Episode 457 - Martial Arts Radio LIVE (Episode 3)
In this episode, Jeremy brings us the third Episode of the Martial Arts Radio Live.
Martial Arts Radio LIVE (Episode 3) - Episode 457
Today's episode is the third installment for the Martial Arts Radio Live. Jeremy answers questions and reads stories from the listeners as well as giving out cool trivia. Listen to find out surprises and more!
Show Transcript
You can read the transcript below or download it here.
So, we’re running about a 3-second delay from what goes into the camera to what I'm seeing here and just to be aware, I have to look through the chat so that complicates the chat. If you're commenting on something as you're seeing it, there is a chance that I might be disconnected from what you're talking about.Welcome everybody to martial arts radio live! This is the 3rd installment of this show coming to you live and it's live. The 1st Tuesday of every month, Eastern, from somewhere in my house. Last couple months we’re out on the warehouse aka whistlekick headquarters but it's currently 30 degrees up there so no, I'm not recording there. Decided to go complete opposite and record in front of the stove. It is nice and toasty. My back will probably be sweating by the time we end this but I wanted to do something that was a different set. I do, it's funny, this entire house is becoming content based on different locations. Who would win tends to happen over there, First Cup is over there on the couch and martial arts radio happens right there behind that wall. I'm not recording anything from the bathroom. You're weird for thinking it and I know, at least, some of you were thinking it, you weirdos.Thanks for coming by. I enjoyed you in the show. It gives me a chance to interact with people live here and see your comments and everything else. I’ll open the show with this. This is a teaser. You think you know what this is. Some of you have guesses to what this is and you might be right as to what it was but what it is is something very different. You're welcome to guess. I'm not going to confirm or deny but I'm going to say that in the next month, you should know what this is.I want to give a shout to Gabe Siu who's been on the show, who helps coordinate live episodes and look, he gave me all this material. Look at all these stuff that I get to talk about. I got 3 totally full pages here and we’re just going to keep them all in the show, figuring out these things that we can do, new ways to interact and just, make it fun. So, if you have ideas, you have things you want to see or do, I'm not going to be ridiculous but yeah. Feel free to jump in and chat and make comments.Alright, a quick recap from Live Episode 2 which you can dig back. You can find it on Facebook, you can find it on YouTube, you can find the audio in martial arts radio feed. We did a poll. We’re probably not doing polls anymore just because in order for you to deal with the poll, you have to kind of leave the video or open another video. A lot of computer and just…it's an idea I still want to do but we’re going to find a different way to do it. Maybe we’ll do it ahead of time. Gabe and I were talking about that. The poll last time was what was the 1st martial arts book that new students should read? We got some great suggestions here.Andrew said Zen in the Martial Arts by Joe Hyams. Stacy said It’s A Lot Like Dancing by Riki Moss. Tommy said Complete Idiot’s Guide to Martial Arts. It’s not a bad start and Craig says 20 Guiding Principles of Karate: The Spiritual Legacy of the Master Gichin Funakoshi. Great choices! I have read 2 of them. I have read Joe Hyams’s book and I've read Funakoshi so I can't say. I mean, there's a new book that’s coming out that might be appropriate. We didn’t plan this and I’ll share that with you. The Martial Arts Handbook is available for pre-order in Kindle format on Amazon. You go to Amazon and search for Martial Arts Handbook or if you search for my name because I'm the author so you will find that. The paperback should be available for pre-order, I'm hoping, is there anything wood around here? No. Knock on something that is wood. Theoretically, should be available by the end of the week. It's almost ready. Been working on this book for a while and Jenny’s just in the chat, I'm going to shout out to Jenny. I don’t remember. Jenny, if you're here, thanks for all of your help with the book and to those of you helping with the editing right now, I appreciate you. Alright. Well.Welcome! Last time, if anybody remembered, I was wearing a hood up because it was cold and I was getting a lot of, catching some heck for that. With the hood up we should call you The Punisher. More like Demon Hunter. Jeremy, the Diablo of Awesome. Anyone else thinks Jeremy looks like the whistlekick Jedi? Good times, good times. Here’s a bit of trivia, I'm going to run this a little bit differently.It's in here as suggested trivia but I keep using this analogy. The idea that martial artists are, quite often, like a bucket of crabs and in last month, I think I brought that up 3 or 4 times in different conversations primarily around martial arts and it's still the best analogy I know of and the idea if you ever have a bucket of crabs, you really don’t have to worry about them getting out because the moment one of them is about to climb out, the others would pull them down again and stop doing that with each other.Most of what we’ve been doing, what the live episodes has been around is a bit of Q&A. I get around to interact all of you and we got questions. If you ask questions in the chat, I will answer