A special guest at our dojo

At Five Cities Keichu-Do, we encourage our students to "train hard and train smart". One of the things that I have noticed from observing classes at other karate schools, from watching martial arts instructor training videos, and from conversing with other students and instructors, is that there is a lot of "martial arts fluff" out there. We believe that Keichu-Do is an excellent, effective system, and that it should be taught and practiced effectively.

Over the four years that we have been teaching in Grover Beach, we have had a number of students transfer to our dojo from other styles. The majority of them have been surprised to discover how much more we require of our students, and how much more our students learn. Some of them were not at all used to the concept of "training hard" or "training smart"; their previous training had never taught them to do techniques effectively; sometimes they had zoomed up several belt levels without learning a single kata or without even learning to kick and punch correctly.

This past Thursday in class, our guest instructor, Sensei Gilliland, helped show us that there are some areas where we need to train harder. That is, in many ways, what Keichu is all about: we are constantly seeking to improve our dedication to training and, most of all for Christians, our dedication to Jesus Christ. I've met few students who want to be mediocre martial artists. If we want to be the best, we need to train the best that we can.

Sensei Gilliland instructs the 5:00 class.

Horse stance training!

If you think the 4:00 and 5:00 classes were hard, they were nothing! You should have seen what we had to do in the 6:00 class. We decided not to post the pictures of us kicking over chairs, or trying to kick with our partners' belts tied around our legs, or any of the other stuff we had to do. If you missed it, you missed out on the fun.