Commentary

Benefits are everywhere when you look for them, even if you are not a fan of where the benefit comes from. Many TMA practitioners (Traditional Martial Arts) don’t like MMA (Mixed Martial Arts). Many MMA  fighters don’t like TMA. The reasons are everything from a lack of an open mind [Read More]

Breaking Down Cobra Kai Season 1-With Spoilers! It is no secret that I really enjoyed the first season of Cobra Kai. I was thrilled to see that they not only brought the original characters back but also made a flat-out fantastic show. You can listen to a spoiler-free discussion I had with Sensei [Read More]

There is no rubric to determine what makes a good martial arts movie. Can a movie survive based on the action alone? Or are the story and characters what make a movie great? Consider the films Ip Man and The Raid: Redemption while keeping questions like this in mind. One [Read More]

Welcome to Positive Psychology Since you reading Martial Journal, it is a safe assumption that you are very interested in martial arts.  Regardless of style, the training is the same: you’re less terrible with more practice. If you’re a white belt, don’t give up because you see a black belt [Read More]

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]