I went in to watch my friends son train. This is the type of stuff they were doing.
Everytime I see something like that I`d like to hide under the bed for having trained Ninjutsu for years. To my defense I was in an irish organization were the coaches
near all consisted out of ex military from Great Britain and physical intensity was every bit as demanding as Wrestling/Boxing training.
Taijutsu is considered to be the simple physical aspect of moving and strenght Training. Like rolls , jumps...etc any sort of strengh and cardio development.
It doesnt make any sense to call an MA Taijutsu.
Problem is there was a big split in the early 90s in Ninjutsu because the Hombu Dojo lowered standards more and more under Masaaki Hatsumi (I dont consider him a legit teacher) to make cash and Ninjutsu got to be the joke it mostly is nowadays. The lineage died with Takamatsu Toshitsugu who, if any evidence is to be believed was a high level ma practitioner.
Most serious practitioners split with the hombu Dojo. Many stopped training Ninjutsu and others formed their own independent groups. Ist mostly shit nowadays and a complete Ninja larping esoteric joke in my city.
My conclusion on MY Training and what Ninjutsu can be:
1) excellent physical Training (because of military history of coaches.
2) shit guard for stand up and shit positioning for ground fighting.
3) the best stick and knife fighting I have experienced to this day. Especially Hanbo short stick was very thought through.
4) excellent movement and throwing /falling training and in general fluid body movement. The throwing and stand up grappling was much more profound than any Judo I learned (was a member) back then. That really was high Level and trained in full resistance drills.
5) very rare hard sparring but live drills with full force. no distance / timing training at all. So in truth we were crappy fighters.
6) Fixation on small Joint Manipulation regarding
7) forget groundfighting. Because of nonexistent positioning it was crap.
I profited enormous from the training. Much more than Judo and Karate and now that I restarted MA after many years with Boxing what I instantly see is that my ninutsu training helps me a lot in the way I learned to move but not in the way I executed techniques (that was mostly crap).
A simple way to see if the Ninjutsu coach is for real: ask for a live sparring with a coach. Near all good coaches never had a problem with that and you could do a kind of kickboxing or Judo fight.
hope that helps. I would say the only countries were you still get quality ninjutsu in parts is England and Ireland / Scottland. United States was from the beginning concentrated on running around like a Ninja. Imo the strongest part of a good Ninjutsu training is the Judo part.
