Visiting the honbu dojo

Honbu is Japanese for like the "headquarters" of an organization.

That's where I was this past week; training with Sensei and a few other students in Gardena, CA.

My entire body is sore from those practices. My butt, my back, my arms, my legs. It's a good kind of sore though. The kind of sore that lets you know your own training has not been up to par with Sensei's standards, i.e. lazy. The way that Sensei teaches us karate engages our whole bodies. Subsequently, if you're like me, you feel afterward as if you had jumped into a pool with all your clothes on. Wet. Soaking wet. I have yet to encounter another martial arts teacher that gets me to engage my body the way Sensei does. The man just knows how to train.

It was interesting participating in and observing the drills/exercises we did during class. One particularly difficult drill for me was practicing a kick aimed at the abdomen of the body while twisting the foot of the supporting leg and simultaneously shifting forward. The twisting of the foot was to add deception to the kick, i.e. it looks like you're gonna give a front kick and then suddenly in mid-flight it changes direction; the shifting forward was to aid in closing the distance gap. This is a great workout routine on the kicking bag. A great technique when sparring. Not necessarily good to use on someone attacking me outside of the dojo/tournament environment.

What was so interesting to me was that I could see how the drills/exercises we were doing were geared towards athletic performance. I used to think these drills were good for learning how to defend myself. I mean, yes technically I could kick someone like that and it would hurt. But there is a great article by Iain Abernethy entitled Kicking: Below the Belt? in which he explains that, because real-life assaults are messy affairs, kicking at targets higher than the waist is not only extremely difficult, it is dangerous (lifting your foot off the ground makes you unbalanced). It's interesting to note that in the kata we practice in our system, any kicking is done below the belt (except maybe for like the flying jump kick in Chinto; but the reason for that technique is not necessarily for how it looks). So why are we training our kicks to go any higher than the belt?

The point of this observation is just to say that the drills we practice need to correspond to the skills we are trying to build. And what people don't realize is that in a modern martial arts dojo, you can be training for athletic performance and think that it corresponds to real-life fighting ability. That can be a deadly serious mistake (and that's not necessarily the fault of the student!). I mean but, now that I can differentiate what the drills my Sensei has us do are trying to develop, I feel better about doing them. Whereas before I felt that the difficulty I had in kicking like in the drill described above was due to my overall crappiness in "self-defense", it was really just due to my crappiness at being good in tournament/sport kumite. And that's not the skill I want to be good at. But the body mechanics I might use in learning how to kick this way could be transferable to when I am using that kick for self-defensive purposes. Plus I am learning about how to judge distance between myself and an opponent as well as conditioning the body. These are invaluable benefits regardless. It is this "fitness" aspect of martial arts training which is something I have yet to see incorporated fully by other dojo here in Oakland. It's one of the reasons I really appreciate and miss my Sensei.

"All you have is your health."

Elbow SMASH!
- Hiji Até