The MartialBody Blog

The power of a technique, a method or a strategy is only apparent if it is brought to bear as planned. When we think about defending ourselves in a martial exchange the consideration of power and how we can minimize its effect is one of the first problems to solve. There are many ways we can avoid, re-distribute, transform or neutralise forces affecting us in the martial context. But one of the most useful, if often shunned, is the use of agility.Agility is the ability to move or think quickly, ...

In this series of articles, I will be delving into the mechanics of force in the martial arts and the various ways in which it can be addressed. In the martial context, we could say that it is how we deal with forces applied to us or those that we generate ourselves that defines every exchange.We will, over the coming weeks, be considering some of the myriad of ways in which forces can be reduced, transformed, neutralised, returned, balanced, and created. All the while maintaining the understand...

Is it possible to learn A Martial Art online, via a book, a training manual or a distance learning program? Let’s cut to the chase, No, it isn’t.But there is more to this question than meets the eye and in this article (and as someone who offers online courses) I will delve into where I think online training and tuition does work and why it remains viable for some and for certain methods.There is a tradition in old styles of martial art, where legend and tails of origin are lost to t...

There is a tendency in the martial arts, particularly the more traditional styles, for students to value the personal martial skills of the teacher above all other factors. It is thought that the teacher must represent the pinnacle of the arts expression if they are to be able to guide students towards their personal development. Of course, a teacher should have a deep knowledge of what they teach and should have at least deeply researched everything they are aiming to pass on, but this article ...

- Using the MartialBody in Grappling- The title of this post was said to me after rolling with a fellow Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Coach. I thought it was an amusing but accurate description of what the MartialBody can bring to the grapplers toolkit. So in this post I will be outlining some of the ways in which I have found this body development training to be useful to the grappler.The attributes, that the various quotes from my peers in the post describe, are not the result technical knowledge or a l...

In this post, I will outline the basic concepts that underpin the MartialBody approach and why it is laid out in the manner in which it is. For those who know my background the perception could be that MartialBody is a repackaging of the ‘internal arts’ which I had studied for many years, and while this is partially true, it is certainly not the complete, or even majority, of the story. Indeed, MartialBody, far from being a rehash of systems that I have trained previously, is an appr...