By Rob Nielson, Program Director and Chief Instructor

This article is about what Karate training means for Cedar Ridge students. When I first began my own training, Karate was still new to the United States and very few people truly understood it.  Even today the best information about this martial art still comes from historic Asian sources.  Over the four decades that I have trained, Karate in the US has shifted away from dedicated traditional training and more toward a sports emphasis.  That shift, along with impatience to achieve status in Karate, has altered the way karate schools market themselves and teach.  Therefore, when someone else talks about Karate, they might be saying something quite different from what I am saying when I talk about Karate.

During the Vietnam War I was a Hospital Corpsman, and upon discharge I was considering becoming a physical therapist.  I could see real value in Karate as a form of physical therapy, and I also sensed that Karate training might be useful in terms of general development.  When I returned from Vietnam and entered college, I wrote a research paper on the benefits of teaching Karate to teenagers who were termed “adaptive”.  I realize now that many of these kids would be identified as having a Non Verbal Learning Disorder or NLD.  Essentially, these were students who, for various reasons, were not comfortable with mainstream physical activities.  These students were awkward, so they usually avoided participating in team sports.  Karate is more challenging for these young people, but they stand to benefit immeasurably from the training.