Lupin1

I'm loving Ragnarok. I went back and played the 2018 God of War, which I had never played before, and it was an amazing experience. After I visit Ragnaok I plan on playing Ghost of Tshushima. I'm also extremely excited for Hogwarts:Legacy.

Personally I don't think promoting students to the dan ranks online is in keeping with the purpose of rank. At some point you have to ask yourself what rank means and what its purpose is. I don't believe martial arts can be taught effectively online. We've done a great job this past year doing the best we can with what we had, but it's certainly not ideal. Promoting to the kyu ranks online is one thing, as they are more for motivation than anything else. But moving from kyu to dan is a much bigger step, which I believe requires an in-person test.

Thank you so much, Patrick, for your hard work and dedication to this forum. 20 years is a long time to stick with a project! I'm so blessed to have you all in my life. I have learned so much from you all not just about martial arts, but about community, building relationships, respectful discussion, and leadership. So much of the internet today has become a place of toxicity and bickering. You can barely make a post without it becoming a nasty argument. This place it different. It's an oasis. And all of that comes down to the leadership of Patrick and the moderators and our wonderful members. Here's to another 20 years! (I'll try not to think about how old I'll be on THAT celebration)

I can't believe I've been on here this long! (really because I can't believe I'm as old as I am!) 😂 I started posting on here while I was a missionary out on the Navajo Reservation. I was only about a year back into martial arts when I went out there. I was unable to attend classes in person (I lived on the reservation in the middle of nowhere) and so I spent the entire two years just posting on here and practicing on my own. When I went home and went back to my school they promoted me my first night back, despite not having been to class in two years! This forum kept me motivated to keep practicing and growing and to keep up with the martial arts community during a time I was fairly lonely and alone living 2,000 miles from home in the middle of the desert. Since then you all have been a big motivation to keep training! I know I'm not able to train right now, but I am going to be moving to Naples, FL mid-July and I plan on looking for a school down there to start up again-- most likely in a brand new style. It'll be fun to be a beginner again and I'm sure I'll be needing your help!

Quantity and quality!

Stretching and squats. Build up slowly and in intervals. For example, start with 2-5 minute intervals with five minute breaks in between. Slowly increase the intervals and shorten the breaks. If you do it while you're watching TV or listening to an audiobook or something, it makes it go faster and takes your mind off of it.

To be perfectly honest, I would never study at a school with a master who would get upset with a brand new student for not knowing his rank. A higher ranked practitioner should have the maturity to understand that new students will make mistakes as they are learning and their goal should be to guide the new students to the correct practice. Anyone who would freak out and attack someone who didn't know any better for "disrespecting" them needs a reality check.

Awww. Thank you again Patrick and to the community. I feel like I'm being showered with love.

Thank you, Patrick, and to the whole community. This community is one of the most polite and positive places on the internet, due not only to our respectful members, but also to the proactive and professional moderation. I've been so grateful to have been part this amazing community for over a decade. I have learned and grown so much both as a martial artist and as a person. I hope to still be around and will still make posts every so often.

I stopped in 5th grade because I wanted to play basketball instead. After college I was back in my hometown and was sort of in a rut and had gone from having so much to do in college to not being involved in anything. I needed a hobby. And I still felt drawn to karate-- especially to the personal challenge of learning the forms and the techniques and advancing through the ranks. So a few months after being home, I e-mailed my old instructor from when I was a kid and I started training again.

Congrats!!

The good news is if you're coming back now most people haven't trained in a dojo in 3-4 months, so anywhere you go should be doing a lot of review and slowly building back up. It's the best time to come back!

The instructors at my school are all of the opinion that kyu ranks are mostly meaningless and are motivational and instructional tools to help move a student through the basic introductory curriculum to black belt (we don't tell the kids that, of course-- we make sure they're proud of every rank they achieve). We're not currently doing any sort of online anything right now-- we're just stopped for the year and we'll hopefully pick up again in the fall. But with our philosophy of kyu ranks, we're very flexible with grading the kids. We want them all the earn each rank and actually learn and we do get a bit more strict as they work their way into the higher kyus, but we're very flexible. And so if I were to do online training/grading, I don't think I would have any problem with awarding provisional ranks via online testing to keep students motivated and progressing through the curriculum with the condition that they have to demonstrate the material in person once we come back together. I think the whole world is trying to be flexible right now and to me the difference between a green belt and a blue belt or whatever is so negligible in the grand scheme of things that if it gives a person something to keep them motivated and training through a pandemic and makes them feel they're accomplishing something in this time when all of life feels like it's standing still, that plays to the greater good and I wouldn't hesitate to do it. That said, I would only do that for the kyu ranks. Dan ranking is much more involved and standardized and a dan level practitioner should have the self motivation and patience to not be so concerned with rank. It's also so long between gradings for dan ranks at my school that an extra few months is absolutely nothing.

I'll be continuing it whilst we are in this situation. Its' keeping the kids especially engaged and the parents are appreciating it as it helps provide some structure to the week. Plus it keeps me focused with my own training. Definitely challenging trying to teach when you cannot physically correct or engage with a student but if anything is forcing me to become better with how I verbally explain things. It's funny because on KF over the years there have been many posts on whether online training can work, the Gracies have already done it to an extent with Gracie University, but the general consensus was that it was a horrible idea. I don't think it will ever replace direct instruction but having had to do this now I can see it having a place. How are you handling tuition during this time? Are you still charging full price for online lessons?

I definitely think there is, but I also think you have to learn to do it the correct, traditional way before you can start expressing yourself properly. Think of it like a 12 year old using terrible grammar in his writing because he didn't bother to learn the proper rules and then claiming "self-expression" when corrected. Now compare that to a professional writer who knows how to use the rules properly but is deliberately and artistically breaking them with a desired effect in mind. Those are two different things. One is a beginner who doesn't know better who is being stubborn about learning to do it right and is overconfident in their abilities. The other is a master of his craft who took the time to learn to do it right and now has earned the right to improvise and can improvise intelligently without losing his effectiveness. The founder of my school always told us "for the first 20 years, your karate belongs to your instructor. After that your karate belongs to you". You have to take the time to learn proper rules and technique before you can make the informed decision to tweak those. I'm not sure someone with ten years of experience split between different styles would be there yet.