Why did you chose the art you study?

[isshinryu5toforever]

The only dojo in my area was for Isshinryu Karate. The only regret I have is that it's difficult to find outside of specific areas.

[FushinRyu]

well i was dragged into it by my friend but i'm really glad she did. the sytle i take i feel is the best in my area. i'm already a junior blackbelt and have been taking fushin ryu for 4 almost 5 years.

[Lord Yasai]

I was too young to know the difference of Martial Arts styles and knew of only one school...the one my parents signed me up to.

I have no regrets and wouldn't have started or transferred anywhere else.

My own experience in starting martial arts was a lot like that, too. I've been doing MA for 4 years now, and I really enjoy my school.

[tonydee]

I tried out a karate class at the YMCA on a school holidays program. I loved it, and the instructor was very encouraging, so I said to my parents that I wanted to find a karate school. Somehow mum ended up mentioning it to the librarian at her office, who turned out to be a TKD instructor, so I tried the closest dojang in that school and was hooked.

Year later, I moved city and looked around for a while. I tried some Bagua Chang for six months: think I'd just seen the training hall when walking past, and they had lots of newspaper and magazine interviews posted up to read - all sorts of interesting things about the master's background in China, university degree in martial arts, travelling meeting and interviewing masters for a martial arts publication over there, other stuff. Sounded worth a try, even though there was no free lesson, and each lesson cost more than 2 weeks unrestricted training in my old school. The senior master was great technically, and the style has lots to offer, but the training centre just wasn't geared up for the intensity I wanted, and the most senior students were making terribly slow progress despite additional and very expensive private lessons. Too many Chinese families sending their young children, or older men wanting to keep in touch with some traditional arts more as a cultural leisure activity, without really having fighting spirit, and I think the master had relaxed into that, enjoying his standing in the Chinese community - a regular honoured guest performing a few minutes demo at social banquets - and losing some of the drive evident in some of the interviews done when he first established his training centre and hoped to make it an international centre of martial arts excellence and research.

I tried a nominally shaolin school for a while, but it was pretty much kickboxing and I wasn't learning anything.

I visited various taekwondo schools but found nothing captivating.

I got into hapkido because I called a taekwondo grandmaster wondering about private classes, but he only did group classes and recommended I visit his head master first. I went along and found it was a hapkido class that night - not what I was expecting at all. Being swept and thrown so many times wasn't a lot of fun, given I had only minimal knowledge of breakfalls. The strikes and kicks were ok, but I liked the stronger versions in my taekwondo training, and by the end of the class I was thinking it was going to be a one-off, but the master was so friendly I didn't feel like saying no when he asked if I'd return, and pretty soon I was finding lots to like about hapkido too. The same master taught me some Modern Yang Tai Chi.

When I moved to London, I trained with a 7th dan ITF guy who I'd seen at a sports centre where I happened to play badminton, but it was too sports orientated for my tastes. I trained under a more old-school TKD master for a while, but an out-of-control 1st dan was encouraged because he was seen as useful to send to national events to knock around other dojang's students in a bit of political point scoring, despite injuring or scaring off a couple of the local colour belt students, and I lost respect for the master's priorities.

I visited a few other places - something like Hapkido that was a bit too hippy to be useful for self defense (they thought wanting something useful for real fighting was crass). A wing chun school advertising themselves as a 'think you know how to fight, come try sparring us'... I did exactly that and didn't find it educational. The master carried on with some completely non-sensical attempts to explain the physics of why a front-facing stance could close the gap to attack quicker than a side facing one, without any consideration for the angle from rear-of-heel to centre of mass. I'd quite like to learn wing chun one day, but need it to be from someone who really understands the pros and cons of things.

Various other experiences... a year of aikido, but the 8th dan was too absurd for me... instructors falling over themselves in a great display of the power of suggestion, but nothing to do with martial arts. I trained under Ueshiba, who is much more practical, but felt the Aikido I'd seen was too watered down - I'm not at all convinced that the undoubtedly brilliant insights and abilities of Morihei Ueshiba are sufficiently conveyed and honed through the training curriculum to produce more people of his ability. Almost a topic for another thread: "a martial art only stays as good as the exercises and training mechanisms make it".

There've been a few other schools here and there but these days I just train myself, sometimes with some ad-hoc friends from various styles. I'll probably open a dojang now I've moved out of central Tokyo and the rent's more sane.

Finding a good school is tough - doing it that first time when you don't know anything much about martial arts, so much more so.

Cheers,

Tony

[blackxpress]

I chose an instructor. When I first started there were only 2 schools in our town and I went with Wado because I liked the instructor better. Now I'm living in an area where there are no Wado schools and just finished the process of having to find a new place to train. I researched all kinds of different styles trying to find one that was similar to Wado. In the end, I went with the instructor. I didn't know much about Kuk Sul Do but discovered that Grandmaster Yang is serving as interim head instructor at the school near here. I dropped by, met him, watched him run class and next thing I knew I was signing on the dotted line.

