Welcome to this short video and article about people finding their way in the martial arts. So whether it’s karate, Thai boxing, jujitsu, judo, Tai chi, etc. They’re all fantastic. They’ve been around for hundreds of years, and millions of people practice each discipline. But different martial arts are suited to certain people and certain characters.

Many, many times, we’ve had people come to the dojo and they want to just fight. One of my friends actually got black belt, but wasn’t interested in Kata or Kihon, he just wanted to spar and fight. He Got very strong, he only practiced kata because he had to. I knew he was going to quit eventually, because he just wanted to fight for some reason, even though he probably only had two fights in his whole life. But that’s a lot of people. And that’s fine. He wanted to practice fighting every day. He would often say, ‘this isn’t practical for self-defense’. But I’ve got a different attitude. I also love the fighting, especially when I was younger, I wanted to fight everything and everyone but in a good way 🙂

I love the art side of karate. Training every day on just fighting, working on something that might or might not work in self defense, for a fight that might or might not happen is definately not for me.

My character wants to work and make the art side better, deep diving into technique, the small details, applications bunkai.

So for me personally, I love the whole thing of karatedo though.

The way of karate. For me, the art side is so important, some people don’t want to do any fighting or sparring, and that’s fine. Some people just want to fight and thats also fine, but you need to find your way. So only do what you want to do.

Hopefully you love Karatedo like me, and if you’re a sensei, you definately want your dojo filled with people with the same attitude as you, that’s what you want. Many years ago, I used to cater for everyone. So for fighters, we would fight and for people that didn’t want to fight, we wouldn’t fight, I was trying to please everyone.

So if you’re a sensei, you want to have your dojo filled with people like you and the people that aren’t like you, you need to get them gone.

I should have said to my black belt friend many years ago, ‘Just just go and join that MMA gym around the corner, because you’ll love it’.

But because he was my friend, he stayed with me and and to be honest, i know he didn’t really enjoy a lot of the training we did.

So ‘find your way’ is the is the message here. Find your way. Make sure you’re doing what you want to do and enjoy what you want to do.