Commentary

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]

The open letter I’d love to write, but would never send…   Dear Parent/Spectator, I spend a lot of my time looking at my feet. Part of it is as I am getting older I am working ever harder at making sure I can still see them as I stand [Read More]

The Reality Of Perception I consider myself a fan of British comedy. I adore Monty Python, and I’m also a big fan of Eddie Izzard. Find his HBO Special “Dressed to Kill” sometime; he has a way of talking about language that is quite similar to George Carlin. The example [Read More]

First Things First (WARNING: This article may contain mild spoilers for both seasons of Iron Fist, Luke Cage season two, and The Defenders.) I recently had the pleasure of recording two podcast episodes about Iron Fist. The first one I recorded on Whistlekick Martial Arts Radio with the host, Jeremy [Read More]

What Is The True Price Of Fanaticism? The following is an excerpt from my book, “The True Believers” which was recently re-released in a 2nd edition. It’s a story about the darker side of martial arts communities, and how great things became corrupted by codependency, fanaticism, and yes, money. Some [Read More]

This write-up is the second in the series offering survey-driven data to interested martial artists. Our last report was on enrollment, and you read the write-up right here on Martial Journal. Well, here. If you haven’t followed the previous articles, here’s the short version. We construct surveys for martial artists [Read More]

A common prejudice among educated humans in both academia AND the martial arts is a bias against people who are self-taught. The nerdy word for these self-taught people is “autodidacts.” While I agree with the opinion that, especially in highly technical areas of expertise, formal training is nearly always the [Read More]

Traditional Martial Arts – Filling in the Gaps I was listening to a martial arts podcast last week while I was on the treadmill and I heard a line that really struck a chord in me. The line was essentially a statement by a traditional martial artist that said he [Read More]

Appetite For Destruction (Of Boards) My boards are stacked. Spacers set tightly at the edge. I raise my hand to strike the stack. *thud* The dull, dead sound of a hand hitting the boards and not going through. The force runs through my hand and wrist, up my arm. Why [Read More]