Discussing whether it’s good or not to block/cover. The answer? It’s complicated.

My teacher doesn’t like teaching this, because it’s not winning it’s prolonging loss. But I’m not going to come at this from the perspective of ‘should’ or ‘should not’ do. But rather I want to say ‘what does covering indicate?’ Chances are, if you’re covering or blocking in a fight, in that specific moment you

Why are traditionalists still so threatened by western martial arts?

Whether it’s combat sports like MMA or RBSD, many people who study eastern martial arts(With exception of Muay Thai) will look down on western martial arts. Today I saw a guy I respect, who generally has intelligent takes, exclaim how offended he was that MMA now has mainstream acceptance as Boxing. Says it’s offensive to

Karate is not your life. Jui-Jitsu is not your life. Kung-fu is not your life. Get a second hobby.

I personally got nothing against the Karateka in the picture. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, maybe knows some cool shit. All that jazz. But I really cringe when I see BJJ bros go in a circle and say “What has Jui-Jitsu done for you? What has it taught you about life?” Or you have

Misconceptions about RBSD and Combat sports.

I follow a left leaning MMA and martial arts group. They are too far left to me, and even among people far left they have some extreme views. But they do a very good job at documenting the history of unsavory crap many martial arts organizations and fighters do and have done which is not

I don’t care how Bad Ass you are. That does not matter in a teacher.

I try to follow many martial artists, combat sports folks and self-defense experts on social media. One thing I noticed is either directly or indirectly they constantly talk about how hardcore they are, how hardcore their training was, how hardcore their life experience was. They want to convince the world they are super-badass. And that

I was spoiled: How good self-defense from my teacher keeps me from enjoying it anywhere else.

So I pointed out many flaws in RBSD. How it’s taught by cops, bouncers, soldiers. Occupations where they are all walking into situations where there is no surprise there is violence. Sometimes the moment they put the uniform on, the body unconsciously prepares and dumps chemicals. It most certainly does so for cops arriving somewhere

The arms not moving, they are moved.

Rick my karate teacher used to say this, and he still often says this to me. And for a long time it drove me nuts. Not because he was correcting me, but because I didn’t understand exactly what it meant. I knew it meant not literally moving the arm separated, but had a hard time

Maybe ‘catching punches’ out of the air isn’t so pointless as I once thought.

Based on reading Maija’s books(ADHD has bad memory, so I have to re-read them to confirm) a big part of her system is being so good at defense that basically you can attack freely without worrying about getting killed, it allows for a focus on attack. One of her biggest critiques of most weapon systems

THE PROBLEM WITH COMBAT SPORTS

I get annoyed by Self-Defense people over emphasizing the shit out of how different street fights are from sport fighting. Thing is there are differences, and they are big enough differences to have to change training approaches. This blog post will focus on specific tactics that are bad for self-defense, but the overall focus is

Kosen Judo didn’t defeat BJJ because Helio was smaller than Kimura.

This post isn’t going to be long. Lots of people who want to claim that Kosen-Judo(Judo before the olympics fucked it up) was still inferior to BJJ in terms of the quality of it’s overall grappling and ground work. Never mind Kimura, Mifune, Maeda were doing De La Riva guard and X-guard long before modern