Next grading
There has been some great training all week, remember grading for those that want to put themselves forward is Saturday 10th June.
Usual format Kickboxing, 12 until around 1-1.30pm. Karate grading follows. You need all your kit and a club uniform/karate gi, kickboxing if it's warm shorts and club t shirt.
You are welcome to train in the morning class 10:30 -11:30am
Weapons and grading for Mini Ronins will be in class the week beginning 19th June.
If you are unsure of anything ask one of the club Senseis.
Ronin Budo in the News
This article was orginally in the Derbyshire Life Magazine:
This article featured details on some of our competitions and my prediction Scarlet would be a world champion:
This article on the University of Derby website is from when Charles Spring Shihan got his first Hall of Fame award:
A blog feature on the National Wellness Institutes site:
Charles Spring Shihan has a book if you are interested go to:
Why take up martial arts such as karate and kickboxing?
Here at Ronin Budo we do Karate and Kickboxing in the Belper area and Karate in Birmingham. Both of these activities are good for physical fitness, mental health and wellbeing. They are also good socially and can widen your horizons in terms of cultural awareness and what you are presonally capable of. Kickboxing in Belper at the Honbu Haru Dojo is a sport based martial art and is extremely good for physical fitness. It can be self defence orientated but that comes from the increased confidence arguably rather than the actual techniques, it was designend for sport rather than self defence.
The Belper club has kickboxing several times a week for children aged from 5 through to early 50's and caters for all age groups, genders and abilities. The kickboxing training has fitness elements, works on flexibility and then light through to full contact style fight training. Those taking part in the kickboxing classes can choose whether they do competition style training at light through to full contact, it is not an expectation that students do all of this. Younger students under 16 do not do full contact training. Kickboxing should be fun and a social activity we believe; so in the Belper club we do promote this to students through doing a Saturday club which includes kickboxing and karate training as well as a range of other fun activities. We also enter tournaments and our kickboxers have won championship trophies and competed at world championship level. Kickboxing in Belper is an all round activity that is fun, social and competitive.
Karate is undertaken at our clubs in Belper and Birmingham. Karate has many styles and the one we do in Belper and Birmingham is Shukokai. Our Karate students are aged from 5-72 years old and is good for fitness, mental helath and wellbeing the same as kickboxing, though we would indicate the fitness side is different and focuses more on steady paced activity rather than the faster paced kickboxing. Though when doing sparring for a while that may seem an incorrect statement. The karate clubs at belper start again at 5 years old and we have several classes a week which are mixed age groups, the club in Birmingham starts form age 7 for their karate sessions and runs one day a week. Karate has many different activities associated with it, such as combination techniques, which are short sequences involving kicking and punching, fighting which is semi contact and Kata which, put simply, are forms invoving a range of combination techniques put together to simulate a fight. The Karate clubs in Belper and Birmingham train socially though the Belper club has entered a number of competitions over the last few years and has English and European Champions in its ranks and world medallists. Again in the karate club in Belper we do not expect people to compete, it is a choice however we do encourage participation, the Birmingham Karate club does the same. Karate is an activity that develops for life and is never perfected so is a great activity to continue into later years and this is evidenced by several of our members. Sensei Charles Spring in 58 and competes at international level still, our oldest Karate styudent is 72 and trains 3 times a week.
Both our karate and kickboxing students at the Belper clubs are encouraged to train for weapons forms. Weapons can be the traditional karate weapons such as tonfa and jo staff (short staff) as well as nunchaku as made famous by Bruce Lee. There are also traditional Japanese Katana, Sword and Sai which are short sword like weapons and featured in the film Elektra. The kickboxing students learn these as an extra to their regular kickboxing training and develop freestyle forms for competitions whereas the Karate students learn kata. Our karate and kickboxing students have again won many competitions using weapons and represented England succesfully at world championships.