I recommend that all my students take at least a basic gun safety course at some point. I prefer they do a course which involves live shooting on a range. There are a number of reasons for this.

The topic of guns can be an emotionally charged one. When emotion gets involved, reason goes out the window. A few years back my wife told me that she had always been afraid of guns. I signed both of us up for a gun safety course and we fired a couple of handguns at a range. My wife’s irrational fear subsided and, after the first shot, she found the experience to be fun. Hey – target shooting is a safe sport enjoyed by millions worldwide – it has nothing to do with violence.

USMC marksman Image via Wikipedia

So here’s why I make the recommendation for everyone:

A healthy respect for the danger of firearms starts from understanding not ignorance. Ignorance breeds irrational fear, which breeds poor decisions.

Love them or hate them, guns are part of our world. Even if you live in a country where guns are banned completely, criminals are still armed. You should understand the capabilities of firearms so that you can more realistically learn to defend against them.

If you were to encounter a firearm, say your child found one, or you disarmed an attacker – do you understand how to make different types of firearms safe so that nobody gets hurt by accident?

If it comes down to defending the life of your family, and you had the chance to pick up a firearm, would you know how to use it? Beyond just pointing and pulling the trigger – would you know how to chamber a round, clear a jam, or reload?

Once again, your opinions about firearms are yours to make, but don’t you think they are better coming from a place of education rather than a place of ignorance? Unfortunately, like martial arts, most people get nearly 100% of their information about guns from TV and movies. The reality is very different.

For modern martial artists, learning about guns is like learning about swords for the traditional martial arts.

When I was a boy I was drawn to martial arts mainly because of images in the media. I saw Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee beating up bad guys. I saw the Karate Kid win the tournament. This was inspiring, but even more spoke to my insecurities with a promise to become someone more powerful, more in control, safer.

Chuck Norris Image via Wikipedia

Having spoken with many martial artists – I think this is a common point of entry. Ask someone who has been training in martial arts for a long time why they started to train, and why they continued to train, and you are likely to get two different responses.

Evolution as a Martial Artist

As a young man, I found myself attracted to the commando tough-guy types. The guys who claimed to train the CIA and the Navy SEALS etc. I would seek out seminars and products from these guys.

Again, the underlying feeling was that I wanted to feel tougher, more powerful.

But there’s a problem with this approach. When you have deep seated insecurities, covering over them with bravado or tough act, you still have insecurities.

I eventually was drawn to teachers who were kind, fatherly, skilled yet friendly. Teachers who didn’t have giant photos of themselves wearing gold embroidered outfits at the front door of their dojo. These are the people I could really learn from.

Enter the Ego

Without getting overly philosophical, the main issue here is the ego. The ego in this sense is a survival mechanism. It is a psychological construct that makes you crave safety, control, and approval so that your identified self can survive.

The ego is a big bundle of insecurities that often masks itself by all kinds of crappy behavior – like acting tough, getting angry easy, putting down others, building up false images of yourself, lying, Internet flame wars. Some psychologists appropriately call these behaviors defense mechanisms.

Moving Beyond Ego Satisfaction

As I progressed in the martial arts, I found myself less attracted to physical strength, macho bravado stuff, and top secret commando killing techniques. I gravitated towards teachers who skilled yet extremely humble.

Write this down: humility is the opposite of low self esteem.

I really enjoy the recent Ip Man movies with Donnie Yen. To me, this representation of the master who taught Bruce Lee shows an ideal self mastery:

• Always humble
• Kind to students, and other masters
• Difficult to anger
• Even under difficult situations smiles easily
• When forced to fight tries not to harm others

Physical skill is admirable, but self control is is an even rarer trait.

Overcoming Ego through Martial Arts

It’s time to examine your role models and your training.

For me, the more I train and the better I get the less likely I am to ever need to fight. This is the paradox of martial arts training.

Predators, animal and human, are instinctively attracted to psychological weakness. Insecurity shows in your body language. In my experience, people who act like “tough guys” tend to get into a lot of confrontations unnecessarily.

An interesting study conducted by Model Mugging showed that women who took the course were less like to ever have a mugging attempted. Why is this? I could argue that an increase in awareness helped them avoid dangerous situations. I also think it’s true that their confidence shines through in their body language making them a less attractive target.

