My way to American Bojutsu
Today, there is a huge amount of offers on the market as people find their personal way or lifestyle in the form of a daily or weekly work-out. Today most people running or cycling, others prefer a gym or a personal trainer. Sports like Kickboxing, Martial Arts like Wing Chun, Brazilian Jiu-jitsu or fight systems like Krav Maga have become an equally popular way to gain your fitness level and learning Self-defence.
In all of the cases mentioned, you increase your self-confidence and your social skills.
Martial Arts had always fascinated me even as a teenager with some experiences of Judo and Ju-Jutsu, watching all the martial arts movies in the 80's. American Fighter, Bruce-Lee, Jacky Chan. And very quickly you find yourself in the middle of life, the job has caught up with you and suddenly one fine day you have this urgent feeling to jump off the sofa and start to do something for a healthier body-feeling and a mindful passion.
Well, the decision has fallen very quickly and so I walked on the mat at a local Martial Arts school with mid-forties for the first time again.
Here I had the chance to learn the principles of a fighting system that included modified Wing Tjun, sparring, basic weapon techniques and rules for fighting against multiple attackers. During our training my interest in the handling of weapons grew. The trigger for this was certainly the phase in which we had been engaged in weapons training in the higher level. Over the four years of my membership I was able to gain valuable experience and every good time comes to an end at some point.
The initial spark for the Bo came much later as I also watched videos about other martial arts topics from time to time. Eventually I got fascinated by Shaolin fighters and their handling of the stick. From that moment on it was clear that I wanted to find out more about this.
So I bought a Bo to check out this weapon at home. Of course first the cool spins and moves I found in videos on YouTube. After a few weeks the thing started to get boring and I didn't feel like imitating tricks anymore. It was more important to get the bo under control and adding this thing as profitably as possible into my experiences of the past years.
Now try to find a school that only teaches the martial art with the staff. These are usually kobudo schools. I searched in vain for these in my environment. I found an Aikido school arround the corner but here I was only able how to learn the short stick. But out of personal conviction I didn't feel like learning Aikido for this.
So I was looking for new inputs and alternatives. Then I found a free lesson on the YouTube-Channel of the Global Martial Arts University. I was so excited about the style, the modern concept and the professional way of teaching this concept that I grabbed my Bo and started to follow along the instructions of the Master. After this 45-minute Bo training session was finished I really felt that I was training present in this dojo. The best benefit was that I learned completely new techniques and insights.
Ultimate Bo - Global Martial Arts University
Questions and doubts - Learning another martial arts on my own without entering a local school?
First of all, the question is whether one would like to learn traditional Kobudo and all its weapon styles like Rokushakubo, Nunchaku, Sai and Tonfa. It also includes a large core of karate techniques. In this case you are surely in good hands in a local school. Essentially, it depends on the type of person and where they want to orientate themselves.
Learning Kobudo in the completed traditional way was out of the question. My goal was that the whole thing should have a certain practical relevance and not necessarily be traditionally oriented. I would not become a kobudo master anyway. And so I enrolled in the Ultimate Bo program at GMAU to learn how to use the Bo in modern and traditional way. As a practice-proven autodidact, I had always good experience with audio-visual learning, so I was able to personally make good friends with this variation.
Anyway I could approach the matter with a solid basis because our Sifu provided us with Wing Chun techniques and regular sparring based on MMA. So the question how one can learn a completely different martial art without ever entering a dojo can be explained to a certain extent.
How do you design your own training schedule and how does it work on your own?
The learning process is nearly identical in all life situations, be it at work, school or even in topics like advanced education as part of distance learning.
At the beginning we first have to listen to someone, observe, imitate and then practice the whole thing until it fits. About half of what we see and hear remains in our memory. If we actively do what we see, 90% of it is already stored in our memory. The rest consists of consistent repetition, correction and increase. Prerequisite here as everywhere is a clear goal and self-discipline.
You need a plan. Just sitting on the couch and hope learning anything just by watching video lessons without doing a real physical and constantly training will not work!
In a dojo that you can enter, it is no different. There is a trainer who demonstrate a new exercise or technique, after that you start practicing individually or in pairs. But sometimes with the important difference that on certain days a trainer has only a short time to go through the rows, because either new candidates have to be fed or he is busy to one student for a longer time while the other students remain in a program loop until the training continues. If there are well-trained co-trainers on board, the trainer can distribute tasks while he is otherwise busy.
Learning from history
The history of the martial art has been handed down in various ways all over the world until today. This craft was passed on and learned through illustrations, sketches and writings before dojos spread like mushrooms all over the world and people started to spend money to receive the wisdom of only their true teacher. This does not mean that all schools are only interested in the money of their members. But there are also those who sell false security for expensive money and unfortunately have no idea of the matter themselves. Fortunately, my Sifu at that time had a lot of experience in his field and so he vehemently refrained from giving us scrap metal that would not work anyway.
For a long time Wing Tjun was only passed on to direct successors within the lineage to protect this knowledge from third parties. Today, in certain schools Wing Chun that has been revealed for a long time is still sold as "secret knowledge" by practicing under exclusion and behind closed doors with the goal to get students who are only supposed to receive general knowledge in the regular training schedule. These students then have to book individual seminars for extra money in order to successively improve their level. A local school is therefore not automatically an indicator of quality.
Conclusion
At the end it is (almost) no matter how you learn. It is important to know that you will not get anything for free anywhere. To enroll in a local martial arts school, pay your fees and wear fancy clothing does not protect you from it if you do nothing for your training. Many candidates come and go or manage to go there just once a week and hope to learn the thousand miracle techniques as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. It does not work like that.
My experience is that a previous experience in martial arts can be very useful to learn something new like American Bojutsu, but it is not a mandatory requirement. Sensei Michael Hodge, the founder of the Ultimate Bo program has created a well designed system to teach his students this martial art step by step from the beginning.
This made it possible for me to learn a mixture of modern and traditional Bojutsu, self-defense techniques and stylistic visual elements within a short time. The didactically well structured curriculum of this program supported me during this time.
Today I am in the fortunate position of being able to vary my training on my own and adding or combining techniques I have learned in the past years.
