Step into many dojos today and you’ll see students moving through kata and floor drills with a kind of casual rhythm. Their stances are loose, their strikes lack conviction, and their eyes drift as if the mind is somewhere else. The movements are performed, but the spirit is absent. This is not how martial arts…
Tag: personal safety
Crowds Can Kill: Riots, Protests, and Panic
We’ve all been in a crowd, a packed concert, a highwaytraffic, a rush-hour subway platform. Usually, it’s just an inconvenience. But a crowd has a mind of its own, and when that collective mind turns volatile, it can become one of the most dangerous forces on earth. In these high-density, high-stakes scenarios, the difference between…
Empowering Teens through the Martial Arts
I had a wonderful student years ago, and for our purposes here, we will call her Lisa, but that isn’t her real name. Lisa was not a bad kid by any stretch of the imagination. She did have some trauma in her life before she became my student. She also had some odd choices in…
My Take on Taekwondo
I’ve been very nostalgic lately. This post is a direct result of my thinking over the last few days. When I think of the 90s, especially the early to mid 90s, TKD memories tend to crowd out the more difficult things I went through. During my somewhat younger days and into middle age, I questioned…
Old Dog, New Tricks
If you ever reach a point where you think there is nothing left to learn in your chosen field, you are only fooling yourself. I have spent decades in the study of self-defense/self-protection and this week I had an eye-opening moment during a presentation from a young instructor named Mike Pana, an instructor from the…
How to Thrive in this Pandemic
 Photo by Edward Jenner on Pexels.com There have been a lot of questions coming in about surviving the current pandemic. I do not want this information to become too dated, I would like for it to still be relative for the future as well as now, so I will approach this about surviving the…
EDC: Colt Night Cobra
When I first entered into the gun community, I knew next to nothing about firearms and the many different things to consider when purchasing a firearm. I bought a revolver that was too big to conceal, and then bought a full-sized semi-auto when I was looking toward a carry gun. Being an absurdly large human,…
Training That Counts
I remember reading an article that mentioned Muhammad Ali’s approach to pushups and situps. In this article the author stated that Ali didn’t count the pushups or situps until they started to hurt, then he would start counting. This was because until he pushed past the number he was already strong enough to already do, he…
Finding an Edge
In a previous article, I wrote about how your initial reaction to some of the increasing types of very bad situations will be fear. Whether this fear is one to result in paralysis or a hiccup of action where you need a moment to decide what to do is going to be based on how…
Do You Have a Reason to Train?
There is a stark contrast between people who have a clear purpose for training and people who are thinking about training. I see it time and again. People say they would like to get in shape, or think it would be good to be able to protect themselves. But these people never have that follow-through….
Initial Reaction
A recent conversation prompted this post. There is a common saying for when things go wrong; “Sh*t got real”. There is a lot that happens at that moment when things “get real”. Whether the situation is a mugging, carjacking, active shooter, ambush assault, or riots (strangely called protesting by our modern media) your first reaction will be…
Escape, Hide, Fight: Is There a “Right” Answer?
As a follow-up and a way to answer some of the questions that have come in since I made my last post, I am going to look at the three main ideas of what to do in the event of an active shooter/terrorist shooter* situation. There are three standard responses taught regarding the bad guy…
Revisiting the Terrorist Threat
A while back I took a look at the threat of terrorism from the standpoint of personal safety. I said what I had to say on the subject, and I really had no plans to address the issue further. But attack after attack, and some of the attacks come close to home for me, living…
The Free Course is almost here!
I have long promised a free online self-defense course, and the wait is almost over. The biggest issue was in finding the right platform, and once that was solved, the work began. After a lot of back and forth on the issues of what should be covered and what could be left out, I have…
Wallace Smedley 