Martial Arts

I’ve been so happy and surprised to join the WSA; the quality of the instruction and dedication of teachers is phenomenal. The facilities are great. The students are very nice and very serious--so many of them look like characters in Street Fighter! All of the senpai and sensei are such a great inspiration. In contrast to my old school, this school is pretty traditional, which is great! I used to be in karate 10+ years ago, and this was an easy transition back. In addition, I love sharing in marital arts culture and all of the values and tenets of discipline feed my spirit. I hope to continue to get to know everyone there because they already feel like family!

The shaolin kungfu academy is great. The student's are friendly and playful, and the master Lei Zhou is great at teaching. You can get a free trial for your first time! It has a lot of excitement during the classes and you get to level up with different belts and forms! The master came originally from China and he trained students in San Francisco before he came to Seattle. Overall, the work he does is excellent for me. It has taught me about strength and skill. You also get to meet different people. If you want a black belt, try this place!

Great place to do serious work out, but at the same time have fun.

Both of my kids, 4 and 6, have been taking lessons at Shaolin Kung Fu Chan Academy. They were really shy at the beginning. Shifu Gao is a great teacher. He made classes fun, and at the same timex challenging for kids of all ages. My kids now love Kungfu, and it's one of those things that they look forward to every week. I can see them practicing for a long time. It's great for their fitness and character building.

Extremely positive and fun environment for students of all ages. My teenage daughter and son have trained with me here for over a year. Masters Kamara and Choe are excellent teachers, focused on encouraging and building up the students, as well as their skills, while having fun at the same time. The program offers a practical and street-wise approach to traditional Hapkido, which includes strikes, kicks, joint-locks, take-downs and throws. In addition, the program also has a strong emphasis on ground-fighting techniques and submissions. As a father and a student myself, I highly recommend it.

Matt Hume, the owner is a world renowned mma coach. The rest of the team at AMC are very technical based, yet helpful and welcoming . It's amazing how much you can learn in such a short time when you have this level of coaching. This is the place to train if you not only want to get a good workout, but also learn technique that can be applied.

I joined Seattle Kendo Kai (SKK) twenty years ago and to this day I am still amazed at how much more there is still left to learn and grow. We are fortunate to have such a depth of experience and camaraderie among our dojo members and sensei, and we can always expect a very high level of training. I think it is rare to have so many active kodansha that I can enjoy keiko with week in and week out. The sensei can truly teach by doing and provide excellent examples of kendo that I aspire to emulate. I consider SKK my second family and am proud to be among their company. I am also grateful for the friendships, support, and guidance of regular visitors and sensei from other dojo.

There are a lot of useful items in this store, and I don't see how it's high priced vs online vendors (there are unique items here). The owner is very helper and nice! I would recommended this store for anyone who wants Kung Fu equipment. They also have a good selection of Jō staves, I appreciate that. All in all a good store if you like to support local businesses (I love the clothing at the store ^_^).

The school is professionally run and most of the instructors are highly skilled and dedicated. The kids classes are enjoyable and kids friendly. They even attempt to teach some life lessons to the kids and organized competition between TKD schools in the region. All these are good aspects that they should maintain. My biggest complain for the school would be the HUGE class sizes. It seems that they just keep growing without turning any parents down for kids enrollment. This brings down the level of personal attention between the instructors and students. Second issue with the school is that they seem to be afraid to fail any student during belt tests. Perhaps they think that parents would be mad if their kids fail. This causes the instructors to focus ALOT on poomsae (forms) patterns to make the kids remember the steps during lessons. When I was learning TKD as a kid, in another school, our class size was much smaller and we were expected to learn and remember the steps ourselves. If we don't practice and remember our poomsae, we can actually fail our belt tests. For those kids that exceeded expectations during the tests, they are rewarded with double belt promotion. This caused us to be stressed out enough to actually practice hard. In Hwangs, the kids are sort of "carried through" each belt test by the instructors as the instructors still demo the form pattern step-by-step to the kids during the tests. In the unlikely chance that some kids still fail, they can retake the test again a week later. I have also never seen any kid been awarded with double belt promotion so it is a little "socialistic". This leads to my concern about the quality of higher level belts in the school, especially in the areas of the quality of their kicks and sparring. There is just not enough time for kicking practices in Hwangs. I would rather that they share out a URL for correct poomsae (forms) demo video and have the kids learn them at home. The classes should be focused more on aspects that are hard for the kids to learn themselves like the quality of their kicks, blocks, stances, sparring techniques, the individual weaknesses of each kid and instructors should target these weaknesses to help them improve rather than memorizing the pattern itself since that can be learnt by the students at home through watching a video than to waste the precious lesson time on. In summary, they did do a little of what I suggested above but not enough, as the classes are so huge and they spent way too much time during lessons teaching them to remember each step of the poomsae while neglecting the other important aspects of learning TKD.

I have been going to May Thai classes here for a little over a year. The instructors are great and so is the environment. They have recently moved and the new facilities are great.

I’ve only ever done two other martial arts before in my life (including Karate in middle and high school, which I say still counts), so by no means am I an expert on this, but if there is one thing that makes this place stand out, it’s the teacher (Master Yi), and how he carries himself and teaches his students. He has a remarkable calm and a deliberate focus when he speaks, and his actions seem sort of effortless. I mean, if the purpose of martial arts is about developing self-discipline and awareness, you probably want someone teaching you that really has those qualities. To be honest I thought titles like “master” seemed a little corny, but a spending some time around Master Yi, you really get the sense that he’s really “mastered” something internally. Worth checking out!!

I wanted to get into Muay Thai after hearing it from a friend, and seeing them review this place well. Pure Fitness is a gym I just started at and the two instructors I have had have been excellent, give individualized attention, lookout for you if you get are starting to get injured, looking forward to continuing this.

Thank you.

This is a great place to train in a traditional style dojo (karate school). It is definitely worth your time to try this place out!