Choke Defense

This is a technique used to defend from someone when you are underneath them and they are choking you. It is imperative that you know how to escape from this as a lot of people have been killed this way. Practice the technique as much as possible before you start trying to do it live or fast paced.

Awareness and Self-defense Training

One of the most crucial aspects of self defense and staying safe is mental awareness or what the Japanese refer to as "zan-shin", which loosely translate to awareness of danger. You will always fare better in a confrontation if you get to see it coming and are cognizant when you are in situations or places that place you or your loved ones in danger. The following video will give you some pointers on awareness.

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Women's Self Defense: Soft Targets

When we talk about soft targets in self defense we are talking about targets on any individual that are equally easy to attack whether that person is big and strong or small or weak. It doesn't matter how much a person can bench press, their knee will still break with the same amount of force. The following video will explore these concepts a little more.

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The Book of Five Rings is a text on kenjutsu and the martial arts in general, written by the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi circa 1645. However it is much more than that, the strategies Musashi advocates in this book can be applied to any form of competition. There have been various translations made over the years, and it enjoys an audience considerably broader than only that of martial artists: for instance, some business leaders find its discussion of conflict and taking the advantage to be relevant to their fields. Here is an online version of it if you'd like to investigate Musashi's teachings further.

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If you're having a hard time getting your sluggish kid away from video games and getting them into something real and good for them, you should probably try making exercise time a bit more adventurous by mixing in some basic martial arts moves. Let them try these five simple karate exercises, and you'll be heading them in the right direction in no time.

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The Bushido of SEO

I'm actually going to devote this blog what SEO (search engine optimization) and martial arts have in common. While at first glance they may appear completely unrelated, if you dig a little deeper than they do have a common root. They both share conflict as a common origin. How is SEO conflict? First of all, the real battle these days is not just having a site, it's getting it to rank in the top three spots of the Google organic results. That's where the money is. However, to get there you have to fight Google's mysterious algorhym as well as thousands of competitors who want the same spot. If there was ever a time to get out Sun Tzu's "Art of War", it's when you start seriously trying to move a site up in the ranks. And there is this commonality as well, you are wise to go about this in the correct way and not try to take shortcuts or hacks. There are no hacks in martial arts, what you achieve you pay for with sweat and effort. SEO does have some means of hacking the system, the only problem is that if you hack the system and Google changes their criteria for ranking, everything you've worked for could be gone just like that. More to come on this tomorrow.

Back in Black

Hi to all past and present students. I am teaching again, although I'm only doing private lessons. You can find out more about that at my website www.martialartscharleston.net. Since I last taught professionaly so much has changed in the martial arts landscape and in my opinion much of that has been a watering down and weakening of the arts. This is part of the reason I am actively teaching again, the other part is that I love it. More to come on these subjects soon.