evergrey

OSU, oh please do, I'm really curious!

Man, your dojo must be really tough! Are there stabbings there often?

It really depends on which Shotokan org it is, from what I have heard. Now, granted, I don't know a lot about Shotokan- if the school is JKS, you might find it to be to your liking okay. There are some kinds of Shotokan that are non-contact though, be warned. I'd say check out a class and see what you think- if you trained for 6 years in Kyokushin, you should have a strong, fine sense of it. Shotokan isn't knockdown, generally speaking. Not like Kyokushin or it's offshoots... but since Oyama trained under Funakoshi, there will be similarities. Good luck- let us know what you think? OSU

Haha MasterPain! I should mention that generally with the men it's that grasp-one-arm and thump the back with the other hand kinda hug. You know, macho hug.

Haha, yep, I've got a friend from rural Illinois. He has some interesting ideas, like how he doesn't like that women get to vote. But then again, he might have said that just to try to rile me up, heh! Overall he's actually a nice person.

OSU, Man, I'm a hugger. I love hugs. Hugging is great, unless it's someone who is really skeevy. It's not something everyone does though, and that's certainly the case in dojos/schools/gyms. For example, our head instructor (who also trains in BJJ, where I think hugging is more prominent) tends to shake hands and hug after bowing following kumite. He'll also sometimes shake hands and hug students after class. Our Shihan though? Yeah, not a hugger. I've managed to hug him twice. But that isn't easy. Anyway, I think it's a good way for sparring partners to bond a bit, if they're both comfortable with it. Humans are very tactile, gregarious creatures and it's kind of a way of saying "hey, we just pounded the everliving blank out of each other, but everything is okay!" But there's something to be said for strict high protocol too, as not everyone is at all okay with being hugged. So how about you all? What do you think about hugging during class? After or before class? In the dojo? Do they hug where you train? OSU

My dojo currently has 5 belt colors- white, blue, green, brown, black. When Shihan was a Sensei and running his own dojo, it was White, Green, Brown, Black. Either way, there are electrical tape stripes to signify more kyus. We have 10 kyus like a lot of standard Kyokushin dojos. It didn't mean anything to me before Sensei and I joined up with a formal dojo. Now, well, it has hierarchical meanings. Being a dan rank tends to open a lot more doors in the community at large. A higher dan rank can enable you to teach. So there's that. OSU

OSU, very solid post groinstrike. I wish we could give rep on this forum!

OSU, JusticeZero- exactly. So frustrating. Every time a woman trains in knockdown and doesn't want to fight seriously, it makes it harder for me to get anyone to take me seriously! Dobbersky- Yeah, not everyone wants to do tournaments... at least she is a fighter though, eh? OSU

OSU to that- fear of getting hurt is pretty deeply ingrained, and most women don't grow up getting a lot of hard contact, unless it's abuse, which is going to deepen the fear. The thing about a contact style though is that you can use it to work past the fear. You can take the pain and own it, and you can overcome it and move from thinking like a victim to being in control of yourself and your life. New guy is great, and I really like him- he works hard and his dedicated to Kyokushin! When I made him fold on himself a little bit, he smiled, haha. After that he hit me harder, and it was good. I doubt I'll have any kind of bruising, but maybe when I'm in better shape again and I can partner with the human sledgehammer that we have here in my dojo. ;} The sad thing is that tonight I found myself being a horrible sexist hypocrite. A female nidan recently came back into training, and I couldn't bring myself to hit her hard. Every time I start hitting another woman hard, I get in trouble! But this is a nidan, you know? And she was a fighter back in the day. I'm just so worried I'll harm her, or that I'll get in trouble. :/ I was watching her facial expressions. She never told me to go lighter or harder...

Today in class, I was partnered for the first time with a new student of ours, who was in IKO2 in Japan for two years. At first, he just touched me with his knuckles. I told him to hit me, and I told him to hit me harder, and harder, and then Shihan came over and every strike the student threw, Shihan told him to go harder. I started blasting him too, to drive in the point. Nothing he couldn't handle, of course. I'm not a bully! Funny thing is though, once he was actually hitting me, and I was actually hitting him, he started smiling and we started complimenting each other's good strikes. Made me happy!

Heh MasterPain, too bad you live in Illinois, I think you'd love our open sparring days! We even have lotsa rolling! And I agree with you so hard.

