On Monday evening this week we had a special event at our Dojo in Liverpool, Sensei Roy Flatt lead the class in a sponsored "2,000 techniques" session. This event was held to promote our karate club and help raise money to send students to next year's IOGKF World Budosai Gasshuku, which is being held from July 20th 2008 in Naha City, Okinawa, Japan. 36 students took part in the class, 20 of them being of black belt level.


Sensei Roy warmed the class up using traditional Goju-Ryu junbi-undo exercises, followed by press-ups and sit-ups. Then, stood in lines of 10 people, the class were taken through a complete range of karate techniques, each performed several times at full power.

The arrangement was as follows: For every technique performed each person on a line of students would count to 10 and everybody else in the class would perform the technique in time to the count. Then the next person on the line would count 10 techniques, then the next person would count, and so on all the way along the line of students. Using this system, each technique was performed repeatedly 10 times for 10 students - 100 techniques per row of students. This process was repeated time and time again, each time a different karate technique was executed by the entire class, 100 times per technique. This included several hundred punches, open-hand strikes, kicks, elbow-strikes and other karate techniques performed either as single strikes to each count or (later in the class) as 2 or 3 techniques for every count.

At the end of the session Sensei Roy announced that during the class everyone had in fact performed 3,600 techniques in total, far outnumbering the original target of 2,000. The class ended with everyone performing Sanchin kata (Goju-Ryu's core kata) as a finish to the night's exercise.

Sensei Roy Flatt wishes to congratulate everyone who took part in this event, as it was very difficult and took a lot of energy to perform. Money raised from this sponsored event will be put into a fund for next year's trip to Japan to train with Higaonna Sensei, Chief Instructor of the IOGKF organisation (The International Okinawa Goju-Ryu Karate-Do Federation - this the karate federation that our karate club, Childwall Dojo, is a member of).

Also it is worth noting that some of our dojo's students will be taking part in a black belt grading examination next weekend - this event was a sort of "warm up" for their grading, which will be held at a national Gasshuku (training camp) and in front of the EGKA national grading panel.