It is one of my pet hates when sport fighting clubs like some tournament orientated karate schools, kickboxing clubs and Jujitsu clubs advertise that they teach self-defence. What they do is okay for some situations but consider this: Roughly 40% of self defence situations involve multiple attackers, which by its nature is a very dangerous […]
The brain is an amazing organ, it takes in and records all the information from all five or our senses. If we had access to all of our memories and were flooded with stimulus from all of our senses all the time we would struggle to focus. So to prevent us from being over whelmed […]
Shuhari is a Japanese concept which can be taken to extremely esoteric levels, but for us, as practical martial artists we should initially view it simply as three levels of learning: Shu(守?) : In this beginning stage the student concentrates on how to do the task. The goal here is to learn to control your […]
Karate Jedi It is no accident that Jedi robes look a little similar to a karate gi. Jedi were meant to look like a cross between a samurai warrior and a Buddhist monk- strong warriors but also wise and religiously devoted to their craft. Obviously, karate students don’t have lightsabers nor can we use the […]
There is a certain mysticism about becoming a black belt and even achieving a brown belt is a serious accomplishment. What is it that is so special about this achievement? Well, the answer is simple: it is not about their physical prowess although that is impressive. It is about the person they became in order […]
In our karate classes, we spend about 5% of our time on ground fighting and take down defences. In combat that ratio shifts to somewhere around 10-20% on ground work and takedown defences. But think about this: in terms of self-defence, 42% of real fights go to the ground. For ladies, the majority of assaults […]
When I first started as a martial artist I was fortunate that I had a great instructor. This was fortunate for many reasons but one of the least obvious was that back then it was very hard to get more information. The internet was very limited using a dial-up phone line connection, there was no way […]
This video is a little slow to begin with, so if you’re impatient skip to 1.58 to get to the juicy bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sUyAWHsDms