them. If you have questions you wanted for next time, put them in the Facebook event but here’s some questions that I'm going to dig into and we can talk about them. This one’s from Andrew. Should there be a teaching requirement for any gradings, meaning, in order to pass this test, you have to have taught X number of classes first?Interesting. Interesting idea. I finished dinner like 8 minutes ago so I'm burping. On the surface, it seems like a great idea. The idea of requiring instruction in order to be promoted, to advance in rank in the martial arts because anyone who’s spent time teaching knows it's two things. One, you're giving back. Martial arts doesn’t continue to exist without you teaching it and two, you learn a lot teaching. In fact, I would argue that most people, if they start with their martial art school are growing towards far more as an instructor than they ever would as student because it forces you to adapt to the way different people learn and if you know how to teach something 7 different ways, you're going to understand it far better than if you do it one way.Gabe is saying Amazon says the kindle version will be released on December 13th. That is correct. However, only if I uploaded the digital copy to Amazon by the 9th so we’re on track with that. That’s what my Friday is intended to be.I like people teaching. I like when people teach martial arts. I think it's important. I think it's transformational for some people but what I've noticed, the moment anything is required to be done numerically, with regard to testing, you have to run a mile in this time, actually the better example is you have to do this number of pushups. Go to a test where people have to do a certain number of pushups and tell me how the pushups are. The moment we started encouraging quantity over quality, I think there's something really wrong. It doesn’t work. Martial arts is not about quantity. It's about quality. What I would rather see instead of you have to teach X number of classes, you have to teach a class where you are able to convey new information or old information in a new way or just something. Something where, maybe you get a 15-minute block in class and if you screw it up, just try again next time. Everything else we do in martial arts is based on incremental progress and the idea that getting something wrong is temporary. You have the opportunity to do it again. I don’t like this number of classes stuff. See if anybody agrees or disagrees.We’re talking about the book. We’re lost about the book. If you’re in the chat, you can see there's a direct link to the book. Hi Stacy. Alright. We do have some people chiming in on this. Any comments I have…Gabe says that’s an interesting thought. In our school, we have the requirement of brown belt and above, you have to understand the material well enough that you are able to teach it. Not everyone wants to teach but of course, you learn better when you do and that’s more in line with how I feel. I do believe everyone should be required to teach at some point.I think it's inevitable that if you remain in martial arts, you're going to teach and that might not be being at the front of the class but I feel strongly to the diverse martial artist is a better martial artist and not just in the things that you know but the things that you do and how you do them, why you do it, et cetera so teaching adds diversity. The ability to move from within the class to in front of the class or part of the class or take one person over the corner and teach them something, I think that’s pretty important so I think I'm going to put it under the heading of everyone needs to do it but how that’s actually implemented, I think it is, completely flexible.Craig’s in the chat saying I agree, teaching quality is much more important than quantity and that’s coming from someone who teaches martial arts professionally as a full time job and does a great job at it. Laura says it's a bit of an unwritten rule that adults testing for black belt have experience teaching. Teen black belts are expected to learn more on occasion and help lower-ranking students. You learn best by teaching others and there’s the common thread, right?There’s almost this selfish aspect to teaching once you acknowledge that hey, you're going to get better at it. It's difficult and it's uncomfortable and here’s the thing. I see a lot of martial artists who get towards black belt and they have never taught anything. They’ve been students perpetually. Here’s the problem with that: the longer you remain a student, the harder it will be for you to make the transition to teaching because you're going to apply much harsher judgment. I've been training martial arts for 10 years and I don’t know how to teach a punch. Well, what if you're a yellow belt and you're 2 months into class and you show someone how to throw a punch? The moment you look at any writing on education and teaching something. One of the ways that you get people to truly understand something is to teach it to someone else whether they're teaching it back to you or they're teaching it to someone that doesn’t know it. If you can teach it, it shows an understanding at a much deeper level and I’ve witnessed schools where teaching happens, basically, at class too. If you were there last time and you know how to do this thing, show that person how to do it.Now, here’s the problem: people complain about that. Not so much the students but people watching and saying well, that person doesn’t know how to do it well, they just started. Exactly but there is that road to progress and so is