OSU, Ahh, Sweden! That explains actually having a working train system, haha! If you went from Wado-Ryu to Kyokushin, I seriously doubt you would keep your rank. You would be asked to start again at white belt- but if what you learned at the Wado-Ryu dojo was good, solid technique, you would likely rank up faster, having an edge on rank beginners in the martial arts. From what I know of Kyokushin around the world, you probably wouldn't get to carry over that rank even if you were a black belt. But don't stress on it too terribly much. Who knows what the future will bring! OSU

OSU, I'm hoping I can get a really lively discussion going on here about female karateka who are serious contact fighters. The first thing that I will say is that there are a good number of women who train in a knockdown style but have no interest in knockdown. Women who just want to get in shape, or something. Women who train for some reason in a Kyokushin dojo, but who do not want to do kumite. This, I admit, not only confuses me, but at times it also irritates me, because every woman who says "I'm a girl, DON'T HIT ME!" or who just doesn't want to fight but doesn't mention gender makes it harder for me to be taken seriously as a knockdown karateka. That's because even if she doesn't state that it's because of her gender, her gender is the first thing that people will notice, and it will re-enforce the whole "women aren't fighters/ don't hit women" thing. Why do you think some women, or actually, some people, choose to train in a full contact knockdown style for the purpose of physical fitness when there are tons of "cardio kickboxing" places around? In those places, they don't have to constantly say "no please go lighter, just barely touch me!" The other thing I would like to share, and would love to hear your thoughts on, is this piece of writing I did a while ago: "I would NEVER fight a woman full contact! I RESPECT women!" by Evergrey Lokadottr on Sunday, 7 August 2011 at 15:54 So you wish to say to me that you would never fight a woman full contact, because you respect women. Please, do not tell me this. With these words and this attitude, you wish to make of me a victim. Weak and unable to defend myself, stand for myself. You seek to make a child out of an adult. You tell me that women have less muscle mass than men of equal size. Yes, this is true, though the percentages vary... and yet, you will fight a man who is smaller than you. You will fight a man who has much less muscle mass than you do. So this is not the truth of the matter. You do not respect me. You do not see a karateka standing before you. You see a woman, and you see me as less than you are. If you did not, if you respected me, then you would give to me everything you give to the other karateka you face. You would fight me just as hard, so that I could learn just as well. You would not seek to patronizingly instill within me some sense of false-confidence. You would not barely touch me as if I were a shrinking violet or some glass-spun thing to put on a shelf and admire- pretty but useless. You would also not, as some men do, seek to crush me and beat me down, fighting me way harder than you would a male classmate of the same stature and abilities, to show me that I'm treading in a "man's world" where I am not welcome. If you respected me, you would face me on the mat as an equal. You would afford me the same courtesy and respect that you would any other fighter. And if I were to bite off more than I could chew, you would allow me to learn that lesson and understand that, as a competent, thinking ADULT, I am capable of making the choice to risk getting hurt. We all take that risk when we step on the mat. We all know that bones are broken fighting, and sometimes people even die. You don't want to hit me in the chest because you don't want to hurt me. Well, I don't want to kick you in the testicles, but honestly it is not nearly that bad. I'm happy with you not aiming for my nipples, but if you're trying to protect me by never helping me toughen up and learn to soak a blow to the chest? Where will you be when I am walking to my car alone late at night? Will you always be there to stand in front of me and guard me, and do you think that you would always be welcome to do so? Do you think I am perpetually yearning for dependence on others? Do you think that I wish to be weak? If you truly respect women, then meet me on the mat as an equal. Anything else gives lie to your words. OSU " Note that I mention stature there. I do believe that in the dojo, sparring should be appropriate to the situation- fight so that your opponent, with their level of skill and their stature, can still learn something. We don't try to murder one another in class! But fighting women who ARE serious karateka, who DO want alive, realistic training and sparring, or who DO want to fight in full contact knockdown tournaments, and just barely touching them just because they are female? That does no one any favors at all. OSU

OSU Haha well to be honest, we use kata at ranking, but at my dojo we maybe practice it once a month. There's a small movement in some Kyokushin and related style circles to do away with kata... I think some offshoot styles don't really even do it any more. 1 hour, 20 minutes is a long commute! I travel about 45 minutes to get to my dojo... sometimes an hour. For me, it's worth it. But my advice would be to check out both schools and decide which one you like best, and if the commute is worth it if you do find you like the Kyokushin dojo. What part of the world are you in? OSU

OSU, you'll get a much more stable base, and it will be kinder on your joints, if you plant your foot so your toe is pointing out a bit. You're going from two feet to one, and having your foot at a diagonal, knee slightly bent, will give you more stability. That's what I've found, at any rate, especially when you're throwing your hip into the Mae Geri.

