Statement of Purpose

This project is an investigation of 5 Martial Arts styles. Self-defense is a major theme in martial arts today and to better understand how different martial arts schools and styles treat self-defense I am going to learn all I can (given time restraints) about each of the five styles. These schools will be chosen from a list of local martial arts studios, and the style will be the one that is taught at that studio. Many studios teach multiple styles, so in this case on of the styles taught there will be analyzed. At the end of the project all the schools I visited will be rated and scored to show in which areas they excel or by contrast, fall short.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Kyokushin Karate

     Yesterday my journey began in earnest, visiting my first Dojo. Run out of the Aikido of Scottsdale building the Dojo in question teaches traditional Kyokushin Karate, also called Kyokushinkai. Kyokushinkai is made of three Japanese kanji,
     Kyoku meaning “Ultimate”.
     Shin meaning “Truth” or “Reality”.
     Kai meaning “Society” or “Association”.
Kyokushinkai practitioners are confident in their style, as they should be. Training in the traditional ways they show great respect and discipline while training. Kyokushin karate is a full contact traditional karate style that mainly focuses on fighting and self-defense through discipline and power.

     My visit began when I arrived at the dojo at 6:40, after the initial meet and greet we went outside the dojo and ran for 15 minutes, the first 10 minutes was just normal running and the last 5 minutes were sprints. When we finished we entered the dojo and removed our shoes, no shoes were allowed in the dojo at all. Then we began 30 minutes of stretching, all of the stretches were conducted in Japanese. The dojo itself had a high ceiling and padded floor for training on.
At the beginning of class we bowed to the front of the room (I am in the Black uniform)

We did some basics focusing on speed and power, using basic punches and kicks, in Kyokushinkai, punches are not supposed to go to the head, because that is too easy, only kicks are allowed to the head. After about an hour of basics another martial artist came in to the dojo, he was not a student of the dojo, but, he came to visit just I had.
The other martial artist is the one on the far left

 He went over some of the techniques that he learned from his dojo. The reason we did this was to get used to inter-style fighting because on March 24 there is an inter-school fighting gathering. I got thrown around a lot (check out the video) but also learned a lot.

 At the very end of class, by this time 9 o’ clock, we started Kumite, which is like sparring or fighting (also see the videos). By the end of class it was 9:30. My class in Kyokushinkai was enlightening to say the least and I quite enjoyed it.

Thanks, and keep reading
Mr. Waaler
Posted by at

2 comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)