I am pleased to say that we have all been showing a great attitude towards our training of late. That’s not to say we couldn’t train harder or more often. I will explain below. On Thursday 12 April we tried our hand at the ‘gentle art’ that is jiu jitsu Read more…
The title of this article is probably not a question you have ever asked yourself. Hopefully I will explain this below. Towards the end of last year I discussed the basic forward stance with some senior grades at the club with a specific emphasis on the the pulled back hand. Read more…
On 27 November 2017 the club held a grading evening and I am pleased to say there were a lot of eager students hoping to impress the grading panel. More so than I had expected and had planned for in fact. Everyone tried their best on the evening and those Read more…
I am sure you will have noticed that I often (some might say constantly) point out little things that aren’t quite right when you’re doing your techniques. I do try to balance this out with praise and often ignore some faults to avoid coming down too hard on students. You Read more…
At the recent grading I was rather surprised to notice the range of marks given by the grading panel for an individual’s technique. I have therefore written an article to help try to clarify how we should be marking students for all concerned. For the past 8 years we have Read more…
Omedetō That’s Japanese for congratulations! Well done, in no particular order, to YuYan, Satori, Symon, Andrei and Kody for passing their yellow belt grading. Hopefully this will be the first of many successful gradings for them. They all tried very hard and for the most part concentrated extremely well Read more…
After a recent training session I was asked by a slightly confused student about what stance they should be practising in. That’s a nice simple question. It has a nice simple answer. Unfortunately the simple answer isn’t at all helpful. Let me try to explain. The simple answer is, it Read more…
Karate is clearly a martial art being one of a number of philosophies of self defence or single combat. Martial arts are often thought of as originating in the Far East but the term was used in Europe long before the Far Eastern styles were known to us in the Read more…
In previous articles I have touched on a bit of both eastern and western philosophy and how they can, directly or indirectly, be used as part of our thinking and martial arts training. This time I am going to be a bit abstract based upon a comment John made at Read more…
On 2 April some of the club’s black belts attended a karate instructors assessment session in Norwich together with members of other local Shukokai karate clubs. For Ian, James, Morgan and Steve this was the first time that they had attended such a session. This was a chance for us Read more…