that other person. You don’t have to be an expert to teach something and you don’t have to be a genius to learn from someone who isn’t an expert. I will guarantee every one of you watching right now could teach me something about martial arts whether you’ve been training for 7 months or 6 years and I look forward to that. I like that. I like working with new people for that reason so teaching, yes, do it. It's important but do it in the way that works at your school. Hi Eric! Craig also says oftentimes in our dojo, students will assist individual students with material that they need to learn how to instruct to inspire to lead classes. Makes sense and that’s what works there. The style, the physical space constraints, the number of students, rank-age distribution all affect what makes sense for teaching.Okay, next! Have you ever carved a turkey or ham with a sword or used a weapon for non-martial arts purposes? Just asking. Don’t blame me if something goes wrong but make sure to record it if you do. That was a question that was posted in the discussion leading up to this event tonight and my comment was does opening a can of pineapple count? Now, I said that kind of facetiously because I use martial arts weapons for a lot of ridiculous things. Opening letters. I've never opened pineapple. Andrew says I used to cut watermelon when I was younger. Awesome! I think that’s a great idea. I should get some watermelon and cut it. See, this is fun stuff. That’s the, you know what, Gabe, take note. That’s the kind of ridiculous but can still make it work stuff that we can do when it's summer. We will do the show outside or at least, in the garage and I’ll chop watermelon. I’ll be like Gallagher, put goggles on and hack away with a sword. Good times!I've never led a taekwondo class, not at my rank, but learning how to teach, inspire and record my success as a Zumba cheer fitness instructor. Cool. Teaching is one thing, inspiring someone is the goal of teaching. I like that. Very poignant, very powerful. I would love to know if you’ve done something with martial arts weapons outside of hurting yourself. I don’t want to hear anything about that. I don’t want to hear about you hurting yourself or cutting off your thumb or something else ridiculous but if you got something, let’s hear it.What is it that gets you really excited when you get to class and you find out you're working on something? What is it that, when you plan out what you're doing, you're really excited and get to use a gift from Napoleon Dynamite kit? It's a great movie. If you’ve never seen Napoleon Dynamite, it does have a martial arts scene in it. Andrew says kata. Alex says a new form. Jamie says endurance as I get older. Gabe responds I hate running and endurance work but I find it a bit easier when I do something I enjoy, et cetera. I do a lot of continuous sparring. Yeah, good call. Flexibility, I'm not naturally flexible but training in martial arts has helped me tremendously. Gaining flexibility not only helps me kick people in the head but also with my job when you need to climb or step over something.Anyone else experience a non-martial art benefit from training in the martial arts? Daniel says I was running an off-road race last winter. Saw a guy who was a few meters in front of me trip over something. He barely even seen me break stride as he hit the ground, did a perfect rolling break fall and popped back up and kept going. Now, that’s impressive. That’s something I would like to see. I don’t think I've done anything like that. I've done some obstacle course races but there is really opportunity for dive rolls. Dive rolls are fun. I enjoy that. I don’t know if this will ever happen, I’ll share this idea that I had years ago. I started to look into it and it just proved to be way too complex.Imagine an obstacle course race that is martial arts themed. So, for those of you not familiar with the term obstacle course, something like a Spartan or a [00:18:24] obstacle course where you're running but there are obstacles. There are things beyond simply just running. You have to perform actions and what if you're doing that with a martial arts layer? It gets kind of fun. You can have people throwing Nerf things at you. there can be stuff to jump over, stuff to avoid, crawl. If you think about all of the skills that we use in martial arts, there is a lot of stuff and I think a martial arts themed race will be a lot of fun. The word that I wanted to use as I was coming up with names was around Mortar but there's one called Warrior Dash. I don’t know if it's still in the system but I still think it would be fun. If somebody else wants to take the helm on that, take that idea, run with it, I’ll bet here. I’ll come do it. It will be tons of fun. Not too longer than 5K, though. I don’t like running that far. No, 10 miles. I have friends that do longer Spartan races. People may not know. Spartan race is based in the [00:19:25] Joe De Sena who started Spartan Race, renovated this, I don’t know if it's a hotel or like an old farm. It's absolutely beautiful, people get married there all the time. It's gorgeous. It's about 45 minutes from where I live and the Death Race. I don’t know if they still have that on. It's kind of quiet. He ran that at his mountain that he lives on and I had a couple of friends who did the Death Race. It was utterly insane. 24 hours or 48 hours, last person get quick kind of a thing but the Spartan Race has, I think there's a lack of a race now where you do the long one twice which would be something like 50 miles. 