Hey, I've just started training in Goju Ryu - I love it! Would love to hear from other Goju practitioners.
Wanted to have fun and be fit, and candidly, I prefer hitting and getting hit to tossing a ball around. "Street self defense" has never been my primary motivation, and wasn't even on my radar when I started. How about you?
I've bounced around a few martial arts, but never tried Goju Ryu. For me, it has the right balance of tradition and effectiveness I was looking for. Not that I go out looking for fights, quite the opposite, but from what I've seen I'm pretty convinced this stuff could be made to work if needed.
The effectiveness, as it is from style to style, is subjective, and will very much vary from school to school (including what it is that you specifically are looking for) If you have been lucky enough to find one of the 'good ones' then it has the potential to be all that you need it to be, and more... Travess
I believe it's a good school, there's very strong links to the HQ in Okinawa and a direct lineage from my sensei to Chojun Miyagi, so it's pretty legit. It's just cool to be a part of that tradition mainly, not so much looking for instant-kill moves.
Sounds good! I always thought goju looked interesting, but it was never offered where I lived. What does your typical class look like? I've seen huge variations in what day-to-day karate training looks like, even within a single organization.
Typical warm up stuff, we do the kind of twisting and sliding exercises you see here around 5:30 - Then it's onto conditioning, pad work, applications with a partner and kata.
Congratulations on starting your journey. I'm not a Goju-Ryu practitioner, but it sounds like you found the same this that I was searching for. I know it's not easy to find. It feels great to find a Dojo with that perfect balance.
Welcome! my Karate is Wado not Goju, but none the less... One of us! One of us! As for what got me training, it was probably reading the Jackie Chan comics, but then as I've got older it's a mixture of fitness, honestly loving training, and enjoying the competition aspect. I don't train for self defence. I had to slow the video down to look at those drills around 5:30, how would you describe the body mechanics going on?
welcome, from another Goju person. It's good to see another karate person on the board. To answer your question, a girl got me interested in karate, but the martial art kept my interest when interest in her waned (although that was shotokan; after a few years in non-MA wilderness, I went looking for a school that had a better idea of what the point of kata was, and a goju school nearby was the answer). Which particular flavour of goju are you?