Growing in martial arts means becoming more aware, more self aware, less attracted to the superficial. Look for practices that help you become aware of and work with the ego, with insecurities.

Martial arts Internet forums are full of some of the biggest collections of haters I’ve ever seen. There’s so much trolling by low self-esteem chairborne warriors that these things are nearly 100% useless.

One of the things that frequently comes up is the topic of lineage. Who’s your teacher, who is their teacher, who’s their teacher’s teacher … and so on. Then there’s the incessant arguing over who’s lineage is mostly fake or mostly real. Most of it is crap.

Why Lineage is Mostly Unimportant in Martial Arts

When I met my teacher, Peter Freedman Sensei, it was at a kubotan seminar at my kenpo karate school. I had many years of martial arts training by that point. I was instantly impressed by his teaching style, teaching ability, his technical expertise, and his depth of understanding. When I had the opportunity to study with him, it was a no brainer. I grew more in a few weeks with him than I had in years of other types of training.

(Please note, I realize the irony of mentioning my teacher’s name in an article talking about the unimportance of lineage. I don’t mention his name to build credibility for myself, only to highlight a story from my own training.)

You know what? I never asked him or cared who his teachers were. I know who they are now, but it doesn’t matter.

I have met many very skilled martial artists who were students of very famous martial arts teachers. However, none of them had the ability to teach that matched my instructor. If I had chosen to train with one of these folks because of their connection to somebody famous – I would not be as good as I am today.

Martial arts ability does not equate to the ability to teach martial arts. Being famous does not equate to being able to teach. Having a famous teacher does not equate to being able to teach.

You can have the greatest lineage on the planet and still suck.

Neither Mike Tyson nor Sugar Ray Leonard have never trained a champion boxer, but Cuss D’Amato trained Floyd Patterson, José Torres, Vinnie Ferguson, and Mike Tyson, and discovered Rocky Graziano. If you ask almost anyone who doesn’t know much about boxing who they would raher have learned to fight from Cuss D’Amato or Mike Tyson, most people will say, “Cuss who?”

My point is that teaching and training is a skill unto itself.

Martial Arts Lineage = Marketing

For the most part in martial arts training circles, lineage is used and abused as a way of “borrowing” credibility. It’s a marketing tactic and, as far as I can see, it always has been.

There’s nothing wrong with marketing, of course, as long as it’s done ethically. I even have a masters degree in marketing and often serve as a marketing consultant.

One of the things marketing communications does is to highlight things as important which might not be. For example, the coffee brand Folgers positions itself as “mountain grown.” Did you know that ALL coffee is grown in the mountains? The Folgers marketing people siezed on the fact that nobody had claimed that yet in their marketing.

Lets run the lineage numbers game

So, when someone tells me they are the 9th generation grandmaster of some lineage, really so what? Imagine that a founder of a system 9 generations ago had only five students, and each of them had 2 five and so on through each generation.  By my calculations, there would currently be 1,953,125 lineage holders. Just through personal experience, I can say that maybe 3% of these people would be good teachers.

That makes for a whole lot of crappy martial arts teachers.

When Lineage is Important

For my money, lineage is really only important for historical reasons. I think that people who pass down and preserve traditional martial arts are great. Historic martial arts study is important, as is collecting scrolls and doing lineage trees.

Some people like the connection of studying a traditional martial art handed down over the centuries. For example, there are many schools Koryu (traditional) Japanese martial arts. There are arts from the Shaolin Temple, and the Wudang mountains in China. Some people might enjoy mounted archery, or very traditional Okinawan karate.

All of these things are totally great, and having lineage might be helpful in making that connection.

When it comes to arguing some authority on the Internet – not so much.

Today I was inspired by this story about a local grandmother who single-handedly fought off two armed home invaders. I was inspired because this story highlights how untrue many statements are that I’ve heard from martial arts and self defense ‘experts’.

