Lupin1

I was wondering how many of you have academic requirements for advancement in addition to the physical movements? It struck me the other day how little our brown belts knew about Isshinryu and even our own school (aka-- they were brown belts and didn't know what belt came next) and I was thinking of asking my instructor if I could help implement some academic requirements for advancement, if not for the brown belts, then at least for my new group of beginners I'll have coming in after the new year (was thinking just some simple vocabulary and very, very basic facts about the system for white belt and build from there). I also spent the day today working on an optional "challenge" I was going to offer to the higher belts. None of the kids currently wear an Isshinryu patch on their gi even though it is allowed for yellow belts and higher (not sure how many of them even know about it. We never mention it after their first class). I put together a three step challenge consisting of a short reading passage about Isshinryu with 10 comprehension questions, a "practice each of the 4 beginning kata 10 times each" challenge, and a "color in the Isshinryu patch while learning the significance of each piece as you go" activity. Was thinking of buying like 10 Isshinryu patches with my own money to present to any kids who complete the challenge (the class itself is free to adults, so I can justify the $50 bucks). What you think of the idea? How to do teach things like that?

I like what we do-- have different requirements for junior black belt than for adult black belt. As I said in my earlier post, children, for the most part, learn at different rates than adults. Because their coordination, spatial reasoning, etc are still developing, they progress more slowly at first. They also usually need more frequent rewards to keep them motivated. In order to do that, my instructor made a separate ranking system for kids and adults while still covering all the same material. Kids have more belts and get them more frequently-- especially right at the beginning (one kata per rank until junior black belt vs. 2 or 3 for adults). He also created a junior black belt which is the equivalent of adult green/brown belt. So, rather than the child having all the requirements for black belt met and simply being in a "holding pattern" until they're old enough for adult black belt, they're actually still working on the requirements for adult black belt and will receive it when they meet all the requirements, regardless of age. Here's the correlation chart: Kids ---> Adult white ---> white purple --> white orange ---> white yellow ---> yellow blue ---> yellow green ---> yellow brown 1 ---> blue brown 2 ---> blue jr. black 1 ---> green/brown 3 jr. black 2 ---> brown 2 jr. black 3 ---> brown 1 adult black ---> black

This post was originally published as an article in a dedicated KarateForums.com Articles section, which is no longer online. After the section was closed, this article was most to the most appropriate forum in our community. Disclosure: through Patrick (KarateForums.com Administrator), Tuttle Publishing provided a copy of the book to me at no cost. We were well into another Tuesday night class, and a small group of us younger practitioners were off in a corner where we were supposed to be working a new partner drill. We were slightly distracted, however, as one of our newer black belts was yet again regaling us with (questionably accurate) stories of his weekend visiting a few somewhat seedy bars with a friend and the several scraps he had gotten into in the process. He was just about finished happily bragging it up to me, the only lady in the class, when our instructor caught wind of what was happening. In only seconds, Mr. Smith was in the middle of our group where he swiftly and thoroughly brought the young charger back down with a simple piece of very good, yet often-overlooked advice. "Even if you did get off with only a few minor knocks this time," he began, admonishing him, "if you had acted smarter and hadn't gone to places like that in the first place, you wouldn't have had to fight and risk hurting yourself and others." Everyone knows the old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The martial arts do an outstanding job of teaching us to deal with situations that have gotten violent, but how often do we as martial artists study or teach our students strategies to prevent becoming involved in those situations in the first place? How Not to Get Hit: The Art of Fighting Without Fighting helps begin to fill in that gap. In the book, Nathaniel Cooke lays out the basics of avoiding a fight to begin with - from recognizing and staying out of potentially dangerous situations, to looking for clues in body language to determine if a person may have malicious intent, to defusing and/or escaping a situation before it turns into a physical altercation. In the first and, in my opinion, most useful chapter, the book begins by walking us through the most common motivations behind violent acts and how to use body language and context clues to determine a person's motivation. After recognizing the motivations of a potential aggressor, it gives advice on how to respond in the manner most effective for those particular motivations - whether it be talking a person down, giving them what they want, or just getting out of the situation as quickly as possible and by any means necessary. It also offers advice on how to differently handle an individual attacker versus a group of attackers. These techniques could prove a great study for students of all levels and lend themselves well to practical drills where students can practice reading different situations and reacting appropriately. Another of my favorite chapters consists of a group of interviews with those who deal with violent situations for a living - including a professional body guard, a psychiatric nurse, a police officer and a prison guard. It was a very entertaining read with very practical, real-world advice. Reading this section helped me see the real use in the skills discussed in the previous chapter and how they're put into use every day by a variety of highly trained professions. It was valuable to hear about actual situations in which these tactics were used to diffuse or end a potential altercation. This renewed my motivation to learn them and gave me confidence in their effectiveness. Other sections of the book include a somewhat dry but potentially useful section listing dozens of statistics on crime from both the United Kingdom and the United States (the author being from the UK and the book being published in the US), a large section with basic, generic self-defense principles and movements in event you do need to fight, and a very useful guide comparing the focuses of different fighting systems and the author's advice for choosing a system that will work for the reader. While much of the advice presented in How Not to Get Hit could be considered common sense, I believe having the strategies presented in a systematic way, along with anecdotes and statistics to back them up, could make this a decent beginning resource for anyone teaching any manner of self-defense course. Practical skills for danger assessment and non-violent conflict resolution are an area of self-defense sorely lacking, if not missing entirely, in the vast majority of martial arts programs. While this book is certainly not necessary for the development of a curriculum on the topic, I believe it would offer a decent starting point for any martial artist who wishes to add these skills to his own or his students' repertoire. Buy the book: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk (KarateForums.com receives a small commission on any sales generated through these links).

