Milton Keynes Jiu-Jitsu Yubukan Dojo
Seniors Page
The Milton Keynes Jiu-Jitsu club boasts a very high standard of tuition for it's students. We have a record going back to when the club was opened over 40 years ago of teaching and achieving the very highest standards of Jiu-Jitsu. We do not give grades away as encouragement, we believe that every grade should be earned by hard work and ability. On average it takes a minimum of eight years to achieve a black belt but through every stage of the grading system our students know that they are worth whatever grade they are wearing. If a student from the Milton Keynes club visits any other club they know they will be as good if not better than students of the same grade.
Students all learn at different rates, a student that picks things up easily is not necessarily a better student than one that learns slowly. People that pick things up at a slower rate quite often retain the finer points of what they are learning. As the old saying goes practice makes perfect, the harder you try and the more effort you put in the better you become.
Unlike most clubs we do not concentrate on syllabus only, we teach a very wide variety of techniques. Jiu-Jitsu has such a large catalogue of moves that you can train for a year and not repeat the same variation on a technique. This means that the grading syllabus is not large enough to accommodate all of the techniques that we use, so to learn only syllabus moves would severely limit a students development.
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The Grades are as follows: Students start as White belts, the first grading is for yellow belt followed by orange, green, blue, purple, brown belts, sho Dan-ho (non teaching black belt), sho Dan or 1st Dan black belt followed by all the other Dan grades up to 10th Dan which is the highest. |
 A senior student receiving his green belt from Shihan Wood. |
Milton Keynes Jiu-Jitsu is part of Jiu-Jitsu International which is one of the largest Jiu-Jitsu organisation in the world. Jiu-Jitsu International has an open attitude to the Martial Arts and welcomes people from many different Arts and styles to join their courses. This means that when you attend open courses you could be training with people from just about any martial art around today. Because of this open attitude to different systems it gives our students a chance to learn what other systems have to offer.
All of the black belts at the club are encouraged to attend different styles of martial arts so that they can better understand how to defend against them. Although the black belts are encouraged to venture out into other areas to help increase their knowledge, it is not insisted upon. It is up to each individual black belt to decide how far they want to take this if at all.
When a student joins the club we start teaching them how to defend against weapons at a very early stage (no steel weapons are used for this), this is included in part of the syllabus and is taught at a slow safe speed. With more people carrying weapons these days we find it is important that students know how to defend against them. Once a student reaches Green belt we start to teach those that are interested weapons systems (how to use weapons). This is only taught to those students that show an interest. It is not part of the normal Jiu-Jitsu syllabus and therefore not compulsory.
We find that some students are not interested in learning the weapons systems, there is no problem with that as far as we are concerned. Different people take up martial arts for different reasons; some are looking for a means of self-defence, some are interested in the physical side of training whilest others are only interested in learning weapons systems. As a club we try to cover all the needs of our students, we will however only teach the systems we are qualified to teach and that we consider are safe for our students to learn.
With Shihan Wood having over 35 years of experience in Jiu-Jitsu, and experience in other martial arts with the backing and experience of senior Instructors such as Soke Richard Morris 10th Dan who has over 70 years of martial arts training behind him. We feel that there are no issues of self-defence training that we can not cover. If the instructors at the club are not sure of anything there are other people in the organisation that will know. We understand that nobody knows everything and are willing to ask Senior grades if we are not sure. We believe that there is no shame in not knowing the answer to a problem, the only shame is in not being willing to learn.
Jiu-Jitsu is approximately 2,000 years old. If you were to train all of your life you would still have more to learn. As other martial arts develop we develop our own systems in order to be able to defend against them. Because of it's nature, adaptability and willingness to adopt new ideas, Jiu-Jitsu will never stop growing and its students and instructors will continue to grow with it.
The club is run on a friendly basis although we stick to the formal rules of etiquette and manners such as students and instructors showing respect for each other, we know that new students will not know these rules so we teach them as we go along. No one will have a go at new students for making mistakes, they will just point out where they are going wrong.
Any new students joining the club are advised to wear loose fitting clothes that they do not mind being pulled about a bit. First lesson includes basic breakfalls and blocking techniques, students do not start practising throws until they are ready for it. Safety is very important to us, so we try not to push our students further than they are ready to go.
Although we do run occasional special courses such as women's self defence, we do in general have both males and females training together. We normally split our training groups by ability not gender; this does however depend on the students that are present at the time.
For further information please contact Shihan Wood:
Telephone: 01908 395227
E-mail: colin@mkjujitsu.co.uk