Hi! If you’ve clicked your way over to this blog, it probably means you’re a new martial arts student or thinking about starting soon. That’s awesome! There are so many reasons to train: for exercise, to learn new skills, to start a lifelong hobby, and even to gain new self-respect and self-awareness.
The weapon called the bo, or bo staff*, has appeared in pop culture for decades, from the ancient Chinese epic Journey to the West and Robin Hood**, to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Pacific Rim. It’s still a favorite in martial arts dojos today, and new forms are still being developed for it. The bo has a long and storied history that dates back to some of the earliest days of recorded history.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the art whose name means “contact combat” in Hebrew is consistently ranked as one of the best for self-defense. The Israeli art has practitioners around the world. Even if you’ve never trained in krav directly, if you’ve attended a self-defense class, chances are what you learned borrowed from krav fundamentals.
Regular physical activity is essential for getting stronger, staying healthy, and living longer. Most doctors recommend getting at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise each day. While this is sound advice, you may not experience all the benefits if your exercise nutrition is poor. It’s important to understand how nutrition, both good and bad, plays a role in the effectiveness of your workouts. Your health and wellness and fitness nutrition have a cause and effect relationship.
Have you ever considered participating in martial arts for fitness benefits? Unfortunately, most people haven’t because they wrongly believe that martial arts are only useful for combat and self-defense. It is undeniable that those are valuable tools. Everyone wants to be able to protect themselves or their loved ones in a time of need. However, when people unfamiliar with the arts focus on the fighting, they fail to recognize the attributes that make martial arts great for improving overall physical fitness.
We all have at least one role model martial artist that we’d love to get to train with. For some, this dream training is strictly hypothetical (sorry, Bruce Lee fans), but other people get the chance to train with their icons at seminars, tournaments, or events like the Martial Arts SuperShow. Recently, I got the chance to train with someone I greatly admire: Mike Seeklander.
As a skinny 14-year-old haole (non-native Hawaiian) kid with long blonde hair, I definitely didn’t look like the typical aspiring boxer from Honolulu, Hawaii. But there I was, being driven to my first (dubiously sanctioned) boxing match.
As self-defense and tactical instructors, we are always working hard to give our students a more realistic training experience. This is especially important to my group, CORE, where we focus on a mix of hand-to-hand and armed self-defense for gun owners.
