While sociable personalities excel in team sports offered in school, what options do lone wolf personalities have?
Competitive sports build many important character traits that are carried on throughout your child’s life, well into adulthood. Many of these are team sports offered in school, but what if your child is more of the ‘lone wolf’ personality, where can he turn to gain these valuable skills?
Even though most schools offer sports such as wrestling, tennis, and golf, the idea of representing the students’ body changes the dynamics, making it more about the collective than the individual.
Competition teaches our children to deal with pressure, personalities, responsibility, independence, and conflict skills. While this is merely a short list of the positive effects of competitive sports, it illustrates the importance of competitive sports. What activities are available for a child who is not interested in representing his high school, that develop the skills he can carry on into his adult life?
Benefits of Karate
Karate offers all the benefits enumerated earlier, and then some. Karate can be started at a relatively young age and continued well into the seventies and beyond. There is no season for Karate, it is a truly ann individual endeavor to better one’s self. However, there are competitions locally, nationally and internationally through organizations such as the AAU.
Karate is an individual activity, which requires cooperation from others.
While Karate is an individual endeavor, it requires mutual cooperation between partners, each pushing each other to become better. Learning to work with partners to develop their skills directly increases the others abilities. The same method and idea exists in our society in the workplace and in interpersonal relationships. Students must learn to cooperate with various personalities in learning through this process. Confilct resolution is also key to Karate training. Students learn a skill that if used in the wrong manner can severely injure someone. Students are taught to avoid and talk their way out of physical conflict, using various verbal techniques. These skills and more are learned through the study and practice of Karate. In many ways, the life long benefits of Karate outweigh the short term benefits offered through team sports in schools.
Coastal Virginia Karate teaches classes to students aged between 7 and 75. We are regularly contacted by those who had taken some form of martial arts as a child, but had to stop training and wish they had not.