50 miles of running with obstacles. That’s too many miles. I like the obstacles. The obstacle stuff is fun. I've done a number of those but yeah, in that case, my knees were made unhappy.How related are parkour and martial arts? Good question. One of the quotes that I'm fond of saying and has been kind of meme-ified and shared around is there are only so many ways to move. There's only so many ways a human body can move. There's only so many of those that make sense from the perspective of combat. That’s martial arts. Just because my arm can do this, that doesn’t mean that it's good. Boy, did that hurt. Doesn’t mean that it will be martial arts related, right? So, you’ve got the entirety of human movement, combat-related things are martial arts. You’ve got parkour which is efficient motion. I forget what the term translates at, it's a French word, as you might have guessed but if someone is doing parkour versus free running. Free running is when people are doing crazy excessive things and flips and whatnot but parkour by nature is, I did a few years of parkour and actually, is Andrew still in the chat? My parkour instructor was in here at one point. Andrew, I don’t know if you're still there, man? He is! Hey! That’s fun. It's about how to get from Point A to B as efficiently as possible and that’s where the vaults and these very fluid, interesting hands as you're going over objects and sliding under and moving around, there's a lot there because as you get better at martial arts or parkour or any other movement discipline, you get efficient at it or you aim to become more efficient.If you're sparring, you're not trying to waste motion. That’s something that you do as a white belt. As you get better, there's a less waste in motion in parkour, there is less in motion so I think that’s probably the best way to compare the two. I've done a couple of sessions of parkour for martial arts focused around balance and the skill that we practice the least that I think we practice comes into play in parkour which is safely descending. We’re good at jumping up and down. We start on the surface, we lay on that surface. Most people instinctively can handle jumping up onto something but the moment you have to jump down, that becomes a big deal. That becomes much harder to do, to use muscle and balance to slow yourself safely and that’s actually something that happens often. Maybe not in the sense of combat but a lot of people that I know that do martial arts only do martial arts, you may want to make sure that we have all notions of physical movement involved. I like having people do martial arts sitting in chairs. I like having them sit on the floor, laying on the floor.People rarely come up to you and attack you when you're in a fighting stance when you're ready to go and warmed up, right? there's got to be some kind of compromise. They're looking for the advantages that’s why they're doing it. Bullies and criminals look for opportunity. They don’t go after the 6’4”, 250-pound strong looking guy carrying a sledgehammer. That will be silly.Andrew is commenting, efficiency and fluidity. That’s a great word. Fluidity is key to parkour and I think there was a joke. Frank had a joke in here. Here it is, come back, come back. For those of you who don’t know Frank, Frank is the producer of First Cup and drops a joke in every Fridays and given us a bonus joke. 2 silk worms got into a race, how did it end? In a tie. I love Frank’s jokes.If you’ve not done any parkour, free running or whatever you want to call it, it's a great thing to learn and this idea that it's only for kids or you’ve got to be 20 to do it or something, it's not true and if you want a more adult accepted way to start, start with rock climbing. It's going to challenge your body in ways that martial arts is not because when you're hanging and that’s not something that we do too much in martial arts. I don’t think I've ever had a class where I've hung off something. I've hung off people when I was younger and smaller in self-defense situations gone wrong. Thinking of a guy named Dave, he’s about 6’3”, probably 260. My 75-pound frame was not enough to pull him down but as you get better at that, at being able to hold and move around, you're probably going to feel more confident and gyms are popping up all over the place that have that kind of American warrior feel and grab a couple kids. You know what? Grab a couple 11 or 12 year old boys, probably girls too. Grab a couple adolescent children. Take them to the gym with you, don’t teach them because again, everybody has something to teach and everybody has the opportunity to learn. It's just a question whether or not you're willing to.Moving on, good question! Give me another one like that. Mats, should we train on them for comfort and safety or not to condition our feet? Stacy says yes, mats preserve what's left of my ankles. Gabe’s response: indeed, ankles only slightly important in the martial arts. We discussed this in one of the Facebook groups. Safety first. Matt says I've done both. I like the hard floor for black belts and senior ranks but I think mats are better for beginners, mats are better for throws. BJJ we use mats but when the tournament is approaching, they pull up the mats and we get to use our hard floor. Ron says it depends on what you're training for, to start with, if you're in a martial arts that is competition-based and yes, if you train for self-defense then you should train in normal clothing and normal environments, parked cars and such. Alright, so here’s my thought on that. They have value but as Ron is getting to, they should not be the only