There are always people asking:  “I have no Jinenkan Dojo near me, but I would like to keep training; what can I do?”  I ran into this same problem back in 2001, when I moved away from Atlanta to Tennessee to raise my daughter in a better place and go back to school to finish my engineering degree.  At the time, there were more high ranking people at the Jinenkan Atlanta Dojo than anywhere else in the world, so I went from an extremely good and challenging training environment to an absolute void of training all together.  If I was going to train, it was all up to me.  Sometimes, real life gets in the way of training and you have to find a way to make due.

            The most important, and most difficult, thing about training on your own is staying motivated.  With no one else counting on you or even just looking for you, it is extremely easy to just “take a day off”, which quickly turns into a month, or even a year.  Constantly vary your training regimen so things stay interesting and you don’t get bored, and be as disciplined as possible so your training doesn’t get neglected.  When I first started my “dojo”, I set a class time and trained then whether anyone showed up or not (which for quite a while was “not”).

            Once you have committed the time to training, you are only left to figure what to do to fill that time.  Start with the kihon (basics) uchi (strikes).  These you can easily do by yourself – begin from a good kamae and punch the air, finishing in a good kamae.  Do some extremely slowly and be very particular and honest with yourself about each small detail.  If you have a mirror or even a reflective surface, watch yourself perform the kihon from several angles.  A video camera on a tripod (or with a friend) works well here too.  After doing several repetitions slowly and perfectly, do several as fast and hard as you can.  Practice doing these kihon while stepping forwards, backwards, and staying in place (just switching your feet).  Practice each strike in several directions, and practice different footwork combinations such as the lunge, cross, and jab.  Practice actually hitting things – from a large heavy target (like a heavy bag) that moves to practice solid footwork and good follow through,  to a small light target (like a tennis ball on a string) to work on targeting and accuracy, to a harder immoveable target (tree, post wrapped with rope, etc.) to condition your “fists” to actually hitting things.  Always finish by going back to your slow, perfect movement to reinforce correct form and taijutsu so you make sure to practice perfectly and don’t develop bad habits.  Unarmed alone you have fudoken, shikanken, omote and ura shuto, shomen, sokuho, and koho geri, boshiken, happaken, koppoken, goshiken, shakoken, and many others.  Practice all of these from all the various kamae.  You can do the same thing with each of the weapons and their basic strikes.  Vary your routine so you are always doing something different to keep it interesting, but any and all practice will be helpful. 

            For ukemi training you have many options as well. Start basic with rolling slowly and perfectly from a single kamae to the same kamae.  Move from there to rolling and getting up smoothly in kamae facing different directions.  Next start rolling in different directions and over different shoulders.  For example, you can do zenpo kaiten from hidari seigan, but start out rolling over the left shoulder only.  Roll forward, to both sides, and backwards, all from hidari seigan and all over the left shoulder.  Do the same thing over your right shoulder, then do all of that from migi seigan.  Repeat that whole procedure from each kamae and with each roll.

            Get inventive with your training, and take advantage of what you have at hand.  You may not have a beautiful dojo with nice mats, but you have plenty of options for training as long as you have some open space.  Use trees for striking targets, and  hang tennis balls from strings from the branches for targeting practice.  Practice rolls over logs and rocks and under low branches, and drill yoko aruki around trees and  through rough brushy areas.  If it’s snowy, icy, or muddy outside, practice your taijutsu for a real test – they used to perform techniques on icy ponds to test themselves, so you can do something similar!  For cutting practice, you can use anything you can find.  Start with water-filled plastic jugs (such as 2-liter bottles, milk jugs, 20 oz Coke bottles, etc.) and cut those.  If you are lucky enough to find a neighbor with bamboo growing, they will most likely be more than happy enough to let you cut all you want.  Fruit trees that always have fruit rotting off the branches gives plenty of good targeting opportunities for cutting.  After Halloween pumpkins are always laying around going to waste, and many times at the end of a growing season there are all sorts of vegetables that just rot in the fields.  All of these things provide plenty of cutting opportunities!

            Try and use everything at hand to further your training, but at the same time be appreciative of what you are using and don’t be wasteful.  Uselessly and wastefully killing any living thing (even plants) is in poor taste, so be respectful of your new “training partners”.  Punching a tree or cutting some fruit causes no harm, but if you butcher all the branches or rip half the bark off the trunk you will cause serious damage to the tree.  Keep in mind you want your “training partners” to be around for a long time, so work in concert with them so you both can benefit.

              Once you start to really look you can find no end to good solo training opportunities.  Sure, you cannot possibly learn kakehiki and some of the grappling things where you need to have a partner, but save those things for when you can visit a dojo.  Of course, training in a good school with a good group of training partners is the ideal and really is necessary to progress fully, but in the mean time - there's no reason not to have so much you CAN do on your own to keep you busy for years!