My instructor refers to bunkai as black belt studies and doesn't go really in depth with them until black belt, but he shows basic applications right from the very beginning, even for the kids. I think there's a difference between learning one or two ways a move or sequence of moves could go down and really delving into its "hidden" potential. The former even the rawest white belt can learn from the first day they begin their first kata. The later really takes more all around understanding to get (a lot of it still goes over my head for the most part when he goes into that stuff).

As RAM said, how does the price of martial arts compare to other sports/athletic programs? How many hundreds of dollars do parents pay for their kids to go to basketball or baseball clinics? Our local gymnastics school charges $175 for ten lessons. I paid over $1000 one summer in college for private tennis lessons once a week. The average pilates class around here is $15 per session and there are upwards of 30 people in a class. Of course I don't agree with price gouging-- with selling belts people don't deserve just to get their money or charging exorbitant testing fees without a reason (if they're flying a master in from somewhere else and putting him up in a hotel for a black belt test, a high price makes sense). But even $100 a month seems to be the norm around here for any twice a week athletic instruction/session, not just martial arts.

I think anyone could earn a black belt if they were willing to put in the time and effort. It doesn't take some pre-ordained skill or attribute-- just time and perseverance. As for the Okinawan masters not selling their karate... I can't say much considering the founder of my style taught karate to enemy soldiers during WWII to avoid being prosecuted by them for draft dodging and then taught US soldiers afterwards for $250 a month-- an arrangement that many of his fellow Okinawans were not too happy with and which lost him many of his Okinawan students (whom he had taught for free).

Actually, assuming he's in the US those are pretty good deals. $75 a month is probably about average for 3 times a week. Most places around here are $95+. amolao-- What is it your want out of martial arts? Tang Soo Do is a striking art-- kicks, punches, blocks, etc; while Judo is a grappling art-- throws, holds, escapes, etc (like wrestling only you slam the person to the ground first [and you get slammed to the ground a lot]). Depending on your budget, $10 a month isn't a huge difference in price and, especially at the beginning, you probably only want to train 3 days a week max to avoid injury and burnout, so the extra 2 days TSD presents, while offering nice flexible options, probably shouldn't get used all that often. I'd recommend seeing if they both offer free trial lessons (they should) and take advantage of those before you make a decision.

We've done the turning Naihanchi before. We've also done spinning crescent kick Naihanchi where every step is a spinning crescent kick. I've also seen our resident TKD Yondan do jump spinning crescent kick Naihanchi.

As a 1st Kyu this resonates with me. Obviously I'm not of the mindset that Shodan is the end (it's hard to hang around you guys for, is it 5 years already, and keep up those notions) but there is still a societal expectation butting in. When someone finds out you do karate, the first question they ask is "are you a black belt"? Up to Shodan being able to say yes is what keeps you going. There's a push to "not quit when you're so close!" and this idea that if you achieve black belt it'll be this huge accomplishment and you can't deny yourself that accomplishment when you've worked so hard. Then you get it and that motivation is gone. No lay person really cares if you're a 2nd degree black belt vs. a first. And you feel like you have your "bucket list" accomplishment, so the stuff you were sacrificing to go to class start to seem more and more important in comparison. I can totally see this happening to me and I haven't even gotten there yet. I guess for me the thing that will keep me going is that I want instructor certification and in our club that means a good 5-10 year commitment after Shodan. And then of course, after instructor certification I'll want to teach, so that should keep me going then. Basically my vocation is to teach and no matter what I do, my main goal and motivation always seems to be to learn it well enough to pass it on to others.