[Danielsan]

Each of the different MAs have their advantages. From my limited knowledge, karate(s) focus on the ability to strike at a distance, but softer forms like Aikido provide a focus on joint locks, which you typically have to be closer in combat to achieve. But as many will tell you, you have to find the one that is right for You. I'm in a similar state trying to figure out which to get into after 10 years away from MA.

[firehouse85]

the closest class was 35 miles away, and it was isshin ryu, been hooked ever since,

[Blade96]

well (about to tell a story here now hehe)

I was sick since April and in may I suffered a severe allergic reaction to the antibiotics I took for my strep throat. That caused me to be bedridden and suffering for months. When I recovered from being sick, I had been unable to watch movies cause i was bedridden and so i grabbed a bunch of my dvds and one of them I grabbed was my Blade trilogy. I'd been a fan of wesley snipes for a while, some years, and he has a 5th dan in Shotokan. I wanted to try martial arts cause i watched him doing it and I thought it looked cool. First school I found was a Kenpo karate, so I signed up for ten weeks to try it out. and it was close to where I lived.

Then one day not long after I found an advertisement for traditional Shotokan while reading through the university student newspaper as I do every week. I went to check it out and I knew I had found what I still like to call 'wesley snipes karate' xD So i was doing both kinds of karate. That was in september.

While doing Kenpo and shotokan though I knew nothing of the 'way of life' or the founders, I intuitively felt it to be a very intelligent, philosophical art, very spiritual. And that suited me because I am that way in real life. I like philosophy and I think about life a lot.

After about a month and a half I started doing research on Master sensei Funakoshi and found that he was a philosopher and deep thinker, more much more than just a martial artist. and his thoughts were what I instinctively had felt while doing Shotokan though I knew nothing of him at that time. (couple of nights ago I had told my mother that shotokan is for intelligent people and then later found out funakoshi had said something along the lines of the same. go figure.)

I also liked that you didn't need to do 50 or so pushups to pass belt tests in the shotokan (which is what the kenpo school required) and half the Kenpo classes were jumping jacks and running and pushups. Though you do exercise in Shotokan, the physical enhancement necessary is obvious without unneccessary emphasis.

I knew I had found my martial art afterjust a month and a half of being in it. And considering that self - esteem and confidence and physical enhancement was what I needed (I am a survivor of abuse from childhood and teenage years) Shotokan is giving me what I have long lacked.

Now I have been training the Shotokan Karate-Do for 2 months. I love it more and more each time I do it. The beauty, the grace, the power, the enhancement. Everytime I do my routines and my kata, Heian Shodan, I feel so.......serene. and confident and powerful emotionally, like I can face the world, which most of the time is scary to me. I guess that serenity and confidence might be one of the reasons Heian means 'peaceful mind'.

also, I developed an excellent student teacher relationship with my senseis. They got very fond of me, and I of them. Guess it didn't hurt that I seemed to be (as they said) on the same page as them, philosophically I understood the true meaning of Karate-Do (even though a rookie) Like I said, I'm quite spiritual and philosophical myself. I consider them as my mentors, and as I said in another post, if my sensei told me to go to the moon, I'd go there, too. xD That's how much I respect them and that I have the discipline. They tell me I am doing excellent in Shotokan. I test next year, for my yellow belt, and sensei told me he doesn't think I would have much trouble passing on the first try. As I understand it, tests aren't really about whether you can do everything perfectly. Its also about your attitude and your outlook on the ways of Karate-Do (so one of my sempais told me)

Having such a great relationship with the shotokan senseis also was a factor in choosing Shotokan as well.

[KarateGeorge]

I kind of found my school by accident and the owner turned out to be such an excellent instructor that I've been training with him since.

I'd been wanting to learn ever since I was a teen, but we lived in a small town with only a few nearby choices, and my parents couldn't afford any of them. Once I graduated college and moved on my own, it remained something that I kept in the back of my mind that I'd wanted to do. I'd moved to a metropolitan area by this time, and a friend of mine, not knowing that I'd had this secret desire to learn a martial art, saw a school just opening up by his home and asked me if I wanted to join him to go check it out. It turned out to be a Shuri-te karate school that was re-locating to a new facility. Needless to say, I agreed, and fell in love with the place. One of the black belts there had a black belt in Wing Chun as well, and eventually started running his own Wing Chun classes there too, so I signed up for those as well.

It wasn't the owner's source of income, and he did it just because it was something he loved to do, so it was rather inexpensive, as he was charging just enough to keep the doors open. But when the economy took a turn for the worse, the school closed it's doors because he starting losing too many students to economic conditions. He effectively "retired" from teaching as far as having an official school goes, but he built a small "school" as part of his home and a select group of us still go to train with him there.

[RichardZ]

I choose a martial art, not for a style, but for a chance to improve myself in what ever I may have lacking.