Introduction

I started practising shotokan karate with the KUGB when I was in my early teenage years, taking my shodan grading during my third year of training and continued training for over a decade. I am currently not actively training although I intend to restart at some point in the future but I decided to leave this guide on the web as a lot of the feedback I have received over the years has been very positive and hopefully people will continue to find it useful. Most of the references to grading in this document are based on memory and in the case of kata a document I received when I first started training which indicated which kata could be performed to advance to each grade up to third dan. Also I believe that within the KUGB the actual grading syllabus is to some degree at the discretion of the grading examiner and hence may vary depending on who takes the grading. In other words if your coming up to a grading by all means use this as a guide but check with someone in your club as to what is expected for each grade. It's a long time since I last graded and some of the things contained in this document may have changed or be slightly inaccurate.

I wrote the original version of this guide during the revision period for the final exams for my degree. I decided to do this because I didn't want to revise constantly during that time but couldn't quite justify playing computer games to myself. Therefore in a moment of inspiration I decided to write a guide to shotokan based on what I had picked up over the years and information from various books, magazines and the internet that I had stumbled across. The original audience was intended to be anybody who was interested at my local club, but I never got around to doing this as once the exams were over I had other things to do and then I started working. I have decided to release a web version of my original document on my web site in case anyone finds it useful and to justify writing it all down in the first place.

I hope you find the information useful and please let me know if there are any major errors. I cannot guarantee the accuracy of this document as most of the information was gathered from various sources including other web sites. The history section was derived from information in the magazines referenced after the history text and if you are interested in this area then I would recommend reading the full articles.

Site Awards :-