Let’s break down a few myths that I’ve been trying to debunk for years:

Self Defense Myths Perpetuated By Experts

1. You can’t fight multiple attackers
2. You need years of training to defend yourself
3. All fights wind up as a wrestling match on the ground
4. You can’t fight armed people without getting killed
5. Untrained people just freeze up
6. You have to be in great shape to defend yourself

In my experience, most instructors out there get their ideas about self defense from the same place most people do – movies and the TV. They also tend to think in absolutes like “never”, and “always”.

Here’s an absolute that makes sense: “Every situation is different”.

Here’s what I would rather hear:

1. Defending yourself from  multiple opponents is hard, but it’s definitely been done and can be done.
2. Untrained people defend themselves successfully every day. Training makes you better at defending yourself.
3. It’s a good idea to learn how to disengage if you’re ever grounded. Some self defense situations wind up with both opponents on the ground, but you don’t want to go there if at all possible.
4. Weapons are always to be considered dangerous. Sometimes armed assailants wound or kill their targets, but this isn’t a definite outcome.
5. Sometimes people freeze up, even trained people. But there are a range of reactions including fight or flight that are more common. Most people are not good at predicting what would happen to them or others under duress.
6. Fitness is a definite advantage in self defense situations. However, unfit people can be skilled. Skilled and unskilled people defend themselves successfully every day. If your self defense training requires you to be in peak physical condition to execute, it might be less effective when you are sick, injured, or elderly.

You do not need to be some kind of commando trained lethal weapon to defend yourself from most common situations. Real self defense is not about fighting like you see it in the movies.

A few years back I published a book of quotations for martial artists. You can still find and purchase it on Amazon.com. I have collected quotes related to martial arts for years and I enjoy sharing them.

I have just released a new application for Android called, Martial Arts Quote of the Day – which will give you a new martial arts related quote daily. Also, you will be able to search on past quotes as well. The application is free. I hope you enjoy it.

How to get it:

The easiest way is to go to the Android Market and search for Martial Arts Quote – it will come up. Then just install it. If I were you, I’d add it to the desktop so that you can  remember to access it daily.

You can get details, or install from: The Android Marketplace

I just got an email from a martial arts “master” who repeated, almost verbatim, one of my least favorite self-defense myths. I am not going to reply to him publicly, but I need to call this out.

The myth goes something like this, “if you do technique x, and the guy has a gun you’re just likely to make him mad and he’ll take out his gun and shoot you.”

The problems with this statement (regardless of what technique x is meant to describe) are many, but here are some of them:

• For years the, “don’t fight back or your opponent will get mad and hurt you” lie was used to teach women not to fight back against rapists. The truth is that women who fight back stand a greater chance of not being raped or harmed by a rapist. The earlier one fights the less severe the injuries one is likely to incur at the hands of a rapist. Does fighting a rapist have a chance of making them more violent? Yes it does, but the vast majority of the time it does not. The blanket advice suggested above is bad most of the time.
• Assuming you are defending yourself against a criminal who is armed, they are more likely to lead with the weapon and not save it for later. Most criminals do not want a fight. Self-defense is a different animal than mutually agreed-upon combat. Criminals almost always try to gain a disparity in power level.
• If a person is armed and “saving” the weapon for later deployment, how on earth are you supposed to guess which technique or tactic is going to set that person off?
• Whatever else such a myth says you “should” do is based on a specific scenario (probably dreamed up from watching action movies). Your likelihood of ever running into a scenario from your head or from the movies is virtually zero.

I’m working on a report of the top self defense lies, this one’s going on the list.

According to this article, Simmons Market Research, studied the number of people participating in martial arts in the US – this is what they found:

Somewhere around 18.1 million Americans participated in karate or some other form of martial art at least once in the past year. That includes 9.4 million adults, 5.5 million teenagers and 3.2 million kids.

5 percent of adults say they participated in martial arts last year at least once, and a quarter of those (28 percent) say they do martial arts “every chance they get.” This number is split split 52% men to 48% and women.

Adult age groups:

18-34 63%
35-49 25%
50 or older 11%

Asian American adults are no more likely to participate in martial arts than are whites;  5 % of each group is involved in the sport. Blacks are more likely than whites or Asians to engage in martial arts, with 7 % saying they have participated in the sport at least once in the past year.

25% of all teenage boys and 22% of teen girls  say they have participated in martial arts in the past year.