environment that you should train in. If the only time you train is on mats and you become used to mats, the moment you get off mats, it's different. I’ve seen people who are used to training solely on hardwood, get into competition and they fall doing their form because they ended up in competition that had matted rings. I think I've seen the opposite but I've definitely seen people who are used to training on mats with the way they move and they're sparring, go into a hardwood situation and it's so different that they're not quite sure what to do.Managing the stove while I talk. I'm not a fan of mats most of the time. I like being grounded. I like having my feet on the floor or in the dirt or on the pavement. Yes, I like training on pavement. I’d rather not be doing walls on pavement, I’d rather not be doing sparring on pavement but if that’s what I got to do, that’s what I got to do and because of that, I feel confident that I've trained in enough different environments that those are not going to be a hindrance to me. The idea of training in “normal clothing” with and without shoes, I love training barefoot but most of the time, when I'm out in the world, I'm wearing shoes. If I never train wearing shoes, it changes things. There are benefits to wearing shoes in combat, self-defense situations. There are disadvantages. Understanding what those are, it matters. It's real. It's something that we should do.Did the rise of XMA help the popularity of parkour? I don’t think so. I feel like XMA, I feel like the heyday, it kind of started to fall off as parkour was becoming more popular. I'm not a 100% sure why parkour started getting bigger. I think, just from my observation, I lot of it came from the videogame Assassin’s Creed because of the way the main character moved. Maybe somebody else has an opinion there.Sparring on hardwood brings me back to my color belt days. Jenny says exactly, you never know what situation you’ll be in when you need your martial arts. Bringing back this as I've said before, a diverse martial artist is a better martial artist so train with diversity. If you're an instructor and you only have mats, if it's really hard to pull them up, maybe you can take everybody outside. Maybe you can rent a high school gym for an hour. Give people the opportunity to train in different ways. Bright lights, low lights. I've done episodes on this. There's an episode of martial arts radio, maybe somebody can find it, where we talk about different training environments and why that’s important. I don’t want to beat that horse too much since there's an episode on it but let’s get the number so you all can check that out any other time.Other things we can talk about. Have I worked with military combat arts or systems? What are some of the differences and the similarities? What should all civilian martial arts know about military combat arts? I think that part’s easy. When you look at militarized martial arts systems like the Marine Corps’ MCMAP, Marine Corps Martial Arts Program. I think that’s the abbreviation. It’s simpler. There is a lot less to know and it's meant to be a well-rounded system to address a variety of situations and there's an elegance in that simplicity and I like that. Krav Maga when it was, I can’t say when it first was taught, but at some point along the way, when Krav Maga was taught to the Israeli military, they had 6 weeks. How would you teach martial arts if you had 6 weeks with someone? I'm assuming that’s not 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. I'm assuming that’s a few hours a day. I don’t know. I wasn’t in the Israeli military but I'm going to guess, 2 to 3 hours a day, because really, you can't get a whole lot more new material down somebody’s throat into their brain than 2 or 3 hours a day. You got to make sure you're hitting the high points. The best bang for the buck. You're not teaching them 47 different versions of a punch.Now, my experience with military combat is Americanized Krav Maga. It's Krav Maga that’s been brought over here and I have no idea how true it is to what was first taught or currently taught in Israel but it makes sense. The concepts make sense to me. A lot of elbows and knees and very simple things there. I think the other one that warrants mention is Tony Blaeur’s SPEAR system which, what I've learned of it, in the one seminar that I took with Tony, it was certainly not targeted at military people. I don’t think there were military people in the room. It was a CrossFit somewhere. It was a crossover for a period of time. I don’t think that still exists where Tony Blaeur is teaching SPEAR to CrossFit people and I went as far as my continuing in CrossFit but it's great. It's a great system that you can, in a day, give people some really basic stuff. Of course, they have to work on it, they have to train to ingrain it but the concepts are simplified enough and it's probably the biggest difference.When you teach someone a military combative system, you're teaching them how to stay alive when they want. Everything is from that concept. When we teach someone Karate or Taekwondo, first time they walk in, at least in none of the schools that I’ve ever trained in isn’t about staying alive from moment one. It's about personal development, it's about growth. Most people aren’t interested in spending the next 20 years of their lives training self-defense but plenty of people will spend 20 years getting better at life through martial arts. That’s why I love it.Hold on, we got questions. What about fantasy-based martial arts? Rather, martial arts that are not