Training:How rough is too rough?

[granmasterchen]

I personally find that too many schools are focused on a) making money or b) building self-esteam. neither of these is bad or wrong, but i still think the focus should be on the training and to me that means training hard.

 

I have seen many schools that dont train hard core like I did when I first started out in the martial arts.

 

My school wasnt too bad, it was what I considered standard practice. I trained there for several years before going on to the military and touring the world. I found that many schools dont even perform situps, pushups, and stretches! I have seen schools that do not believe in contact in fights and those that do not believe in sparring yet these are schools that advertise deadly fighting arts. I have also seen the schools that only teach 30 min classes or something like that and some schools that teach once a week or less.

 

Back in those days we would do a huge amount of physical training...we would knock out thousands of jumping jacks...

 

I remember several times where we would do 500 push ups, 200 on your knuckles (and we only trained on hard wood floors, or out in the gravel parking lot), 100 finger tip push ups, 100 clapping pushups, and finished it off with regular push ups, we did one handed push ups,

 

1500 situps at a time, leg lifts for 30 min +,

 

we would run 15 miles for testings,

 

we did the balancing on poles and get hit in the legs with sticks and boards if a stance was wrong,

 

we would break boards over our bodies,

 

and put ourselves in very painfull situations by being the "volunteer for a knife or gun self defense",

 

we trained with real knives and learned to take cuts,

 

we would do laps of duckwalks around our large dojo,

 

and learned to do falls, sweeps, and takedowns on the hard wood floor. We trained everyday for a minimum of 1 hour and 30 min per class, with several back to back classes.

 

We sparred full contact to the knock out or submission of the opponent just like the early UFCs....

 

we did classes of pressure points and vital points, nothing like willingly taking pain and being submitted to knock outs with out fighting back.

 

The way we learned our catstances was to stand in the stance for 45 min....intense pain after awhile, but after that you never get it wrong.

 

We would break bricks with our heads for our black belt test. We did real life street self defenses where we would have to fight off 4 or more attackers at once, and then the attackers would have weapons, then we would blind fold you and you would have to fight them off.

 

Our testings lasted from sunrise to sunset for several days....one mistake and you fail, anything from your wrist bent wrong on one punch to a stance being slightly off...you failed and waited six months to retest or even up to a year. We would train in all situations from buildings with no fans or AC in temps over 100 degrees, to training outside in the middle of winter when it would get into the negative numbers.

 

We would do one leg deep knee bends (painful), and then there was the weapon training...we would lie across two chairs(feet on one and upper body laying on the other) then you would open up your gi top, to show bare skin, we would lie a cucumber across our chest while another student took a katana and cut it in half...we would also do this with cucumber against our throats from lying position and standing positions.

 

We would spend hours beating our forearms together against anothers forearms (forte) and the same with our shins, we also punched boards and bricks and steel for hours to build up callouses and to prepare us for breaking drills, we would take an apple and place it in a five gallon bucket fill the bucket with sand and spear hand through the sand to get the apple....aaaa the memories of those days and my favorite school.

 

So I started this thread with the intent of giving people knowledge of some of the things that we used to do back in the old days and to get some participation from others on grueling things that they did that would now be considered "too rough".

 

Now I know that many have trained even harder...and I am not saying that our training was harsh, I am saying that was normal for us, and what I see today just makes me shake my head....

 

Thanks.

Edited June 8, 2004 by granmasterchen

[White Warlock]

That is one massive paragraph in the middle there. Huge paragraphs are so friggin' hard to read AND comprehend, most readers would steer clear, and yet i'm interested in what you have to say. Seriously, I'll read it later unless you're inclined to maybe break it up a little.

[granmasterchen]

basically (now edited) i was just stating some of the physical things we had to do (incase you skipped all the above statements to see what others have written)

 

i just want to see if anyone else trains hard in their dojos or dojangs or what ever, what kind of traingings do you do, and how do you feel about the different trainings?

 

does it make for a better martial artist or not, or is it just simply different, I just want to know everyones' view on this issue,

 

Thanks again, sorry about the long paragraphs and such.

[DokterVet]

Sounds like some pretty hardcore training to me.

[angelica d]

It sounds great IMHO, except for the breaking bricks with your head for the shodan grading. Whats the point in doing that, its never going to come up in a real life scenario and you could possibly get brain damage. Thats not hard core to me, thats just macho.

 

But I was pretty impressed by the rest of it, everyone must have been really fit. I know what you mean about how there are a lot of dojos that don't really push the students. I was reading a martial arts magazine the other day and there was a report from a grading, with lots of photos. The students didn't look like they'd been working at all!

 

You must have had some seriously long classes though, to fit in all that fitness/strength stuff and all the basic techniques/kata and partner work! It makes me want to have a go at one of your hard core classes out of curiousity, just to see how long I'd last!

[ramymensa]

Grandmaster what you say is indeed the truth for many people in the years that MA was taken seriously. Unfortunatelly these days a training schedule like you presented and my sensei told me they did is not the one to keep your dojo full of paying students. Mercantility and economical problems that come with running a dojo made this "watering down" of the MA's. There are stil instructors that train their students very hard, but they are few

[TheDevilAside]

I wish I could train at a place like that. My dojo isn't nearly that hard on you, they will push you (to your own personal limits) a bit, but nothing like that. Unless you make friends with the right guys and let the instructors know that you're no softie.. then it's a different story.

 

One of our instuctors who's pretty young went to a Muay Thai (or Krav Maga.. I really have a terrible memory) training camp in California where they trained pretty hard from 7 to 5 or something like that. Fought full contact, etc. He came back with a two missing front teeth, and he told us stories of several other injuries.

[Thruhiker]

There is something to be said about working out hard. You can learn a lot about yourself and your tolerance for pain. However, one of the purposes is to know what it feels like to get hit and how much force you are producing behind your techniques.

 

As far a getting your teeth knocked out I think the individual lost some self-control. The mouth is not a location in which you want to make contact with. The human teeth will cut your hands up if you make contact with them. As a martial artist you would be better off placing your punch or kick into the ribs or the solarplex than in the mouth.

 

The object of full contact is to learn effective placement of your techniques with the right amount of force to do damage.

[Dijita]

I noticed that you are from Japan? If that's the case, I'm preety sure that people in Japan take martial arts a lot more seriously than North America where it's more of a sport to most people. I envy your training. I would love to endure all of that to make me stronger. The only thing I worry is the use of swords and cutting cucumbers on peoples necks. It just seems beyond risky.

 

I have a strong belief that when we train in our dojo, it is fairly hard. We sometimes have the softer classes when we do kata. However we always warm up with plenty of pushups, situps, and squats. We make hard contact... we often do drills that involved a partner punching us in the stomach as hard as possible randomly while we keep our eyes closed.

 

I try to do some hard training at home as well. I'm trying real hard to condition my shins. I roll them with wood, hit them with my hand over and over for 15-20 minutes. I want to get out this summer and start conditioning my hands as well by building a makiwari on a tree or something.

 

I'm a believer in hard training.... though it should be introduced in steps to the beginner to avoid injury.

[Xerxes]

I'm going out on a limb here, but did you do your training in Japan?