A new martial arts studio is set to open in Salisbury next month, with its founders hoping to provide a space for growth and learning for people in the area through karate.
Legacy Martial Arts, located at the Twilley Shopping Center in Salisbury, is set to open its doors on Aug. 1, holding classes for age groups including young children all the way up to adults. And Kena and Justin Garner, the founders of the studio, hope that martial arts will have the same impact on the lives of their students that its had on their own.
When Kena, a Salisbury native, and Justin met, Justin was already an owner of a martial arts school in Georgia. Now married and with children, they’ve blended the different styles of martial arts they’ve learned over their more than two decades each of learning, teaching and practicing, and hope to implement it into their teachings at Legacy Martial Arts.
“We wanted our kids to have the opportunity to grow up in a safe, family-friendly martial arts environment,” Kena said in an interview. “We grew up in two different martial arts. I grew up in one called ‘Kenpo,’ and he grew up in something called ‘American Karate.’ So, we blended the two together, and we focus on Kenpo for self-defense and American Karate for competition in sport. We think that creates a well-rounded martial artist and gives our students unique opportunities and advantages.”
Along with self-defense and competition, the Garners believe that studying martial arts can have an even larger impact on the lives of young people, and they use their own lives as an example of its benefits. For Kena, her parents initially enrolled her in martial arts classes in hopes of her learning self-defense, not knowing just how impactful it would continue to be for her throughout the rest of her life, giving her confidence, and teaching self-control and respect. For Justin, who says he struggled with shyness and a bad temper when he was younger, martial arts also changed things for him personally.
“I was struggling with a lot of things in my life at the time,” Justin said. “When I started martial arts, it really centered me. It grounded me … Martial arts really was the catalyst for me to really work on myself. So it’s very important for that to be available to our kids and to the community.”
When the studio opens in August, Legacy Martial Arts is planning to have classes for students 18 months old and up, separated by age groups, as well as classes for adults, with multiple classes per day being taught throughout the week. They are also planning on having classes tailored specifically for children with special needs.
And when it comes to the overall mission of Legacy Martial Arts and what they hope their students will gain from their teachings, the Garners say they will be fulfilled by helping to nurture well-rounded young people, with improvements coming in different areas of the lives of their students, whether it be academically, their lives at home and more.
“How we measure success is, ‘How are we impacting the community? How are we helping parents?’ ” Justin said. “When a parent comes to us and says, ‘Thank You so much, he went from Cs and Ds on his report card because he thinks he’s dumb to straight As because now he has the confidence in himself to do better in school,’ that is our win. That’s our success.”
