Karate participants have various reasons for joining a karate class. Some may be there for physical fitness. Others may want to perfect the ancient art of the karate kata. If you are instructing a karate class, your objective is to help your participants reach their goals. You also want to offer a motivating and challenging class that will keep your students returning for more.
Physical Fitness
Begin your karate class with a fitness-related warm-up. Your students can perform strength movements such as pushups, situps, squats or lunges and cardiovascular movements such as marching, jogging, jumping jacks or high knees as they warm their bodies for karate practice. You can set up a circuit workout prior to the beginning of class. A circuit has different exercise stations that your students rotate through until they complete all the exercises. Set instructional cards at each station with the exercises written on them, and have your students spend one minute at each station.
Kata
Karate katas are a series of movements that flow together into a routine. Katas contain attacking and defending motions to prepare your students for physical confrontations. A large portion of your karate class will be spent teaching kata. If all of your students are not at the same belt level, you may be instructing many different katas at one time. A solution for this predicament is to have your advanced students instruct the lower belts.
Self-Defense
Many students take karate to learn how to defend themselves. Self-defense drills can help your students reach their goals. You can teach students how to defend against hair pulling, choking and wrist grabbing in a drill that uses half of your students as attackers and half as defenders. Those being attacked will stand in various places around the room with their eyes closed. The attackers will randomly pull hair, choke or grab the wrists of the defenders. The defenders then open their eyes and perform the technique to escape the attack.
Weapons
Provide instruction on how to use weapons. Traditional karate weapons include nunchaku, bo staff, kama and sai. The nunchaku are two wooden sticks hooked together by a rope or a chain. A bo staff is a 6-foot-long wooden stick. A kama resembles a farm sickle used to cut weeds or tall grass, but karate uses them in pairs. A sai resembles a large metal fork. If you are not confident providing instruction in weapons, you can hire a weapons instructor.
