Having a traditional martial art with such a broad
range of aspects, how do you cover everything with
students who only attend classes a few hours a week,
without having classes that jump around and don’t
provide any real training?
You can’t really. The IOGKF Syllabus is so wide
ranged that you think to yourself after a month,
‘I haven’t done this or I haven’t done that’. In Higaonna Sensei’s Dojo, even though the classes
are scheduled from 8pm-10pm, they aren’t really. They go to 11pm or later most times. That
three hour block Sensei works off was the same
time frame for classes when I first started. So if
you were training three nights per week, you
were still getting nine hours training, even if you
didn’t do any other types of training. On top of
this, we used to do running, weights, train at
other Dojo’s. Most people today train twice a
week and the lessons are only an hour and a
half in most Dojo’s.
In some Dojo’s they are only an hour, so those people are only training like a third of what
we used to train, or a third of what they would get in Higaonna Sensei’s Dojo.
I believe on average most people at Higaonna Sensei’s dojo train about three times per
week. So they are basically going to cover three times as much as most westerns will
cover in a week.
So with that in mind, how do we as traditional karate
compete when a gym that can offer something like an
express 45 minute work out?
It really depends on what you are doing it for. If people just want to do Karate for just fitness, I think they’ve picked the wrong activity. For people who just want to come in, do a
45 minute workout, sweat and go home, then aerobics classes or a cross fit session will
be more suited to them.