What Is A Traditional Martial Arts School
There is a lot of confusion surrounding the terms "traditional martial arts" and "self-defense". Many self-defense systems want to separate themselves and distance themselves from the term, traditional martial arts, yet most traditional martial arts embrace the term self-defense. A lot of it boils down to semantics or even definition, but here's my take on this question.
I think the word "traditional" when attached to a martial art, has a bad connotation. And I think many of the martial arts schools that consider themselves traditional are responsible for that bad connotation for some reason many martial arts schools put in silly frivolous techniques, movements, and even groups of movements that look kind of fancy with a lot of frills, jumping, weird hand, movements, weird stances, all of which are completely ineffective and useless. For some reason, these people that teach these foolish curriculums like to consider themselves traditional, when in reality, they're just foolish. Our system is very traditional, yet you will never find any silly or foolish movements or techniques. My definition of a foolish and ineffective technique would be one where if somebody saw it, they wouldn't understand how it could be used in a real fight. If you watch someone in a silly stance that doesn't look effective, or weird hand movements, which you would have to try to figure out what they are doing, that is usually foolish and ineffective. And proponents of these systems try to explain their foolish ineffective techniques by saying that it is all part of their philosophy, they call it BUNKAI.
Their explanation is that they can take a silly movement, and say Bunkai magically makes those silly techniques, real and effective. It's kind of like sprinkling fairy dust on a terrible, silly technique, and it makes it real (with Bunkai being the fairy dust). With that said, I am still a huge proponent for traditional martial arts schools because I feel like they are what our communities need. I feel like the traditional martial arts schools, encourage family involvement, and help children grow to be stronger adults, and adults become better parents, employees, employers, spouses, and generally people.
I feel like a good traditional martial arts school teaches all effective, efficient, and powerful techniques while teaching the tenants of bushido. I feel like the word tradition in our program means we have a belt system that shows steady improvement, we involve the families with all of our students, and we have certain specific traditions that are proprietary to our system. Some of these traditions include our two week belt testing., Our belt ceremonies, which include exhibitions of some of the techniques our students have been learning. We also have our traditional patch, which some students actually get tattooed on their body, we do our Pit prayer at the end of our advanced class, and we have Easter egg hunts, Halloween costume, contests, Christmas and Thanksgiving parties. we have many traditions at our gym and I consider ourselves a very traditional martial arts school. What separates us from other traditional schools, I feel like it's just the quality of our traditions.
