Whap, bam and yippee! We eye the big screen, and we see kung fu flips all over the place in the Matrix movies and we watch pai mai sword standing and grown up girls eye gouging in Kill Bill and we know we have seen the real masters! Smell the coffee, dude, that's a a bunch of actors, and what the real masters have done would put those cinema heroes to shame.

Gichin Funakoshi is considered a pivotal karate master. He brought karate to Japan, and thence to the world. If that isn't considered feat enough, why don't you go stand on a rooftop during a hurricane and hold a sheet of plywood?

That's right, to make his stance totally immovable in every way, he battled the very elements, and word has it he never sailed off to Oz. And, if you want one of the older masters, try Sokon Matsumuri, an Imperial bodyguard of old Okinawa, who made a bull run away just by giving the bull a serious stare. The trick was that he went out to the bullpen during the dark hours and jabbed a pin smack in the middle of that old bulls nose!

Of course you may not think the intelligence to figure out how to best a bull without bashing him is not much of a deal. So try something that doesn't take much intelligence, like grabbing the beams of a ceiling, not hooking the fingers over, but just grabbing them, and hand walking across the ceiling. This is something that people were doing in old Okinawa just for kicks!

One of the toughest of the old karate masters was Mas Oyama. Mas was famous for chopping the horns off of charging bulls, and he ended up killing three of the poor beasts. Now, cruelty to animals is not what we are about, and this was a while ago, but think about the muscle, the intelligence, the brute strength, and the sheer artism required to kill a bull with your bare hands. It's not something I would try if I were you.

Okay, you've heard my spiel on the old legends, so let me give you a simple trick to do, and you can start becoming a karate master all on your own. Learn one of the forms of Karate, maybe Bassai, or something like it, or maybe you might want to start off with a simpler form like Pinan One. Now, let the garden hose run for an hour on that bare patch of ground behind your house.

Now, the ground is nice and gooey, yucky and pukey. So it is time to do your form, heh heh. Whap, bam and pow!

Your fanny flies over your face and you look like a plant hiding in the mud. Up on your feet you lazy wanna be karate master! Did you think the legends of old would whine just because they got a little muddy?