Classes Get Underway For Newly Launched NJPW Academy

Last month, New Japan Pro-Wrestling announced that their LA Dojo in Los Angeles, which served as a finishing school for many of the wrestlers who appeared on "NJPW Strong" and other NJPW of America shows, would start offering a more traditional commercial wrestling school program under the NJPW Academy banner. On Thursday, NJPW's website checked in with an update, taking a look at how the first week of classes are going so far, with beginner's classes (for those with zero to one year of experience) having started this past Monday and advanced classes starting the following day.  

Tyler Bateman, The DKC, and Royce Isaacs coach the beginner's classes, while KUSHIDA and Fred Rosser coach the advanced classes, with Minoru Suzuki dropping in as a guest coach during week one. Bateman and DKC assessed the students warmed up with 100 free squats and 50 pushups, a significantly toned down version of the "hell camp" era of NJPW dojo tryouts in Japan where hopefuls had to do at least 500 squats. After that, they were taught the most basics of basics for the rest of the session: Lock-ups and wrist locks. The warm-ups for the advanced class, meanwhile, added "mat exercises and rope work" to the pushups and squats before they got down to the wrestling training proper. According to KUSHIDA, the enrollees were split more or less evenly between beginners who already had some experience and advanced class members with more than five years of experience, implying that there were no true beginners in the first class.

"My mission at NJPW ACADEMY is to help everyone not just learn the style of the greats that came before us, but to learn the thinking behind their style," Rosser told NJPW. "At the end of the day, we don't want to look like our heroes we want to see like our heroes." KUSHIDA added that "I want us to be very conscious of teaching what makes Japan different, how things are done there — we are under the NJPW banner after all."