Student’s Guide to Surviving a Traditional Dojo
Free Martial Arts Ebook – Student’s Guide to Surviving a Traditional Dojo
This is a fairly quick plug for Ikigai’s eBook, linked to above. It is quite nicely done. It is 95 pages long, and I didn’t find anything in there I disagreed with. It definitely has a Japanese slant, but most of the traditions hold for the Korean-based arts I’m most familiar with, which isn’t surprising, considering those nation’s tangled history. There is a lot of great advice and background information in the book, so take a look at it if you haven’t done so already. If I have a criticism, it is that I think it might be a bit overwhelming for someone who has never trained in martial arts before — sort of an “Oh, gosh, how am I going to remember all that?” response. But I think anyone with enough enthusiasm to read through the book should realize they’ll learn this stuff as they go, and this book can be used to provide a framework for understanding what is going on.
Matt, if you’re reading this, I think you’d do a great job at writing a “beginner’s guide”, as more of a time-line progression: how to choose an art, what to look for in a martial arts school, what to expect in your first class, etiquette, moving up the ranks, becoming an advanced student, etc. A good chunk of the information would be the same or similar to this ebook, but just arranged a bit differently.