By Johan & Mio

On Sunday 29.10.2017 myself, Johan aged 42 and my son Mio aged 6 attended the SST karate convention in Ballerup. I was already a little skeptical as to whether my son would be able to keep his concentration through a 3½ hour training session and was pleasantly surprised by how much was made of being there and making it fun for the children, so Mio was with me all the way through and seemed that it was really fun. Our instructors were the elite of Shindenkan karate in Denmark and there were, in addition to all of us adults and even more children with white belts, 4 instructors with black belts present who all took good care of us and made us all feel part of the convention.

After a joint greeting to start with, we were split into two, adults and Jokokidz, and we got a good introduction to what it means to train multi-track karate, as well as the philosophy, the history behind it and how to advance through belts by earning to them. In particular, I noticed that emphasis was placed on mutual respect, regardless of age and gender, and that you meet and help each other wherever you are.

The program was made up of a series of skills that you need to achieve to get a purple belt, as well as a mixed view of what you can look forward to by training multi-track karate. This covers both MBH which is the warm-up, katafit as a kind of full-body fitness training for karate practitioners, punches and kicks as well as falls, throws, punches and kicks with resistance (pad) and fighting with swords. All in all, it never got boring and we all had a good time throughout the event.

For myself, I take home an increased awareness of being a role model, both for my son, but also as a philosophy for meeting other people in my everyday life where they are. And in terms of fighting, I've also got a few tricks up my sleeve, as I said you are met where you are by the highly competent instructors.