen those and a lot of them have quotes and some of them are quotes that we take from others some of them are quotes that I come up with myself and there are usually things that I find myself saying when I'm running a seminar or when teaching a class or something and this particular one says martial arts is one of those rare pursuits that will give back exactly and only what you put in and I'll leave it to you to draw the correlation between the story that I read and that quote and maybe you don't even see it tied personally I do. Wanted to explain where that came from. Now first off, that quote came out of my own head, if somebody else has said that before and I'm sure someone has I didn't hear it I'm not trying to steal credit. I found myself saying that quite a bit over the last 6 months when I was talking to people that we're not involved in martial arts. See one of the things that's been interesting about whistlekick and about doing this podcast is that it gives me a lot of exposure to people that don't train in martial arts that have tied them either personally on Facebook or just kind of out I the world people wanna know hey what's going on with you and so they'll talk to me about martial arts and should they train martial arts should their kids get in the martial arts and I found myself saying this, Martial Arts is one of the rare pursuits that will give back exactly and only what you put in and that sounds like it could be a negative and I suppose it could be but for me when I was growing up anybody that knew me knew I was nerd and I wasn't just a nerd I was the nerd. Most schools have one nerd that kid is just a complete outcast because everyone perceives them to be smarter than them and I did well in school but I was smaller. I did martial arts. I was awkward at team sports and so I found that the more I dedicated myself to martial arts the more I got back out of it. I didn't find the same thing with really anything else you know I thought about playing basketball and so I spent one summer really getting as good as I could be playing basketball and I was good shot but I was still 5'6" and 130 pounds and nobody wanted to pass me the ball and it didn't matter how good of a shot I was, I wasn't gonna get anything more out of playing basketball but with martial arts it's a 1-1 ration. If I put effort in I'm gonna get results back now some might say you know you can spend all day in the dojo and not get anything out of it and when I say dojo I don't mean you know just karate please I hope no one's thinking them I'm picking on Japanese martial arts and excluding something else it's we said dojo in the story so that's what popped into my head. Sure, you can put a lot of time in without effort but really the heart of what I'm trying to say here with this quote and the sentiment behind it is about your effort your intent and you can dedicate yourself to a lot of things but martial arts is one of the few where everything you put in you get back and that's what I love about it and I bet for a lot of people listening that's what you love about it whether or not you've articulated it this way. So, I'm gonna put that image up on the show notes. Feel free to steal it share it repost it quote it I don't care. I 'd love credit but if you don't credit that's fine because what's the goal here, the goal here is to get more people training. The more people doing martial arts I genuinely believe the better the world will be so anything you do in that direction I'm gonna support it so that is it for today, this is about the length of the show that I wanna do about 15 minutes or so. So, head on over to whistlekickmartialartsradio.com for the show notes the links all the things that we talked about today and remember this is episode 35. Please if you haven't leave us a review wherever you're getting the show, iTunes is kind of the key one and don't forget we've got free apps on Google Play for you android users and on the appstore for those of you that are using an iPad or an iPhone or even an iPod. So just search for whistlekick and that should come right up. Until next time, train hard smile and have a great day