Adults, 18+. Shorin-ryu. Nothing else.
No point system. No trophies. No tournament season. No one’s kid.
Just the art, taught the way it was handed down.
The road here
Sensei Ken Larkman spent decades doing what serious martial artists do: training hard in whatever was in front of him, and training well. Shotokan. Shito-ryu. Wado-ryu. Fukien White Crane gung-fu. Shaolin Chuan Fa. Fifty years of accumulating.
Then came a short conversation with Walter Todd, not long before Todd died in 1999.
Todd was one of the great figures of Western budo — widely credited as the first American to earn a black belt in Shotokan karate, the first foreign student of Hironori Otsuka, founder of Wado-ryu, and appointed U.S. branch director of Shudokan by its founder Kanken Toyama. Sixty years deep in Japanese martial arts, near the end of his life.
That meeting changed the direction of everything. Sensei Larkman began the slow work of converting his karate to Shorin-ryu — the Okinawan source the Japanese styles came from — guided by mentors who pointed him toward the right material and the right ideals.
That process produced Ryukyu Kyuryo Shorin-ryu: built from Matsubayashi-ryu and Kobayashi-ryu, the two great streams of Okinawan Shorin-ryu, and shaped by everything a fifty-year career taught him about what actually holds up.
The teachers behind it
Along the way, Sensei Larkman trained under people most karateka only read about:
- Master Teruyuki Okazaki (1931–2020) — founder of the International Shotokan Karate Federation, direct student of Gichin Funakoshi, and the man who brought JKA Shotokan to America in 1961.
- Master Yutaka Yaguchi (1932–2023) — ISKF co-founder and chairman of its technical committee. The last surviving direct student of Funakoshi himself.
- Master Shojiro Koyama — one of the five instructors who founded the ISKF in 1977 and a pillar of traditional Shotokan in North America for half a century.
- Hanshi Frank Woon-A-Tai — the senior Kyokushin authority in the Western hemisphere and a defining figure in Canadian full-contact karate.
- Bill “Superfoot” Wallace — undefeated world middleweight kickboxing champion and the most influential striking technician America has produced.
- Dr. Bernd Weiss — author of Applied Karate, specialist in the practical application of traditional technique.
Japanese precision. Chinese softness and circularity. Superfoot’s mechanics. All of it eventually filtered through Okinawan Shorin-ryu.
What that means for you on the floor
A teacher with that background watches you move once and knows which joint is lying, which habit came from a previous style, and what you’ll need eighteen months from now. That isn’t something a curriculum provides. It’s the difference between being taught karate and being taught your karate.
What training looks like
Kihon until the basics stop being basic. Kata as the actual curriculum — studied slowly, layer by layer, with the bunkai that explains why each movement exists. Partner work at a pace that builds skill instead of ego. Conditioning that comes out of the training itself.
Sport karate is a different animal, and a good one. It just isn’t this. Competition rewards what scores. Traditional karate pursues what works and what’s correct, which are frequently not the same thing and never on a two-minute clock.
Who ends up here
People who tried a gym and got bored. People who did karate as a teenager and have thought about it for twenty years since. Lifters and runners who want to move with intention rather than just intensity. People carrying more stress than they’d care to admit, who find that ninety minutes of demanding, precise, fully absorbing work is the only reliable off-switch they’ve got.
Beginners are genuinely welcome. So are experienced karateka from other systems — Sensei Larkman has trained across enough of them to meet you where you are.
Why adults last here
You don’t need to be fit, flexible, or young. You need to show up.
Karate is one of the few physical practices that gets deeper with age rather than just harder. The twenty-two-year-old will out-jump you. That advantage evaporates the moment technique matters. Ten years in, you’ll be better than you are now — a sentence almost no adult athlete gets to say.
Progress is measured in years, and it’s honest. Rank here is earned in front of someone who knows exactly what it’s worth.
The room
Adults only. Small classes. No contracts built to outlast your motivation. No competitive track, by design. We train within Karate Alberta and Karate Canada, the official provincial and national bodies for the art in this country — a matter of standards and legitimacy of rank, not medals.