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

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

Applications of your own enemies peng/elasticity.

I am going to use the term PENG from chinese martial arts to describe weaponizing the natural elasticity in the body to strike, push or move. While I believe Taiji and many chinese styles particularly study this concept in martial arts more than others, they are far from the only ones to use it or

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

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

Khabib and the cage: Why he would be MORE dominant in a ring.

Khabib is not a perfect person or even a perfect martial artist. He has areas he’s weak at, etc. Hell when I saw him fight Edson Barbosa, I thought the way he just plodded forward would get him countered against McGreggor. But when Khabib fought McGregor, he didn’t plod forward, he controlled the distance very

WAIT! Catch wrestling used to be in the Olympics? WHAT!!!

I watched this video, and it makes many wonderful points. But if there is anything I learned from watching it, it’s that martial artists should never ever ever ever want their style to get into the Olympics if they still want it to have a combative focus. Most notable was the fact that when the

Strength and good body mechanics are the same thing.

No the title isn’t click bait. Depending on how you define what technique is, it’s not different from strength. If you define technique as collecting a bunch of moves and tricks to pull off, then technique and strength are different things. But that definition of technique only helps you in a limited fashion in combat.

If you’re a good teacher, your students should start beating you.

Before I talk about students, lets talk about size, strength, age and Talent. When we think of martial arts, particularly those in Asia or Asian influenced, we think of a little old man with a bent back, a line full of students throwing punches and kicks. When he squares off with one of his students,

The aging martial artist: Learning to take things slow.

A martial artist should rarely injure or cause repeated harm to their training partners. But they should go fast. Landing a blow without injuring a partner as fast and as many times as possible. I am not against going fast in training, and if anything drills should always speed up. But you should start slow,