There is a lot of pressure on teachers to make training fun. While I understand this from the position of teaching beginners, the reality is that quality martial arts training in and of itself is not fun. If we make fun the aim, as soon as it isn’t fun anymore, we quit!

These days it appears that people only want to do something if they can get fast results! When training they want to shake things up, cross train, keep it fresh! Social media bombards us with “how to train”, and tells us what the next '“big thing” in exercise is going to be…

I sit here excitedly contemplating the prospect of visiting my good friend Gabriel Van Rel’s Londan dojo on Saturday 22/01/2022.

We have all heard the phrase “empty your cup”. While it implies maintaining an open minded approach to training, not limiting ourselves to one way, often we take it to mean that we have to throw away or discard something…

I was looking through some old note books and I found this poem. I wrote it back in November 2019 - I must have been feeling introspective after some push hands practice…

Kata and Kihon as training vehicles: Martial Musings

From day one of our introduction to karate, we are taught a variety of moves – blocks, punches and kicks of varying complexity that build over time into sequences and combinations of the basic techniques that are the physical expression of our art…

Teaching Karate is challenging and it goes beyond the dojo; a good Sensei is teacher, mentor and role model to their students…