Zaine

Just wrapped up my Sankyu test. There were 10 other testees, 4 total going for Sankyu, 2 for Yonkyu, 3 for Gokyu, and 1 for Nanakyu. It was a good test! Everyone passed, and I'm currently enjoying some pizza in celebration. Almost to that 3rd (and 4th) Shodan!

I was in your shoes 6 months ago, starting a new dojo that practices a different branch of Shorin Ryu. I just went in as a white belt, didnt even consider asking to come in at Shodan. I wear it during informal classes, and of course any time at a tournament or outside thing, but in classes I started over and I found the experience to be refreshing and a lot of fun. That said, they are different enough from my branch of Shorin Ryu (Matsumura Seito/Shorinji to Shobayashi/Shudokan) that I don't think it would have made much sense to ask. If this school is so similar to the point of the difference being trivial, I would ask the Sensei what their expectations are.

The dojo I grew up in also did mostly MMA/KC rules when sparring. The CI reasoned that it was because he wanted us to be prepared in the event that a fight didn't end due to some self-defense technique we learned, but I think a big part of it was also that he's a fan of MMA and just wanted to take part in it. Whatever the reason, the tournaments we went to did continuous sparring and we always took first in our respective age/rank groups.

Allow me to insert some of the words I learned while compiling a massive amount of debt in order to be called a Master of the English Language. From what I can tell from reviews, both professional and reader, it seems to be a speculative/slipstream young adult book. Slipstream is an umbrella term used to say that a book, or story, has a setting that is either the modern, real world or a world that is closely paralleled in technology and culture. In this alternate world, there is some element of fantasy (in this case Chi being quantifiable and used as a force instead of abstract and philosophical). In essence, it's an imagining of our world with a few things that are different. This is nice because for the reader, they do not have to do a lot learning about the world or memorize a bunch of obscure locations, making the things that they do need to learn much more manageable. For the writer, they don't have to create some huge fantasy world with that they have to keep track of. It's a genre which has been seeing rising popularity within the last 2 decades (think Harry Potter, Hunger Games, or, going back even further, Slaughterhouse Five). This one looks like a fun read. I think I'll pick it up to read to my kiddo.

So many people don't make it this far. I'm glad you have.

I would definitely recommend a HIIT routine, there are a number of good ones to be found online. Once you get used to the process, you can start to sub in exercises you enjoy and create the routine that works best for you. That will help you maintain muscle performance during rolling. The cardio can be whatever you want. Sounds like you have a pretty good idea on where to go from there when it comes to cardio.

That's not an uncommon approach, especially in less formalized schools. There is a fairly large amount of stuff Traditional Karate does on the grounds of tradition alone. Some of these things are about respecting the history of the art, and some of the things boil down to "well, the Sensei who taught me this did it this way so that's how we're going to do it" even though the Sensei who taught them was 4' 10" and they are 6' 3". It's good to understand how people at different heights do kata so that it makes sense for them, and how a kata was originally taught, but if I'm teaching a class full of giants then I'm probably going to have them do less high blocks. For me, testing is one of those traditions that I quite enjoy. It feels good to go through a gauntlet and emerge victorious. Even if you know the odds are stacked on your side. Even if you know the chances of you failing the test are slim to none. There's always that errant maybe that gets you. It feels good to win. My first Sensei would just test you when you were ready. Instead of a special day (aside from Shodan tests, which were scheduled for a special day), when you were ready you tested during normal class. Everyone would do the warm-ups, you would demonstrate your kata, go through some sparring rounds, and then at the end of class you would be awarded your new rank.

There is a very good reason that Sanchin is such a wide spread and important kata in martial arts.

It really depends on your end goals. We're looking at two different types of cardio work here: Aerobic and Anaerobic. Both are important to martial arts, but your specific goals will determine what you want to focus more on. Both aerobic and anaerobic refer to the air we get as we do the exercise. Aerobic means "with air" and generally refers to exercises we continuously that last longer than 2 minutes. Anaerobic means "without air" and refers to exercises that we do with such intensity that our bodies struggle to oxygenate cells in the short periods of time we are moving. Aerobic exercises are things like running, swimming, biking, or any other prolonged activity you enjoy with no breaks. This trains our bodies to better take in air. It allows our heart rates to stay lower over a sustained amount of time. It also trains us to breath better through long pushes. Anaerobic exercises are things like HIIT, weightlifting, and strength training in general. These are workouts that focus on what your muscles can do while they aren't being actively oxygenated. They are exercises that focus on created sustained power throughout an exercise while also raising your ability to sustain desired intensity through thing like sparring rounds. I enjoy doing HIIT because while it is largely Anaerobic in nature, it touches on Aerobic health as well and teaches me, psychologically, to better handle multi-round bouts and sparring. Furthermore, if I become bored with a certain routine, I can switch exercises in and out of the plan to keep it fresh. Like I said, your goals matter when choosing what to do, as does access to the equipment necessary to do these things. I enjoy HIIT, for example, not only because it is varied but because I don't need equipment to do it. It can all be done with bodyweight. At the end of the day, the best supplement is an exercise that you enjoy doing. Starting a routine is difficult, and the more you dislike it, the less you want to do it. If you like biking, that's your jam. If you prefer swimming, then swim.

