In holding to the kaizen or continuous improvement tradition, our school adapts techniques established in feudal and Edo periods to modern circumstances. It’s reasonable to think that traditional, ancient martial arts wouldn’t be very effective in the modern world—and that may be true if they don’t evolve. While most schools work to identify the best techniques and strategies, and perhaps even incorporate new weapons and tactics as they develop, it’s only the few improvement-minded schools like ours that have survived this long. Perhaps kaizen would more properly translate as the way of the past, present, and future.
A traditional system that improves itself
Except for advanced martial tactics like sustained restraint, infiltration, line combat, and advancing in battle, our system includes all the parts of traditional jujitsu schools—
- • Throwing and striking techniques
- • How to release a hold
- • How to avoid strikes and throws
- • Joint locking and control
- • Ground survival
- • Weapons systems
Because we’ve adapted to modern circumstances, we don’t spend much time on traditional weapons systems like Yari, Naginata, or Kyudo. Instead, we study what our modern students might encounter: knives, clubs, expandable batons, and handguns. We also include some katana, bo (staff), and stick training to develop adaptable melee skills.
Unlike strictly traditional schools, Total Ryu Martial Arts also looks for better ideas about martial arts, and improving our tactics and teaching methods is a core part of our curriculum.
Successful self-defense
In some respects, modern approaches to self-defense aren’t much different from those used in the past. We’re still concerned with response to holds, surprise attacks, striking, and multiple attackers. But our approach teaches these approaches in response to modern situations. For instance, traditional strikes like palms, punches, elbows, knees, and even kicks depend on the situation. So, understanding modern targets and applications helps our students succeed in their actual environments.
Likewise, the ground tactics we use are a mix of traditional and modern variations. While we hope our students will be able to avoid taking a fight to the ground, a true martial artist needs to develop skills in case it happens. We use choking, ground sweeps, joint locks, striking, and other movement tactics to get off the ground again as quickly as possible. Some modern ideas like the bridge-and-roll and sprawl defense are particularly useful.
Schools that focus solely on tradition or competition can miss key aspects of self-defense and combative applications. Our first rule is to do in real life what you’re not allowed to do in competition because those techniques work, which means that Total Ryu Martial Arts is a comprehensive system for true self-defense.
