Lupin1

One of the reasons I went back to Martial Arts as a hobby is how cheap it is compared to other hobbies. I was a poor, under-employed millennial fresh out of college and didn't have much money. I joined a youth center dojo which charges no fees. All I needed to pay for was a uniform.

I would say 7 or 8 to start proper karate training, but as young as 3 or 4 can benefit from group learning in a martial arts environment working on gross motor skills, group behavior, balance, concentration, etc in a fun environment. I don't consider that "karate" as much as just a movement class in a karate-themed environment, but I still think kids could get a lot out of it.

You'll notice most of the females in this thread are arguing the opposite-- that a top-of-the-game female cannot compete with a top-of-the-game male. It's ironically the males in this thread arguing they should be in the same division. A trained female has a chance against an untrained male, which is why females still learn and trust martial arts. If you're gonna be attacked on the street, it's most likely going to be by an untrained person. But if you take male and female fighters with the same level of skill, the male will win out 9.9 times out of 10.

To assist with an adult instructor in the room at all times-- maybe 14-16 depending on their maturity level. To teach a class alone-- at least 18, but they'd have to be a very mature 18-year-old with a lot of training on how to be a good instructor and what to do in case of emergencies. 18-year-olds are certainly capable of running a school, but it takes a very motivated and well-trained 18-year-old to do it well.

I'll just point out that I think it's funny the two women in this thread are saying "no, women are different from men" while the men are saying women are strong and can compete. From a woman's perspective-- we'd rather have women compete against women to give the strongest among us a chance to shine rather than have them compete in the same pool as men and have maybe one or two women in the world who could even break into the top 20. Women ARE different from men and it's more fair to the athletes to have them compete separately. There is a reason ABC just voted unanimously to separate fights into even more weight classes-- because body composition matters.

I don't think being a Barbie vs a Tomboy is enough to overcome the physical differences between men and women. Women who compete in the Olympics are the real deal. They train just as long and hard and have just as much fighting spirit as their male counterparts. They're not Barbies. Yet they still compete separately because the physical differences between the sexes require it. Let's look at swimming. The woman's world record of all time for the 400m individual medley is 4:26.36. The slowest male competitor in Rio last year swam it in 4:16.8. So the slowest male beat out the all time world record for women. Let's look at running. We'll look at the 5000m. The female all time world record is 14:11.15. The slowest male competitor at Rio did it in 13:07.17. Again the slowest male beat out the all time world record for women. And I didn't go cherry picking these examples, either. I just picked two random events. I'm sure you could look at almost every Olympic event and the vast majority of them will have the slowest man still beating the female world record. Men and women are just built differently. And that's ok.

And yet men don't play women in soccer. For good reason. Women and men are just different when it comes to athletics. The most skilled women consistently struggle to beat middle-of-the-road men. It makes sense for them to be separate.

I don't think they will be fighting each other. Other sports have been around for much longer and are still segregated for good reason. Men and women are different when it comes to athletics. That's not a bad thing. But it doesn't make sense to have them compete against each other.

I did. I started when I was 8 years old and trained until I was 12. I then quit to join the basketball team. After I finished college and moved back home, I was looking for something to get involved with to socialize and give my life some purpose (I graduated in the middle of the recession and I had a rough few years right out of college). I looked up my old instructor on Facebook and sent him a message. So it was about a 10 year break. It took a few months to remember things, but since it was the same school and I remembered some of the more basic forms, I got back up to snuff quickly and was moving forward again within six months.