I see what you're getting at now. I do not have much experience with boxing gyms, though we did have a boxing coach at the MMA gym we ended up renting out who, when he had off time, would come over and teach us some stuff. It was a lot fun and informs a lot about the way that I fight now. What I can speak towards is the idea that, broadly and with exceptions, traditional martial arts does tend to have the ability to focus on the individuals with more than others. I hypothesize her that this is largely due to the difference in competitive scenes of Boxing and Martial Arts. Boxing is far more popular than even something like MMA. The top 5 grossing PPV fights for boxing averaged 3,106,000 PPV buys whereas the top 5 UFC averaged 1,710,000 PPV. While MMA is not something like Karate, it is closer, and remains a good, if rough and imperfect, comparison. The point being, if a boxing coach has a person they're training who seems more than good, that they have whatever it factor that indicates that they can go the distance, then it also means that the coach could achieve renown. Renown means more requests to train people. It means larger cuts of prize money. It means that they're set for life and those students who are "merely talented" they few as fodder for the betterment of their prized students. Or perhaps they see someone who can be a coach one day and they keep them around to teach them that. Again, I have little to no familiarity with how boxing gyms work as a whole, so I'm basing this hypothetical off of your analysis and boxing movies. Karate, on the other hand, does not have a clear path (though extremely difficult, requiring an absurd amount of dedication, and even then, often luck-based) to fame and fortune. No competitor gets rich off of their success at World's, or similar events. While fans of fighting, and I would wager and good number of non-fight fans, know who Floyd Mayweather is, and to a lesser extent Connor McGregor, I imagine that most would be hard pressed to tell you a single name of someone competing in KarateCombat. Even dojos that do focus heavily on tournament results and are successful won't really find the success that Boxing would. Because of that, and because it is better to have a high density of people who are placing at tournaments over than one person, Karate has more time to focus on more people than Boxing does, which may only ever see one person in a gym who could "go the distance" and that's if they're lucky.

Haha yeah same. This was before my time, but I got a chance to peruse some issues that would have been out in the time I was starting karate. I can remember going to my local MA supply store and staring wide-eyed at these products through the glass.

This is exactly why weight class exists in professional fighting. A 50 pound weight advantage is huge, and hard to overcome. I do not have the most experience against larger opponents when it comes to fighting on the ground, though the Sensei who originally trained me had more than 100 pounds on me (I never won against him). The thing he would always tell me is let them wear themselves out, gravity and using their weight against them is your friend, and pray the first two things are on your side today.

I found it on Google Books, which has an archive of Black Belt Magazine. It's the March 1988 issue. https://books.google.com/books?id=PdYDAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false It's interesting to see the adds and pictures from this time period.

Do you have a link to that article? I'm having some trouble finding it online.

I know that the colors have no meaning. What I am looking for is the beginning of this particular myth. Where did it start?

I believe in moral purity even less, but that's a discussion for a different website. If that's the case, however, my stance doesn't really change. We can just ignore the final paragraph.

So already an update, I have found that Judo seems to be the first to wear a gi, and Funakoshi is largely responsible for making it popular within the realm of Karate. Still nothing on colors.

I've heard this a lot, as I am sure we all have. Does anyone have any historical record on this? Where did this story began. My dad likes to share a story about why his mother cut the ends off of beef roasts. His mother used to say that she cut the ends off because it's what her mother did. His grandmother claimed that it was what her mother did to make it taste better. His great-grandmother said that she had to cut off the ends to make it fit in the roasting pan. To me, it seems that the story about white gis is similar. I know that (off)white clothing would be cheaper, as it was undyed, and people would want separate clothing to sweat in so as to not ruin their nicer clothing. It seems to me that early karatekas just wore white out because they didn't want to soil expensive cloths, and eventually ascribed a meaning to it (probably because someone randomly asked and the Sensei wanted a better answer than "it's cheap"). Anyway, martial arts history is notoriously shrouded in myth and legend, and it's often difficult to know the actual history of something. In this, google has not been particularly helpful, and the scholarly resources I have immediate access to are based in literary studies and not history (the small amount of history scholarship I do have ready access to tends to be Western, as it is). So I am hoping someone here as better access to histories that might include something like this. A book recommendation, an journal article, etc.

