Learn to fight first before learning a style or system.

The title may sound like a very strange statement, since the assumption is that a system will already teach you how to fight. That isn’t a wrong assessment, as a boxing system involves actually trying to punch people or Muay Thai as a system involves trying to strike and disbalance. Wrestling/Judo systems mean actually trying

Why is Sen no sen/Interrupting punches and combinations so uncommon in most kickboxing styles?

I’m going to praise myself, and in doing so also praise my teachers. To paraphrase former Trump administration flunky Anthony Scaramucci(Or however you spell his last name) he said “Steve Bannon sucks his own dick.” Well I don’t mean to suck my own dick, but most people I teach or spar with me say I

Revising my view on blocking and covering.

So a young man that wants to fight that I try to help fill in gaps in his knowledge came to me with a question. He said to me that he is afraid to attack in striking and sticks to countering, because he’s afraid of being countered himself. Now I find this a problem, because

Challenging the gift of fear: What if your gut is wrong?

So Gavin Debecker wrote a book about essentially how our fear and gut instincts are a gift. He’s not touching on something completely bogus, research shows when we make decisions, we make the choice first then reason why we did it. Many times our brains know the right answer before even we ourselves realize it.

How many boxers do Tai-Chi body mechanics every practice.

Before I go onto how boxers generally utilize this skill, I’ll do an overview of peng/elasticity. I’ve made blog posts about Peng before, about the natural elasticity in the body that internal martial arts practitioners use as one of their primary skills and characteristics. It’s what they use to cause people to go flying with

Rules dictate how a style or school fights.

Ninety percent of martial arts or combative schools have rules when they fight, especially when doing pressure testing or sparring. Yes even your school with eye pokes and groin kicks. You all train with rules whether you know it or not. My school we could tap the groin if someone had a cup, and indicate

Headbutts change everything.

So agan, I started with Karate, but my teacher didn’t train in a traditional way, or rather he never felt bound by it. So we head butted. And I got pretty good at it, I think we all did. But the focus of the training went toward purity of motion than focussing on a single

Applying WPD-RC Empty Space concept with distance and Range.

My karate/combatives teacher Rick Wilson talks a great deal about how Empty Space and understanding it is largely a foundational principle in understanding combat. It seems like common sense at first. BJJ says when you’re on top you take space, when you’re on bottom you create it. When you’re putting a submission on you take

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

From the mouth of a striker: Wrestling is the king of martial arts.

I like striking. I started out with it. I think for a slow fat guy I’m pretty good at it. I certainly love dirty boxing, Okinawan karate is a close quarters fighting art, and unlike most Uechi-Ryu schools that give lip service to close quarters combat, we actually did close quarters combat, with head butts