75 % of teens who practice karate say that they have also played golf in the past year, 74 % have skateboarded, 69 % have practiced yoga, and 41 % have gone downhill or cross-country skiing.

Teens who spar are even more likely to see their activities as beneficial to their overall health and social life than do their equally active peers. 67 % of teens who practice martial arts say, “Sports are a part of my social life,” and 77 %, “Sports are important to keep healthy.” For those teens who participate in a sport other than karate, the figures are 59 % and 71 %, respectively.

13 % of children ages 6 to 11 have participated in some kind of martial arts activity in the past year. With kids,boys are significantly more interested than girls:  61 % are boys, and only 39 % are girls.

The likelihood that a child will partake in martial arts increases proportionately with the income of his or her parents. 15 % of kids whose parents earn $75,000 or more a year participate in martial arts, compared with 13 % of those whose parents make between $50,000 and $75,000. Only 10 % of kids whose parents earn $50,000 or less participate in the sport.

21 % of youngsters who practice martial arts agree with the statement “I like to be the first to try new things,” compared with just 16 % of kids who don’t participate in martial arts. 58 % of children who participate in martial arts say they want to be famous, compared with 52 % of kids who do not.

Adults who participate in martial arts are more likely than nonparticipants to say that they enjoy taking risks.

I find theses statistics interesting. I think the takeaway for me here is that kids who enjoy martial arts tend to be more outgoing, and enjoy physical activity.

At the prompting of my sensei and others we’re starting a new email newsletter for martial arts and self defense pros.

I know that many of you probably receive a lot of email already so this is what I’ll promise you:

1. The newsletter is free and will be packed with good information you can use. If you don’t like it you can unsubscribe at any time.

2. I will probably only send them one or twice a month

3. I’ll never ever give away or sell your information or use the email to spam you with junk. I hate spam too.

You can sign up here: http://eepurl.com/cmKx5

The exact origins of some Japanese martial arts can be difficult to pin down. There are some important concepts about the external influences that can help us understand where these systems came from.

First, it’s important to understand the concepts of koryu and gendai. Koryu (literally old school) martial arts, in Japan, predate the Meji restoration (around 1866).Koryu styles include Japanese jujutsu, kenjutsu, schools of iaido, sumo, archery and other arts. Gendai martial arts post-date that era and include Judo, Aikido, Karate, and others.

Any country which has experienced warfare will ultimately develop some systems of armed and unarmed fighting. Human beings who fight one-another will discover or invent methods for more efficiently doing battle. This is simply inevitable. Every human body behaves in predictable ways, has limitations on it’s movements, and can be damaged the same way. Because of this factor, all martial arts have similarities. This is why it can be difficulty pinpointed imported techniques.

In Japan, and many other countries fighting systems were passed down among families. At one time, there were over 1000 documented systems of jujutsu in Japan. Very few of these remain.

For much of it’s history, Japan was insular, locking out all foreigners by force. However, the important influences of China and Korea in the development of Japanese martial arts are not to be underestimated.  China, in turn, undoubtedly drew martial arts influence from places like India, Persia, and even Greece. So, one can find techniques in the martial arts of India in the martial arts of Japan.

All martial arts are necessarily influenced by the environment, the enemy, the landscape, the culture, and religion. In early Japan, the samurai were the warrior class. The samurai were used to organized battle on a field (much like European knights). Their battle arts included the use of horses, bow and arrow, the sword, etc. Jujutsu, the unarmed component of the samurai arsenal was designed for fighting armed and armored opponents. Jujutsu relies on throws and joint locking primarily because striking armored opponents was less effective.

Karate, on the other hand, cam from Okinawa but originated with Chinese arts. At the time, the Okinawans had been disarmed by the shogunate. Their style relies primarily on pugilism. Karate weapons frequently derive from farm and fishing implements.

Spiritually, the people of Japan have gone through periods where the country as a whole seemed to embrace pacifism. Out of this, and the quest for personal betterment the “do” arts evolved. When the name of an art ends with “do”, such as karate-do, aikido, judo, you can safely assume that it’s undergone a transformation from a combat art to one aimed at personal or spiritual development. “Do” in Japanese means path or way. This isn’t to say that you can’t use judo or karate-do in a combat setting, it’s just a switch in emphasis.

