I began Kyokushin training with only one goal in mind: get tough. I didn’t care about being the best fighter in the world, I had no desire to make a career out of it, and I didn’t care about tradition. Without knowing anything about Mas Oyama or the Honbu or anything else, I started with the goal of becoming invincible from the neck down: men like Georges St. Pierre, Dolph Lundgren and Gerard Gordeau were all the proof I needed that this martial art style could give me what I wanted. Over the course of my four years training with Sensei Charlie, I am pleased to say that this goal has been realized and continues on. If my dog gets too energetic at the park and crashes into me, I don’t feel it. If I step on one of my kid’s Lego pieces in the middle of the night, I can stuff the pain down and keep walking like nothing happened. I can now ignore being tired at work or on the road.
Thankfully, Sensei Charlie made sure that I did not lose the other benefits that Kyokushin has to offer. Actual fighting ability and common sense strategy for self-defense come to mind first: this kind of Karate is not flashy, but practical. It has also paid dividends for my overall fitness, which is a running requirement at our dojo – if you want to be promoted, you have to show that you have been putting in the work at home to get stronger, leaner, and more enduring. Unlike many other schools though, Sensei actually cares about preserving our long term health, making sure we are stretching, recovering, eating well and getting in touch with the “softer” side of Karate. We condition hard but spar light (most of the time), and the kata get much more emphasis here than in other Kyokushin schools. In his words, “it makes no sense to sacrifice your old age to this, it has to be something you can do your entire life.” If I had joined a boxing gym as I originally planned, I would not have experienced this wiser point of view: Karate isn’t a means to an end, but a way to make you a better person and improve your quality of life.
I have thirty years of martial arts experience, and I have to say that training under Sensei Charlie has been the best of it all. His open mind and creative spirit ensures that it is not a stultified, brittle relic of previous eras in martial arts history. His Kyokushin is a living, breathing art that takes a fresh perspective on how we interpret kata, how we do conditioning, and even how we engage with the tradition itself. If you do a technique a little differently, Sensei is perfectly fine with you doing it that way so long as you keep good form and intent. If you do home conditioning differently, he holds his peace so long as you get good results. For crying out loud, he let us incorporate grappling rounds for the sake of kata interpretation, a testament to his willingness to make “this Karate” into “MY Karate.” Whoever joins our dojo, I can promise you that Sensei has established something that gives you twice as much as you put into it.
-Sempai Bishop