To be fair, in the videos the guy posted of adults, it seemed as if they were doing a "go as fast as you can" exercise with the kata. We do them every so often at my school with similar results. I doubt they do their kata that fast all the time. I don't deny there are some horrible adult black belts out there, but the adults in his examples probably aren't as bad as those videos make them seem. And the girl in the video is awesome, but that same girl seems to be used in all these "amazing karate kid" videos. She is an outlier, which is why so many videos of her make it into these debates as opposed to videos of her and 20 other children just as good. Personally, I agree with child black belts to an extent. I don't think the vast majority of children under ten (other than significant outliers like the girl in the video) would be able to get to black belt. Even if they did start when they were 4, children learn differently than adults and their coordination/spatial reasoning/body awareness/etc is all still developing and as such 6 years of training as a 4-10 year old is much different than 6 years of training for an adult. Sort of like how a week long basketball camp with five-year-olds would leave you with different results than the same length camp with older children or adults. However, if a child started young, trains regularly, and is of average coordination, I can see achieving black belt by 13 or 14.

I'm not sure what you mean by license. Is it a certificate of accident insurance? Because if they're committing insurance fraud, that's a matter for the courts. As for the sparring thing-- have you been known to hurt people while sparring before? Is there anything that would make the Shodan and your sensei afraid to fight you? If so, they shouldn't have graded you just from the fact that a 3rd Kyu should be able to spar with his classmates without hurting them.

I saw an interesting idea a few days ago where a school actually broke Shodan into multiple levels and had colored stripes on the black belt for each one. Not saying I agree or disagree with the practice (don't know enough about it), but I thought it was a unique concept.

I can't say "get my black belt" because that's really out of my hands (though I am hopeful for getting it in 2015), but I want to work in a more systematic way on the requirements for my shodan test to ensure I'm prepared when I am granted the opportunity to test. I've already created a google doc with the physical and academic requirements and have been going though every so often and adding to pages of style history, kata history, sequence write ups, etc. I've also been considering for awhile starting a small after school "karate club" at the middle school at which I work-- I've been working on creating a 2 year rotating beginners curriculum bringing them through the first four belts of our Isshinryu program for transfer into our school (if they'd like) after completion. I'd like to at least present my proposal to the principal. After I present it, it'll be up to her, of course, if she'd like to actually pursue it.

The teacher in me wishes we did have more set standards. I hope to someday start a small after school club where I teach and one of my favorite pastimes is imagining and drawing out what I'd do for curriculum and standards. At my club, though, it's very highly subjective. Our head instructor is of the more traditional mindset that all ranks below Shodan are made up necessary evils to keep kids (and adults) interested. If it wouldn't cause 99% of the kids to drop out, he'd probably go back to just white, maybe brown, and black. As such, he's very loose with kyu standards. Basically, each belt has a kata and once the person can perform the kata reasonably well, they move on to the next rank. Basics, combinations, partner drills, etc are seen more as an ongoing thing that a student will cover and develop eventually with longevity of training. Nothing's really ever taught systematically. The only test we have is for Shodan and the instructor provides every brown belt with a set list of kata, techniques and knowledge required for that, but, as a current Ikkyu I've found I'm responsible myself for ensuring I know everything on the list. There are several techniques and drills on there I've only glossed over (if I've seen them at all) in my 5+ years of training and I'm finding I need to specifically ask my instructor for instruction and resources on those things, which can be a little nerve wracking. While our lackadaisical system makes the school teacher in me uncomfortable, it's the way we've always done things and, if a student does make it to black belt (a rare occurrence), they know their stuff by then.

I don't have too many years of experience and have never tried any high end belts, but for my brown belt, knowing I'd be wearing it for awhile, I decided to get a Judo belt rather than a karate belt-- I got a Mizuno. I've had it for two years now and the thing is just starting to get broken in... Still thick and stiff. Took over a year and some working it just for it to stay tied. I have a feeling it would last a very long time. I've also used Fuji belts for Judo and they're not nearly as thick, so they have that "broken in" feeling right away and stay tied, but they're still very well made compared to most karate belts in that price range. Belts made specifically for Judo are thicker-- they're basically made to allow you to be picked up by them and to withstand lots of rubbing and torque against gis and mats.

I feel really bad for the kids in those articles. They don't know any better-- they're kids. They're proud of their accomplishment as they should be. Their parents usually don't know any better either, and are also proud of their kids' accomplishment, so they put them in the paper. Then this poor kid gets attacked by strangers on the internet and people argue over him and he becomes debate fodder. I agree that a six-year-old training twice a week for two years most likely doesn't have the basics mastery necessary for black belt, but I feel bad for the poor kid more than anything else.

