Killer7

Sanshinkai karate which is unfortunately reliatively local to my area. you can find out a little more at http://kilewisville.com/content.php?shanshinkai.htm

Exactly my thoughts. We are taught to drive through and not let up. In your dojo do you do line drills? We have about six people line up in front of one person, and the people come at the one person (slow at first, but then moving up to full speed) and we do a series of non-chorographed attacks. If controlled it can be somewhat realistic to a real fight. Second degree blackbelts and up do "double line" where two lines charge the person at once. I love it.

The first class I ever took at my dojo they taught me that in a real situation, I should try finger rake to the eyes, four knuckles to the neck, or a side kick to the knee

Wow those videos look pretty fancy. Looks a little too flashy if you ask me. Would look good in a movie though lol.

O Soto Gari and O Soto Nage

Do any of you find that you do not like sparring or feel restrained by sparring rules? At least in the rules for the type of sparring in my style, I feel my training for self defnese and "real world" situations are contradicted by sparring. I often feel like sparring is too much of a glorified version of tag rather than practice for actual combat. In class, we do many other things that are simmilar to sparring that are more advantageous I feel. We do one on one self defense (one person attacks you repeatedly and one must counter them), line drill (a string of people attack one is succession), and wrestling/grappling type activites. I just think that overly focusing on point-based sparring is not as effective to teach a student how to fight as some other self-defense drills. Any thoughts?

It seems like the majority of weapons are illegal in California. All the websites I go to shop for supplies at always say they can't ship it to CA, MA, and NY. Sucks for you guys .

Our style has 11 belts before black and there are monthly promotions, but only to a certain extent. When you get five belts away from black it slows down to every six months.

My Gi flies open a lot too. It came with the little strings on the insides, but in our style we do a lot of throwing and tossing, therefore ripping them off in weeks. The biggest problem is that generally student Gi's are very lightweight and made of some thin cotton or polyester. Next time you buy a Gi get a good heavyweight Gi and you won't run into this problem. And yeah, my belt is flat against my back.

I think it depends a lot on the training style of your dojo and also how many belts there are. For example: In my style there are many "extra" belts on the way to black belt. There are many kind of "half step" belts that don't really have any difficult requirements associated with them. In short, I think it is a bad idea if you just have four or five belts before black. If you're like me, however, and have 11 belts before black I think it's OK. I never skipped a belt, but I tested for one of the really easy belts one week and the next up belt a couple weeks later because I knew a lot past the previous one. I find in many Americanized styles of Karate there are a lot of less significant belts just to keep young children enthusiastic about karate and advancing.

At my dojo, anyone over 16 is allowed to attend night adult classes. They are great because to a degree we get to do what we want to. I go four times a week to the dojo for about an hour on average. We stretch out on our own first and then salute in (we don't bow, we cross our arms in a downward motion with a loud kiai). Then depending on what we want to do and who is teaching the class we work on katas, sparring, breaking, judo/jujitsu teqniques, weapons, groundfighting etc.

Second brown in Sanshinkai Karate. I've been at it for a little less than a year and a half. Probobly be another year towards first black. First post by the way