Quality

Shinkyu’s service as a club, hinges around two key concepts:

• Student experience

• Quality training

The student experience

• Shinkyu karate’s goal is to foster community spirit. Our instructors are not just strong martial artists, but good people, with great people skills. These include the basics of being welcoming, friendly, and empathetic to new students, as well as praising and positively encouraging our existing students. Shinkyu’s goal is to always provide a supportive environment where people feel a sense of social belonging, and where they feel great about themselves.

• Values and Discipline. We believe that teaching great karate-jutsu will not necessarily produce great karate-ka. Our teaching philosophy embodies positivity and encouragement as well as honest and constructive feedback. All of our instructor to understand the balance of positive reinforcement and discipline. Our goal is to produce responsible, well rounded martial artists who are with us for the journey.

• Every student matters. Karate is a life-changing endeavour and potentially life-saving skill. For that reason, it is our responsibility to ensure that every student stays with us for as long as possible, so that they can experience the benefits of karate training. This value manifests in our water-tight customer care systems, coordinating the efforts of our recruiters, instructors and customer care department.

The quality of our training

• Self-defence is our first priority for our students. While there are many benefits to training in a martial art, what defines success for us, is the ability of our students to defend themselves in real self-defence situations. This goal must be balanced with the family values and atmosphere, and our syllabus reflects this.

• Traditional values. Shinkyu’s goal is to balance teaching modern, effective self-defence with traditional values, and the fundamentals of movement and technique. Shinkyu’s teaching methods also reflect the traditional principles of repetition in training, moral values, respect, etiquette and discipline.

• Specialist classes. In order to continually challenge and excite our students, we have locally run specialist classes. As a student grows, and their karate journey demands more stimulation. A one-size-fits-all class is not enough as a student begins to branch out and explore all that karate has to offer, we have specialist classes for them to attend. These are in the fields of kata and traditional training, kumite and self-defence and advanced classes. Attending a specified number of these classes is part of the grading requirement for higher grades. This helps broaden a karate-ka’s experience beyond their regular dojo.

• Ongoing development of our instructors. We believe that one of the core beliefs and benefits of karate is constant improvement, learning and personal growth. In order to pass on this core belief, our instructors need to embody this, so they all train on a weekly basis. This weekly training regime ensures that our instructors are enthusiastic about their own training, and also stay at the cutting edge of karate, self-defence and teaching skills.

• Ongoing development of our style. In order to stay at the cutting edge of both what we teach, and how we teach it, we constantly seek new information. Any addition or enhancement on what we currently do is tested and to ensure it is robust before implementation. In the quest for information, suitable instructors are encouraged to train in selected other styles. We promote a selection of external events and seminars to instructors and students. We will also invite guest instructors to run seminars in Shinkyu Karate.

• Grading system. As grading is a key motivator for students, both the grading criteria, and the uncompromising grading standard is what will drive and determine the quality of our students, and in turn the quality of our club. Shinkyu’s grading criteria are based around our strongest priorities in training; primarily self-defence. Shinkyu’’s gradings for middle-to-higher grades are assessed on objectively to definitively measure a student’s ability.

• Quality black belts. The quality of a club is comes down to the quality of its black belts. A Shinkyu black belt must have these 3 qualities:

1. Defend themselves competently against a bigger and aggressive attacker. This implies having both the mental and physical skills.

2. Strong performance (with kime), and understanding of basic techniques and combinations.

3. Sound character, confidence, integrity, determination/persistence, humility.