Idk. I think if it more like coaching. You wouldn't expect Bill Belichick to get out on the field at his age without getting himself killed, but that doesn't mean he can't mold some of the greatest players in the game. Think of the gruff old boxing coach screaming at his young athlete from the corner of the ring or the old gymnastics coach on the sidelines in his windbreaker or the ballet mistress correcting her dancers from the piano. None of them would ever be expected to best their top athletes as they are now, but they're respected for their knowledge and experience and, even though they're no longer out on the court or stage or field every day, they play a role that's vital to their sport or art.

We would call the first one the roundhouse kick and the second a spinning roundhouse kick. There are no spinning kicks in Isshinryu, of course, but one of our instructors is also a 4th Dan in TKD and he teaches them to us. To each his own, of course.

My state actually has decent laws for it. You don't have to retreat from your own home or anywhere you have a legal right to be (the "stand your ground" law) as long as you're not the initial aggressor. You're allowed to use deadly force if you reasonably believe a person is about to use deadly force on you or another person (as would apply to the veteran being attacked by the kid with the bat in the story above), someone's likely to use ANY illegal force while committing a robbery or any felony against you on your property, or some is committing about to commit a kidnapping or rape (which may also apply to the vet's story). For non-deadly force, a person is justified in using non-deadly force upon another person in order to defend himself or a third person from what he reasonably believes to be the imminent use of unlawful, non-deadly force by such other person, and he may use a degree of such force which he reasonably believes to be necessary for such purpose. However, such force is not justifiable if: (a) With a purpose to cause physical harm to another person, he provoked the use of unlawful, non-deadly force by such other person; or (b) He was the initial aggressor, unless after such aggression he withdraws from the encounter and effectively communicates to such other person his intent to do so, but the latter notwithstanding continues the use or threat of unlawful, non-deadly force; or © The force involved was the product of a combat by agreement not authorized by law. So basically, in my state the vet never would have been convicted of anything. I've luckily never had to defend myself or another physically, but it's good to know that if I was ever forced to, I wouldn't have to worry about my entire life being ruined because of it (at least not legally... psychologically I can't say...).

Awesome! What a great experience!

Why does your instructor make that rule? He explained it to me once, but as we don't really compete, I wasn't paying too close attention... I believe it had something to do with developing power through spinning movements and timing or something like that. So it's not so much the wanting us to compete with it as it is wanting us to spend a month or two tirelessly practicing and dissecting that particular kata at the brown belt level. Granted, he could ask us to do that anyway, but nothing motivates you to seriously get to know a kata better than a little competition.

We don't really do tournaments. Last and only one I've ever competed in, I was 10 years old and an orange belt. I did our (Isshinryu-ized and watered down for beginners) version of Anaku. Got 2nd place in a division with much higher ranks. If I were to compete now, I would want to do Kusanku, though my best kata is Seisan (as it should be). My instructor, however, has always had a rule that all brown belts have to compete with Chinto (one of my least favorite katas). So that's probably what I'd end up doing.

Wow. That's awesome in the full "awe" sense of the word. I have a ton of respect for BJJ black blacks. The sheer amount of training that goes it to it makes it such a unique accomplishment. Way to go!

With the kids we do stretching and conditioning exercises for the first 15 minutes or so of class. For adults it's all on us. We don't even stretch-- you come in a bit before class starts and stretch/warm up off to the side while the kids class is finishing up and then we usually start with a few kata to warm up. For conditioning-- a few of us spend a lot of time outside of class at the gym/exercise and a few of don't spend any. The people who come to our class don't really come for the exercise.

Kinda like asking "how long is a piece of string". That word can have many different meanings. We outright call our students "beginners" until they join the rest of the class for the entire class instead of going off part of the class for "basics" lessons-- about six months (also about the time frame for earning yellow belt). Some schools have specific "beginners" classes for the first 3 belts or so before they move on to "intermediate". Others would consider all the kyu ranks "beginners" while others like to stress that a new Shodan is "still just a beginner". And then you get those who insist that you could train 100 years and still just be a beginner. No one's wrong. It's just different ways of viewing the concept. Personally, I'd consider someone a beginner for the first year or so-- until they get a good grasp on the basic movements and can start applying them in certain situations-- until they've constructed a working "martial arts schema" on which to build. After that I wouldn't consider them a beginner any more, but not being a beginner in no way implies or even attempts to imply a person knows everything there is to know or even that they know a lot. You can no longer be a beginner while still recognizing that you haven't even touched the tip of the iceberg of all there is to learn (so obviously I don't subscribe to the "everyone will always be a beginner for all eternity" mindset).