tested in reality for whatever reason may it be, I think this can be a real disservice for adults looking for active self-defense. Here’s my thought: the vast majority of movements taught in martial arts will work in self-defense under specific circumstances. Most martial artists have not been in a fight. I’ll retract that sentence. Most martial artists had not been in a lot of fights to the point where they fully understand self-defense. I'm one of them. I'm not embarrassed to say that. My martial arts kept me out of fights. I'm really proud of that. I'm not the best person to teach you how to win a fight. I'm a great person to teach you how to not get into one and I think that that is a valid skill. It's only if those skills break down and you actually need to physically defend yourself.It’s true we have a lot of people in martial arts who are theoretically qualified to teach self-defense but do not have practical experience to fully convey the information and that can be a disservice, yes. However, on the flipside, if I teach you, if I give you this map and this pen cap and I tell you keeping this magic pen cap in your pocket will keep people from attacking you, it is a lie. It is an outright lie but the irony in that statement is if you believe it, you're going to carry yourself more confidently. That confidence makes you less of a target so, while the crummy self-defense, some people, some schools teach is fraudulent, yes, it still has the impact of keeping people out of fights so even accidentally, martial arts is better. Eric, are you raising your hand? That’s weird.Alright, some other things that came through here…wow! Alright, going back, going back. Does your training change with the seasons? I mean, there's 6 inches of snow out back. I'm not training barefoot out in the backyard. It's cold outside and I'm not training out in the backyard and I think that’s probably the biggest difference here in New England. We run outdoor stuff June, July, August, September but other than that, it's pretty much guaranteed to be inside. If you have a school that also has an adjoining lawn or a flat surface, you can go outside. Some schools might do that. organize May Day or October Day but for the most part, you're inside.Okay, Jenny, we train at the church with a grassy hill that we use for kata and self-defense. Cool. Andrew says survive and then, win. Yeah, it's funny. This will come up if you listen, this is going to be absolutely like 360, the guest that I interviewed today, phenomenal guest, I had a great time talking to her. She’s talking about how she was taught. First, you run and if you can't run, if you defend yourself and the impact that had on her as a young child. Survival is the most important part. It is ingrained in us. Different training environments, that episode I mentioned was episode 113. Wow, we’re going back. Definitely going back. Liz is saying great confidence makes you less of a target. Undoubtedly.What's the weirdest thing someone has asked you to do because you're a martial artist? Well, we got all the clichés. I want to hear from those of you here in the chat, what people have asked you to do. You’ve got the noises. Can you break this? Can you kick that person in the head? When I was younger, I would indulge some of these things. Not that I'm kicking someone in the head hard which is I bring my foot up close. I've broken boards but what I've learned is most of the time, people are looking for you to mess up or something. Martial arts occupies this really strange place in the world. It's something most people recognize the value of but most people are not going to invest time to do it so they look for ways to belittle it because it justifies, in their mind, not investing the time to do it.Here, I’ll move this way. I don’t know if anyone wants to see the fire.And once I connected those dots and I realized hey, it's not doing anybody anything any good by indulging these requests, I just stop doing it. Now, with the bottle cap challenge, I liked that. Laura says how many surface probes can you destroy with one strike? Laura, that will be a great but expensive question. Laura and Stacy who are both at the chat are the whistlekick breaking team, team’s matches. I forget what Laura’s up to, is it palm or elbow? One of her breaks is just some ridiculous number of boards so I can only imagine stacking up a bunch of computers to break. I mostly get asked, this is from Lessie, do you think you could beat so and so in a fight? I always say no to that question now. Ask to steal something because I knew karate and could beat someone up if they try to stop me. That’s crazy town. Laura says 10, 11, 10 or 11 surface probes and I know people get asked to do even crazier things and it's just ridiculous what people will ask others to do and I think the best way to handle that and I'm going to credit my first karate instructors with this one; somebody wants to really see some martial arts, bring them to class. Come try a class, come watch a class. It's fun. You'll meet good people. You'll meet good people, great people. This is, I have a note, it's meant to be funny. It is but at the same time, it's kind of insightful.Sparring is just mutually agreed upon assault. The word assault is kind of aggressive but yeah. If we did any of the things we do in sparring to someone on the street, it would be considered assault so I kind of like that idea.Care to explain my no answer? I think that’s…see that’s the pain of the delay. I think it's going back to can I beat so and so in a fight. I will say no because what happens when you say