There was certainly betting going on during the 2020 Olympics. I would be surprised that there wasn't betting going on at World's and other large events that, while not popular in the public eye, does have no small number of watchers. I assume that, when it comes to betting, the rules follow the format of Rule 1 for the internet: If it exists, someone is betting on it. Add to this newer formats of Karate media like KarateCombat which betters would be more familiar with the spirit of, and I think it's safe to say that there is betting. I disagree here as a philosophical matter. I don't believe that things, in and of themselves, have value. We create and assign value to things and we tend to be incredibly biased when it comes to our favorite things. Value only matters insofar as as those that find value in it. Many people would say that Karate does not have any value at all, or negative value (I've met plenty of martial artists who take this position). We tend to view things like martial arts in terms of pure when it is closely related to the source material. We often ask questions about lineage to pre-judge the quality of the practitioner. We ask questions like "How related is it to Shuri, Naha, or Tomari-Te?" or "Was your teacher taught by someone taught by Ginchin Funakoshi?" We obsess over purity but in all reality a system can be as pure as we want it to be but if it isn't effective at what it is trying to do then it needs to change. In sense of purity, also, one could argue that modern karate is not "pure" at all. It isn't the karate of the past, it's blended and morphed. It changed with the world and it should have. It's a good thing that this has happened. It's good that Itosu created a program less rigorous so that schools would take it up in their P.E. programs. It's good that Funakoshi changed it to appeal to mainlanders wanting to learn Karate. As we learn more about physical health and as the world changes, we should change.

Follow up, do they offer Zoom classes? If you can make it once or twice a week and Zoom in otherwise that might be a good compromise.

Are you looking to return at 6 days a week? I understand not being able to go a lot, my dojo is about the same distance, but I got twice a week to mine and I feel that this is worth it to me. Would you feel the same about limiting it to twice a week? Or is that still to much for your current situation?

How far away did you move from the Shotokan class?

My first dojo did a lot of "full contact" sparring, which is to say at higher levels it very much resembled an MMA bout in rules. We were able to punch to faces, do takedowns/throws, go to the ground for locks, the whole 9. Even then, no one was throwing a punch to knock someone out. Strikes were often pulled so as to not cause injury (especially to the face, no one was ever knocked out and we were pretty good at hitting someone in the forehead instead of the nose). The only real "full-contact" sparring we did was during tests, when we had to showcase that we were able to do this in a "real" situation. EVEN THEN, no one got knocked out (though contusions and busted ribs weren't uncommon. Kyokushin does do a lot of hard sparring, I've spent some time in Kyokushin dojos. They obviously don't go full out like we might see at competitions every time, but the hardcore dojos are intense. The amount of joint issues that I have seen with Kyokushin Karateka later in life does worry me a little, it seems an art prone to lasting injury. However, I don't have the numbers to back that up and I could just be only hearing about a loud minority. How many times have we heard of other Karateka that have lasting injuries because of their dedication? I've met a lot of older masters with joint replacements. It could just be due to our poor understanding of joint health and proper stretching techniques in the past.

There's a whole culture of high priced MA services. A part of it is this American belief that we can make our living doing something like running a dojo and all it takes is hard work. I know that this is not a specifically American belief, but it certainly is loud here. This is exacerbated by people who have been successful doing something like this (e.g. Jesse Enkamp) and feeling that they can do it better. Another part is our belief that price = quality, so if I'm paying $150 for something that someone is paying $80 for, then I know that my education is of a higher caliber than theirs. (Internalized classism is rampant throughout the Western world, so it is no wonder than it plays here). Sometimes compromise is necessary. Maybe a dojo doesn't tick all of the boxes but it ticks enough of them to be worth while. I currently pay $65/month unlimited classes for my dojo. The Shihan and other Sensei have daytime jobs, and this is their passion project. They teach karate in a way that I like, are serious about their training, and their students are typically tested when they should be and not just because the school wanted to lower turnover. I like the people there, and I enjoy my time. Do they have everything that I am looking for? Absolutely not. There are things that I wish we did differently. Some of those things are things that I just wish we did more (like sparring, but with COVID still around I am more than understanding as to why it's not as prevalent). There are some things that I don't think we need to do as much of. But at the end of the day, it's not my dojo, it's the dojo where I train. When I achieve a rank where I can open my own school (Nidan, by the dojos standards, Sandan by my own), I can train my students in whatever way I find best. All of this to say: Sometimes you have to compromise with a school that isn't perfect for you so that you can be the perfect school for you. There is no perfect school or student, but only you can train yourself in the way that you want. Martials Arts training is 30% classroom, 70% personal training.

It's more of a rules change than anything else. From what I saw of the competitions, the palm strikes are more slaps than anything else and can only be done when someone is one the ground. From what I can infer, Bravo (the creator) got jaded with the current rule set of BJJ tournaments and felt this was a purer way of doing bouts. I can see where he's coming from, and have no loyalty either way. Otherwise, it looks like BJJ.