Honestly, I think the standards in the 70s-90s in the west were overly inflated. Black belt was never meant to be a master rank. It wasn't meant to take a decade of work. It wasn't meant to require thousands of pushups and situps and a three day boot camp-like test. Black belt is meant to signify you've completed the basic curriculum in your art and have a solid base to begin more advanced training. The majority of karate in the west started with military men who were stationed in Asia from WWII through the 70s. Those men learned karate over there and achieved black belt (usually after about a year of training) and then brought it home and opened their own schools. As most of them were just shodans when they opened their schools, shodan became seen as an elite rank (at the time, it was). The shodans were the masters, not because they were amazing and had trained for decades, but because there was just no one with more experience. They still only had an average a year and half of training when they came back to the US and opened their dojos. Basically-- in the years since we've built black belt up in our minds to turn it in to something it was never meant to be. I don't see what's happening right now as "watering down black belt". I see it as black belt in the west going back to what it was meant to be and what it's always been in the east-- a rank signifying you've mastered the basic curriculum and are ready to move from beginner to advanced training. Edit: At my school it takes about 4-5 years of training an hour twice a week for an adult to reach shodan. Children take about 4 years of training twice a week to reach junior black belt (equivalent to adult brown belt) and then another 3-4 years to reach shodan from there (longer if they started young). We don't require people to jump through hoops to earn their black belt. When they've learned the necessary curriculum, they get their belt. I think it's fair. It requires a decent amount of training without being too over the top.

Most of our kids are low income and many bounce around between two houses, so making sure laundry gets done and they have all the pieces to their uniform at each class can be challenging. Most of them also come straight there after school, so they have to remember to pack up their uniform in the morning. They forget a lot. I'd love to try to enforce "you must have your entire uniform every class", but it would just be so difficult it's not really worth it. If I end up teaching a separate beginners' class or class for younger kids, I may just take their uniforms home after class every night and wash them myself. That way I can ensure they have all their uniform pieces and they're clean at every class at least until they move to the intermediate class. For the hygiene part, since most of them go straight there after school and then run around the club playing games for a few hours before karate, they tend to already be sweaty and stinky and gross by the time they come up to class.

For the kids we try to tell them to keep everything clean, but they're kids and don't have much control over it. We're just happy if they have their complete uniform that day (and often times they don't). I'm still trying to convince them to let the kids wear all black gis as their white ones usually end up discolored after just a few months, but my instructors still go for tradition over practicality. I have a feeling they'll change their minds in the next few years. For the adults, it runs the gamut. At one end of the spectrum, one of our instructors is a Korean guy who runs a dry cleaning business and his gi is always an immaculate, shining white and pressed. On the other end we have a guy who crumples his gi up and throws it in his bag and doesn't take it out until he puts it on again the next class. His once white top is now something between yellow and brown. He also like to eat smelly food right before he comes to class and it's hit or miss if he's washed his socks. No one likes working with him. Most of us are somewhere in between. I never wear a gi twice without washing it, but I don't dry clean and press it. I make sure my nails are trimmed, but I don't scrape the dirt from under them before every class. I try to either brush my teeth or chew some gum right before class and I wash my hands right before going into class. I also put on a fresh swipe of deodorant right before leaving the house. I'm not meticulous or anything, but I think I uphold a certain standard of cleanliness. I wouldn't mind working with me.

Keep showing up. Honestly that's the alpha and omega.

We have the kids do them blind folded. It's a great test of your stances and turns. Being just a little off on each step or turn really adds up over the course of the kata.

A little late to the party, but I just watched Iron Fist last week. It was the first of the Netflix Marvel series I've watched. Now we're on the Daredevil. They're both pretty good.

Our school started out as a husband and wife team. They both had day jobs and taught in the evenings for fun. There are no financials to deal with-- everything is free. The program is run out of a youth club, so they've always let him use the space for free in exchange for teaching the club members as part of their membership. All youth students must be members of the club to join the class. Eventually the wife decided to stop coming and the husband ran the program himself. Some of his students who had trained to the dan ranks began assisting him. Now our founding instructor and his wife have moved away and two of their original students have taken over. One of them works at the club full time as their programs director. The martial arts program is now just one of the programs he manages and runs at the club. When he retires, I hope to take over the program myself. Hopefully that won't be for a few more years yet (he's turning 60 this year, but he still competes in Iron Man competitions, so he's no feeble old dude). I still have a lot to learn before I'm ready to take over.

It's the aluminum in deodorant that causes pit stains. Since switching to aluminum-free deodorant (Arm & Hammer Essentials), I haven't had a single pit stain.