yes? There is a significantly greater chance that it escalates when you say yes. If I'm hanging out with a group of people and we talk and they find out that somebody points to the biggest person in the group and says could you beat that person? I would say no. Then why not? You're a big, tough martial artist. I never said I was tough. It's something I've done for a long time and most of the things that I've practiced have very little to do with being in a fight. I've managed to talk my way out of every altercation I've ever been presented with and I really have no interest in being a fighter and then I change the subject. If I have to and they're still not letting it go, I say look, I'm short. That person is a lot bigger than me, there's a reason weight classes exist in most combat disciplines, what do you want from me? Just something like that.Matt says have you ever done full contact sparring in a tournament? No because I do not enjoy getting hit. I've definitely been hit, probably not full contact, but I've been definitely been hit hard enough to know I don’t like it. Yeah, it's the same with you think you're cocky and it turns into a prove it situation and nobody wins in that.Here’s a scenario. It's a good one. You just started working out, maybe a training session, you realize you just don’t have it today. You're not going to have a good workout. What do you do? How do you respond? When I was younger and that happened, I would just count the seconds to be done and just go home. Oh, pardon me, but I look at it differently now and maybe that because of I'm older and it is rare that I'm going to get to class on time, well rested, having eaten properly, well-hydrated, my body feels great, I've got the right beautiful [00:46:25] the people that I really want to train with are in class, flexibility’s good, the room is not too hot, not too cold, et cetera; so if you think about all these factors that contribute with your training, what's the chance that they're all going to line up the same time? Pretty slim so it becomes about not having the best workout ever but the best workout you can under the circumstances. Oh, I missed the biggest one, your mindset. Your head’s right. It's what gets you the most.What's the best workout I can have with these circumstances, with these people, with my body feeling the way it is, with my head where it's at? Sometimes, after a difficult day, if I go to training, my goal is to simply not think about the difficulties and guess what? I do but I try not to do it too much and I try to be kind to myself and to give myself space to get what I want out of it because here’s the thing: a terrible workout is better than no workout than albeit a few weird exceptions like oh, you broke your leg. Yeah, better to stay home.Do what you can with what you have where you're at. That applies to every aspect of life including your martial arts training. Frank says the same thing. A little bit of something is better than a whole lot of nothing. But let’s continue this for a moment. There are things you can do to set yourself up for success. When I go to taekwondo, our changing room is the bathroom. Go in the bathroom, put on my dobak and I close my eyes as I count to 10. It's a really quick meditation but during that count, I let go of everything from the day as much as I can and get ready for the chaos that’s going to ensue in moments as the children start to arrive for the kids class and that helps, and if nothing else, I try to find a way to have fun. There's always a way to have fun. If you're not having fun, you're not being creative enough and I don’t just mean as an instructor, can be as a student.Practice visualizing. You're doing step-punch-step-punch up and down the floor, how ridiculous of a cartoon character can you deform by punching them repeatedly? Well, that punching knocked his chest in and now, his heart’s sticking out the other side of his body and now, he’s completely deformed and looks like he’s got a mouth. Right? Find ways to work with what you have. Liz says if you're always looking for a goldilocks training day, you'll never show up. Yes. Laura says if you're getting sick, go home; otherwise, go train. Consistency is the most important thing in anything you're looking to do. If you want to progress, you have to be consistent and that means, sometimes, not getting worse by not practicing is the best you can do. Sometimes, it's about stopping the bleeding, the degradation of your skills or rather, slowing them down. If sitting in the couch means that you will deteriorate at a sharp rate and having bad workouts means you will deteriorate less, you should go into class. There’s always something to be gained from training.Where did wood breaking come from? Why do we do it? Pros and cons. I don’t know where it came from. We do it for a couple of reasons: 1, is fun. Breaking things is fun. Who doesn’t like to break things? To use your body to destroy what you generally perceive as a very durable object, that’s super cool. The other reason to do it. This is probably going to blow your mind but let’s follow it up. What are the surfaces that we teach people to punch? Solar plexus and the face with the exception of the nose, the eyes, maybe the teeth. The head is really hard! You could take some pretty significant chunks of wood and break it over somebody’s head. The head is stronger than the wood. If you're not comfortable punching through a few boards, don’t expect to be able to not break your hand punching somebody in the skull when you need it. I think that’s where the value of breaking is, is