Karate is a contact sport, no question about it, but what happens when you can no longer come in contact with anyone but your immediate family? How does training and teaching have to change? How do we make sure that our small dojo is not only supporting the community but being supported by the community? These are all questions I have learned the answers to over the past several weeks and will continue to expand on in the coming weeks.

When quarantine started, I had no idea what that meant for my training at Granite Forest Dojo. With businesses being forced to close, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to train with my dojo family every week as I have done for years on end. Fortunately, after about a week of planning, we began hosting Zoom classes. The first week was our trial run in which all of the instructors got together to attempt to work out the kinks of using Zoom. While technology is never perfect, after that first week, we were able to begin consistently holding classes following the normal weekly schedule of the dojo.

While our classes aren’t exactly the same as they would be in person, all of the instructors do their best to make the classes as normal and comfortable as possible. Karate students of all ages are still able to get the same amount of training just with a few modifications. The only major area of karate that is difficult to practice alone is sparring, since you don’t have a partner, but there is more than enough to learn outside of sparring. Every week, we are coming up with new ideas for how to run the classes and still provide students with the best education possible.

Granite Forest Dojo is more than just a place to learn karate; it truly is a big happy family. We are expanding our outreach to the community during this time by supporting the “Rainbow Revolution” in Perkasie, hosting spirit weeks on our Instagram page, and sending out fun activities for kids to do while they’re stuck at home. But as much as we support the community, they support us as well. Parents are bringing their kids to hang drawings on the dojo walls and leave supportive messages for the instructors. So as much as this quarantine is limiting our face to face contact, it certainly isn’t limiting our connectivity and sense of community. 

For more information about Shotokan karate and some of my personal experiences, check out my website: https://sites.google.com/view/komasz-karate/home?authuser=1