Monthly Archives: September 2009

Three more victories for CARISMA

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(L to R) Robin, Georgios, Andrew, Heley, Andrea, Nas, Linda and Massimo

Participants at Thurston September 2009

3 victories, 1 draw and just one loss is an amazing result for the 5 fighters that entered yesterday the tournament in Bury St. Edmund:

  • Heley Matthews (20), a 1st Dan black belt instructor for CARISMA and coach for the Varsity Team of the Cambridge University Kickboxing Society, managed to dominate her opponents during all of the 3 rounds.
  • Andrew Gilham (26), a green second belt with several years of experience and a number of successful fights and victories in his past, managed to easily dominate his opponent on both technique and ring strategy.
  • Andrea Cristofaro (37), a martial artist with many years of experience that started kick boxing early last year, also managed to impose his own technical expertise onto a less technical opponent; Andrea was at his second official fight.
  • Georgios Evangelinos (30), a blue belt with less than 3 years experience,  managed very well his skills and energies controlling a technically less capable but more aggressive opponent, finishing his first official fight in a draw.
  • Nas Salmi (39), a green belt with 15 months experience, was fighting his second tournament although he recently suffered an injury and he was surely not at his best.

Once more an obvious observation should be made: apart from very few exceptions the average technical skill from other clubs is pretty low and CARISMA’s members even when beaten because of other reasons, always demonstrate superior technique, posture, guard and repertoire.

We would like to thank all fighters for their committment and dedication in representing CARISMA in such a tournament, Robin Turner for his precious assistance and for coaching Andrea to his victory and Linda Silvestri for her help in filming the event.   We are missing Andrea’s video because of technical difficulties (two fights happening at the same time and just one camera) but please have a look at the others and leave a comment:

Best Strikes from Michael Kuhr

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YouTube is full of martial arts video: nonetheless the number of decent clips about good quality kickboxing is scarce.  I recently found this video and I was impressed of the quality and the rich variety of the techniques used to cause the many KO you will see.   Good boxing with nice, tight guard, axe kicks, hook kicks, spinning back side kicks, quite an amazing repertoire.  Any comment is, as usual, appreciated:

10 good reasons to train martial arts

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I wrote some time ago on my personal blog, Martial What?, a post that lists 10 reasons to train martial arts as a good alternative to other sports and physical actitivies: I thought it would be a goood idea to share it with you, CARISMA members.

Please read 10 reasons why martial arts are an effective alternative to gym, aerobics and lifting weights and let me know what you think by leaving a comment.

CARISMA demo at Olympiad 2009 week end

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CARISMA took part to a sport demonstration organised by Cambridge City Council at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge.  Six of us prepared and performed a half an hour demonstration that shows some aspects of our training: regimental training, pair training, different styles of sparring and Multicombat for street fighting.

The resulting demonstration was good although the light and the position of the camera affected the quality of the foootage we managed to capture. I am pleased with the overall result:

I would like to thank personally and on behalf of the whole club for the effort and hard work that all members put in this project that are: Georgios, Heley, James, Robin, Rosie and myself. A special thank you for Caroline who assisted us there and was presenting and commenting our show.