Japanese vs Okinawan Karate: enter Goju Ryu


After my long experience in Goju Ryu (exactly 4 days) I became aware of a fascinating fact: I never trained punches or kicks in Goju Ryu. Not in Japan, not in Okinawa.

Surprising, because my previous experience in Karate (Shotokan and Kyokushin) was focused, 95%, in punching and kicking as hard as you can. 

In this intensive Goju Ryu crash course (the 4 days were in the same week) I trained throws, locks, weapons, vital points, small joint manipulation, breathing, attacking the eyes, breaking necks and other ways of incapacitating an attacker and leaving him (or her) maimed on the ground.

How is this divergence of training objectives so big? After all, they were all Okinawans those who took Karate to mainland Japan...



Please, excuse my generalizations. I am talking only about my reduced experience. Yours may be different. Please, let me know in the comments!!




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A rainbow of choices

Image
Let's talk about something really trivial now: What colour should the embroidery of my belt be? First, let's start with the most common one: golden brown (金茶, in Japanese): This is a belt that was gifted to me so the content of the embroidery is kind of unusual but the picture will show the colour I am talking about. Beautiful and classic, right? So, what other colours are acceptable? By far, the two next more common colours are red and white: (red one is mine too) All the other colours have really few adepts but I have seen a blue one, a green one and a pink one: (it is pinker in person) You also can choose a metallic gold or silver threat: Considering getting a silver one soon... if not pink! And you can choose to get kanji and/or katakana (or hiragana) embroidered, but also common letters: Or you can just go crazy and get a multicolour multifont belt, like this one: Cool, uh? And what about rank strip
Read more

Saifa bunkai

Image
Today I share with you this bit of Saifa . This bunkai was shared to me by Omoto Kancho, head of Yuzenkai. I had a karateka laying around with the perfect old-school Japanese top-knot, so I used him to illustrate this technique. This part: Apparently, the same technique exists in Shotokan (and Shuri lineage, I guess) kata, so it's time to do some research! Here is the whole kata for you: @practicalkarateagain in Facebook
Read more

My Karate style

Image
What is my Karate style? I guess one needs to know if he/she can feel identified with the contents of this blog. If my methods and theories are aligned with those of his/her Dojo. Fair enough. What is my Karate style? That is a fair question with a complicated answer. My first Art was Judo, which I started to learn when I was six years old. Even though I never stopped training I did it in a discontinuous manner, never caring too much about it. I never thought it could be used in a fight, until recently. After that I joined a Shotokan Karate class, not by choice (I wanted to learn Kick boxing) but because it was the only kicking-and-punching option available at that time, until I broadened my martial circle of friends and became involved in full contact styles. Many years and a few dans later I was forced to move my residence to China, having Kyokushin as my only choice for the first years after I landed. After that I met many people involved in a variety of arts who were
Read more