to condition your body but also your mind to know what to expect when you're hitting something hard.Jenny says she loves breaking things. Laura says it's fun. It is fun. One of the sayings, something I've heard along the way, I don’t know how much I agree with it but you use a hard surface on a soft target like, say, the arm. You use a soft surface, like an open hand, on a hard target like a head. I think I like that. I haven't played out long enough. I haven't spent any time with it. if I'm teaching self-defense to people who doesn’t know anything about martial arts, if I'm teaching them to go to the head, yeah, it's an open hand because I can teach someone to do this much easier than I can teach someone to make a fist and hit properly and not catch the wrong knuckles. Something to think about.If the martial arts were developed today, what would the weapons looks like? Pool cues? Shovels? Hammers? Shout out to Guro Christ Thompson who developed a system around a hammer based in principles of Filipino Martial Arts. He’s an awesome practitioner, nice guy. I don’t have time to see that yet but his hammer system is super cool but I believe he’s the person to develop something like that. Uh, what else do we have? Knives. It's about stuff you have laying around. Shovel, some kind of a stick thing. I got tripods and scissors. Scissors would make really interesting weapons. I'm going to do a scissor form in the next tournament. Spin them and cut people’s hair.Tell us about your consulting business. I don’t really want to get into that. It's not really martial arts related. I'm available in doing some work with some martial arts people and schools but I do business in marketing consulting for the sole purpose of putting money back to whistlekick and helping whistlekick grow and if you want to learn more about the coaching and consulting stuff, go to whistlekick.com. There's some links in there you can check out.Selfie sticks, there was a, where was that? This goes back and few years. I think we even mentioned it on, like the 1st or the 2nd roundup episode which is what the Thursday episodes originally were, about a Russian school teaching self-defense with selfie sticks. It was like episode 37 or 9 or 41, like way far ago but here’s the thing about selfie sticks. They're all flimsy junk. I mean, I wouldn’t want to get hit with one but yikes.This is a great one to end with. If you could tell every school owner, master, one thing, what would it be? You're the example. If you want your students to train hard, are you training hard? If you want your students to be kind, are you being kind? If you want them to care about their training, do you care about their training and your training? just as children grow to be like their parents, martial arts students grow to be like their instructors and if you're not happy with your students, it's probably your fault. If you look around the room and think, why can nobody get this? You! you're not teaching well and it's ok. It's ok to not be great at something all the time. It's ok to admit as a martial arts instructor that there are aspects to your skill that are better than others. Maybe you have someone in the class who does certain things than you, maybe it's a higher rank.Do you know how powerful it is to bring that person up and say you know what, so and so does better than I do. I want them to show you. That doesn’t wonder for that person, it shows your students that you're aware of what's going on because guess what, they know that person already does better than you. It gives the other students something to aspire to. It's just a better overall environment. For too long, we have acted like martial art instructors are these untouchable and infallible people and it's just not true and I am excited for what happens when the current older generation of martial artists is no longer in position to spread that karate. I don’t want anybody to die but inevitably, they're going to die and while we’re going to lose some things, that’s one thing I'm excited to lose.The chat is turning into a discussion on selfie stick defense. You're welcome to jump in and check that out so this was good. This was good. Good amount of content, Gabe. I think we had good stuff. I like the topic questions. These are my favorite stuff but here’s the thing: I want to know what you think, I want to know what you want, talk about what you want to see. The benefit of this medium is that you can see me. You can see me gesticulating wildly. You can see my facial expressions but we can also do more of a show and tell. I need a little bit of prep work on that.No idea what is this about, this super heavy, damn, that’s heavy. You know what this way? This is not what it is but what it was. This was a grand champion medal from the tournament that we’ve held coming up 3 and a half years ago. Each one of these was like $30 because they're heavy. If I put this on a chain, I could kill people with it easily. I don’t trust the jump rings on these and the flimsy ribbon would actually would hold if I swung this but this weighs, it’s over a pound. There were people at the tournament that were posting pictures that they were taking 4 or 5 medals and you can see their heads just straining forward. It's great!Thank you. Thank you for coming by. Thanks for watching. Thanks for asking questions. Thanks for submitting feedback. Let’s grow this. Let’s keep having fun with this so I hope you all have a great night. If you want to join me for First Cup tomorrow, 6:30 AM, Eastern. Sending out, until next time, train hard, smile and have a great day!