Commentary

A prejudice common in the martial arts world is to automatically assume that training in the country of origin of a given martial art is superior to training anywhere else. I call it the “Training Overseas Fallacy.” I’ve practiced one martial art or another for forty-eight years, and taught for [Read More]

Health in the Martial Art World Martial arts, as a whole, is a very deep and amazing practice.  For us to continue our beloved art to the next generation, we must know its past, present, and future. The past is full of war, philosophy, duels, religion, and spirituality. Current martial [Read More]

Three-section staff and other possible Chinese cousins to the nunchuck This March is Nunchuck Month at Martial Journal so I wanted to add my two pennies to the subject. Earlier this month Jaredd talked about the history of the nunchaku. In his article Jaredd mentions a Chinese version of the [Read More]

The title might throw you off, but I’m sure you’ve seen it before. Spectacle is what makes professional wrestling entertaining. It’s the reason Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor fought to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. You can also credit spectacle with being the reason that so many [Read More]

Putting A Spotlight On Nunchucks For the month of March, Martial Journal is bringing you something a little different. We are calling it Nunchuck Month! This means you might notice more articles appearing on Martial Journal that are about, or relating to, nunchucks. There will be articles about nunchucks that [Read More]

Watch Out For These Fairy Tales In the previous two installments of this series, I discussed some phrases, that are often uttered in gyms and dojos around the world, and that one should be wary of. Some of them have to do with the way business is conducted. Others are [Read More]

Don’t Be A Crab I recently read an article on Fatherly entitled “Everything You Need to Know About Martial Arts Before Signing Your Kid Up”. I came away in a very conflicted mindset after reading the article. Overall, I think the article itself is actually fairly decent. It relays some [Read More]

The warm up is finished. The instructor tells you to find a partner and get a pair of pads. You put on your gloves, and execute your combination on the pads. ‘You need to pivot more on the ball of the foot, because that’s how you get power. And also, [Read More]

2018 started off great for me, training-wise. I was never one of those people who seemed to live at the dojo, but I was maintaining a fairly regular training schedule and felt I was progressing nicely. And then, as happens all too often for many people, life got in the [Read More]

“The warrior is not someone who fights, because no one has the right to take another’s life. The warrior, for us, is one who sacrifices himself for the good of others.” ~ Sitting Bull.   First Things First A lot of people who think of martial arts think of the [Read More]

Imagine this: You go to a restaurant that you heard good things about. You like pizza, and they are known for making great pizza. You come in, take a menu and sit down. When someone comes to take your order, you ask to speak to the manager. When the manager [Read More]

If you’ve been training in the martial arts for more than a little while, you have probably had awkward interactions with other people when they found out about your martial arts “habit.”  I’ve been practicing a variety of fighting arts for forty seven years, and I can tell you that [Read More]

Violence – My Perspective I’ve come to believe two things about violence: it is fluid in nature and it is morally neutral. I don’t think I’ll get much pushback about violence being fluid. After all, almost all of us train in dealing with any number of unpredictable scenarios. There’s a [Read More]

Taking A Look Back At 2018 Wow. What a year 2018 was for Martial Journal. It really is hard to believe that we are back in December already, but multiple calendar checks have verified it for me so I guess it must be true. As I take a look back at this [Read More]

Recently I encountered a variation of this question in a martial arts channel on Reddit. The person asking the question was a teenage instructor at a traditional martial arts (TMA) school. She had begun teaching several older students, some of whom were old enough to be her parents. To complicate [Read More]

By Jonathan Bluestein The modern era has seen a significant rise in the popularity of sports-oriented martial arts, and eventually Mixed Martial Arts. The philosophical roots of these martial arts are strongly linked with American Capitalism. That is to say, that there exists a belief in sports martial arts, whereby [Read More]

The Black Belt. Everybody in the world knows it means… or thinks they know what it means! They think a Black Belt means you’re tough—maybe even a killer. It means you’re skilled—maybe even a master. It means you’re wise—maybe even a white-bearded wizard who wields the power to turn villains [Read More]