I hate kiai-ing. :-/ I'm a quiet person and don't like making loud noises for seemingly no reason. I never understood the whole "screaming loudly means you have spirit" thing. Usually during a kiai I'll do more of a grunt or low "I". Just enough to release the tension-- like hitting a ball in tennis. Most of the kids do the stereotypical "Hi-yah!" while most of the adults do an "I" or a "Ah".

Yeah, I wouldn't consider that martial arts. If it had been more of an "oh no, my rifle won't fire and the bad guys are coming at me! How else can I use it to stop them?" thing with butt strikes and jabs and stuff, I would've been fine with it.

Did it have a bayonet on it or something? I'm struggling to think what a kata with a rifle would look like. All I can think of is like military armed exhibition, which is not martial arts. I don't think it's necessarily inappropriate. Remember the weapons we use now were original wielded to kill, not just to look pretty in a kata. I don't think using a gun to defend yourself is any more shocking or taboo than cutting into someone with a kama. Depending on how the kata was approached, I honestly don't see a problem with it. I think the judges should have let him continue and then made the decision to disqualify him or not based on the martial arts qualities of his kata. And I will say I may be a little more open to firearms than others on this forum. No one in my family ever owned a firearm when I was growing up and I didn't shoot a real one until I was in my 20s, but I'm now a gun owner myself and in a long term relationship with an NRA instructor who owns a small arsenal and carries daily. To me a firearm is a tool and I'm not shocked or afraid or disgusted by the sight of them. If a martial artist can apply that tool to martial arts and do it in a way that stays true to the origins of the art form, I'm all for it. I'd also like to point out that an AR-15 is not an assault rifle. It's a normal rifle.

So as of right now, it looks like I may be able to change my work schedule to make it possible for me to take over teaching the beginner kids in Mr. Smith's program next year! More updates (and probably questions) to follow as things get hammered out a bit more.

Because we're such a small dojo, instructor training is done via an informal internship. Originally the requirement was to take a group of students from white belt to shodan, but since so few people actually get shodan at our school, I'm not really sure how that will work. Our requirement to become an official instructor is to be at least sandan and have at least 15 years training in addition to this internship. I'm sort of an unofficial instructor/assistant instructor. I'm just a shodan, but I've been helping out with classes since I was a 4th kyu-- about 5 years now. I also have a BA in education and classroom teaching experience, so I've got the instruction part down-- it's more the karate specific instruction stuff I'm still learning. If all goes well, next year I plan on stepping up my role. Our founder has recently moved away and our two other instructors have inherited the program. They aren't able/willing to put in the same hours as our founder, so I hope to step up and take on some more responsibilities. I'm hoping to become a full instructor by the time they need to retire, but as the training is so informal I'm not even sure how it will work now that our founder is gone. I guess we'll see.

We're not part of any organization. We were founded by our head instructor who is currently an 8th Dan (promoted by his instructor, who is a member of at least one big Isshinryu association (he was one of the original Marines to bring Isshinryu to the US). He's moved away recently and now the club is run by two of his students. Both started studying with him in the mid 80s and both are 6th Dan. The way I think of it-- when karate first came to the west in the 50s/60s/70s, most of the instructors were 1st-3rd Dan and their instructors were across an ocean in a world with no internet. They made it work. Karate flourished even without the grand masters. People find a way.

It most certainly is true. http://www.freerangekids.com/crime-statistics/ The reason you see it more now is because news moves faster and is EVERYWHERE. Someone sees someone who kinda creeps them out in a park in LA and within minutes it's shared on social media with people all over the world (even if literally nothing comes of it because it was just a normal, innocent guy walking in the park). You're just exposed to it more.

It most certainly is true. http://www.freerangekids.com/crime-statistics/ The reason you see it more now is because news moves faster and is EVERYWHERE. Someone sees someone who kinda creeps them out in a park in LA and within minutes it's shared on social media with people all over the world (even if literally nothing comes of it because it was just a normal, innocent guy walking in the park). You're just exposed to it more.