To denote a combat oriented art, the ending “jutsu” is typically used. Jujutsu is to Judo as Kenjutsu is to Kendo. There is such a thing as karate-jutsu, and aikijutsu, and iajutsu. These are rarer arts today. Jutsu can be translated as “art” or “combative art”. It’s one of those characters in Japanese that has many layers of meaning.

There are some rarer indigenous arts of Japan such as ninjutsu or ninpo and the martial arts of the Yamabushi (mountain ascetics). From what I’ve seen, these arts have much in common with styles of jujutsu, but may combine arts like espionage, poisoning, and some unique weaponry. Some scrolls I’ve seen from various ninjutsu schools reference Chinese arts – so there are definitely some influences there.

The problem with nailing down the historical origins of many arts is that they may pre-date written records. It also may be true that families wished to keep their arts secret for ancient OPSEC.

The Internet is full of haters. Chairborne warriors who grasp one or two principles and use them to shield their weak self esteem by bashing every chance they get. An area of the martial arts under constant attack these days is traditional martial arts.

The criticisms of traditional martial arts tend to fall into a few camps:

1. Modern commando wannabes who  claim that old-school martial arts won’t work on “the street”
2. UFC fan testosterone junkies who think that winning sports matches proves a specific style of martial arts is superior to all others
3. The misinformed who read stuff on Internet forums, grasp onto it, and believe it

All of theses stances are fundamentally flawed.

Even though I no longer train in traditional martial arts, I like to keep my mind open and learn as much as I can before opening my mouth or hitting the keyboard. I may not be the most educated person on the planet, but I have 30 years of martial arts study, which is more education than any doctor, lawyer, or professor. There are many people who can school me, but if you fall into one of the categories above – you are not one of them.

Here’s my take:

1. Most traditional styles come from hundreds or thousands of years of battlefield experience. While many of them have transformed into something more spiritual, the principles and concepts are still there.
2. Being tough, or a good martial artist has almost nothing to do with style and almost everything to do with the individual and the way they train. Good MMA people are good because they train hard and they train smart. Teach BJJ to somebody who isn’t going to work hard at it and they are going to suck. Your style is not going to do the work for you.
3. If you want to train for self defense you train for self defense. You do not train for sport, or spiritual enlightenment. There is nothing wrong for training for sport or enlightenment, but it’s difficult to be all you can be with 3 disparate goals.
4. “The Street” sounds really dangerous. Please tell me where this street is so I can avoid it. (I stole that expression from Raymond Desmarais). Seriously, self defense is not “street fighting”. Street fighting is brutal, but if you agree to fight with someone it’s a sport. Self defense is not about fighting and winning, it’s about surviving and escaping. If you don’t understand the difference, you’re not training for self-defense.
5. If the only toolbox you have is a set of lethal skills, I hope you have a good lawyer on retainer. Training in killer commando techniques only doesn’t sit well in jurisdictions which allow for “reasonable force”. If some drunk guy throws a punch at you in a bar and you collapse his windpipe, you may go to the gray bar hotel for the rest of your natural life. Options are good.

I hear a lot of complaints from people watching skill demonstrations or attribute training that go something like:

• That won’t work against somebody who’s resisting
• That won’t work against someone on PCP
• blah blah blah

This is just ignorance. When was the last time you saw someone in the middle of a round in the UFC pickup a jump rope and start skipping, or drop and do pushups, or start hitting a speed bag? Are you going to  lift weights out on “the street”?

I have been in combat commando type classes where the instructor had rank beginners “pressure test” what we were working on and people got hurt. A friend of mine broke his wrist. Why? Because the people didn’t know what the heck they were doing, hadn’t developed control, and their technique was sloppy as hell. Under pressure everything they learned went out the window and it turned into a slug fest. It takes training a long time to get past this point, there are no short-cuts no matter how tough you act.

I hope we can move past the meat-head, energy drink pounding, tribal t-shirt wearing, gladiatorial age that we’re in now. And let’s be clear, I mean no disrespect to any art, including MMA. I do not like the culture of disrespect that is present in so many these days. Someday I hope things change.