I don't mean to say that we never go light... but we pretty much always use contact during kumite. We are encouraged to try to work in the techniques we have drilled earlier in class, but we still tend to spar freestyle. Always, however, there is someone watching all of the fights, and they will stop kumite if they feel the need to make a point, either the individual fight, or the entire class. We usually have half the class sparring with the other half of the class, and most often it is the low ranks against the high ranks, fighting down the line, so everyone gets to fight the entire other half of the class. Sometimes low ranks will spar low ranks, and high ranks will spar high ranks... there are very good reasons for doing that, too! Also, in my dojo, usually the low rank does set the pace, unless the high rank is instructed to wake them up, or take it lighter. White belts aren't beaten into a paste- what would the point of that be? What would that teach them, except for helplessness? Though, SOME white belts (*coughs and looks back into her own past*) tend to be a bit too gung ho, and do need to get the wind knocked out of them and take some free flying lessons in order to settle down, haha! There is a lot of instruction, in the form of advice from instructors, and even advice from one's opponent, in my dojo. Sometimes (GASP!) a low rank will even notice a "tell" that a high rank has and is unaware of, hah! Not so common, of course, but it can happen. Sometimes when someone lands a really solid blow, we'll "OSU," and sometimes we'll just say "oof, GOOD ONE!" Me, I'll often start laughing. Yeah I don't know why either exactly. Sensei has called me his little berserker before.

Oh well, yeah if it's a jab...

Actually, I started working on defense way later than working on offense. I only started really working on blocking at my instructor's insistence- my strategy was to soak and then not give them another change to press forward on the attack, by raising my level of aggression instead. I guess it depends on what level of aggression and fighting spirit you have. Of course, they broke me of never blocking my throwing in face punches too. It's a heck of a lot harder to soak face strikes! Anyway, it hasn't generally been an issue for me.

My body is like a whip, and the end of my fist or my foot is the cracker. My balance is me planted on the ground, my force is thrown through my hips, from my center. OSU

Running like your life depends on it.

OSU, In my dojo, we spar hard. Well, somewhere between 40% power to about 70% power- occasionally harder, but we don't want to break each other! We're a knockdown full contact style. My experience is that getting hit hard encourages me to block, yes, but it also encourages me to fight back. I don't get upset or scared... I get used to taking hard strikes, and learn to not fear them. I can handle a lot more pain than I used to be able to, and it's much harder to make my body bruise. I've also only a few times done one-step or one-move sparring. It's not terribly realistic compared to an actual fight or serious kumite. People know what to expect, and know when it's going to end. When someone is coming at you, relentless and unpredictable, when the sparring is more alive, then you really start to lean how to think and move in a situation where you have to fight. If you never practice alive sparring, you're probably going to freeze up in a real fight. It's a totally different animal. Another thing to watch out for- it's a lot easier to have perfect kihon (technique) in a controlled, drill-like setting. In full-speed sparring with serious contact, everyone's technique falls apart a bit, especially at first. Most people find their technique falling apart quite a bit at first... that's why practice is so important. When people from styles that never have alive sparring come to enter our knockdown tournaments, most of them tend to go down really fast. The force, the speed, the unpredictability, and the pain tend to be too much of a shock for them. Of course there are exceptions to the rules, always! But for the most part, YOU FIGHT HOW YOU TRAIN. OSU!

LOL, what a silly man, thinking that you, who signed up for classes and wore a white belt, were trying to dojo storm him. A dojo storm doesn't involve quietly training in three classes! Sounds like he forgot that most basic of rules in a dojo- leave your ego at the door! Sounds really insecure for an instructor! Looks like you ran into some Ameri-Do-Te there! OSU!

Well, aside from the things we must prove to ourselves, and that is the most important, I think, we prove out style and our training by sparring with people outside of our style. Once a month, we open up our dojo for all styles to come and spar, in a friendly fashion. I think some students have been gained that way, without anyone trying to sell them on leaving their current style or joining ours. But that's not the goal- the goal is to learn, and to test ourselves, and to see how our style and training fares against other styles and other schools! Another way to do this is open tournaments. My style, Kyokushin, is a full contact knockdown style, so usually it is only other knockdown fighters who enter into these kinds of tournaments... but in most of them, anyone is welcome to try. Sometimes a non-knockdown style will enter. Sometimes they do well. Sometimes... not so much, heh! Everyone learns. But I have respect for all who dare to step on the mat! Dojo storming isn't done much any more. Liability issues, you know? And all the restrictive laws... my country is very litigious these days. So, step on the mat. Simple! And if one happens to get attacked (in an unavoidable situation) and comes out of it pretty well off, well, there's something to be said for that too! OSU!

Most people, I bow to out of respect for them, or affection for them. There are some that I do not like personally, to whom I bow out of respect for their rank and for protocol. Also, in my dojo, there is a bow where we are bowing to all, INCLUDING ourselves! OSU!