Category Archives: karate instructor

Karate Kumite…Should You Get Emotional when you Fight?

Karate Kumite and Clint Eastwood?

Karate Kumite and Clint Eastwood, I never thought I’d say those two things in a sentence. In the movie ‘The Outlaw Josie Wales,’ Clint lectures some sissy pioneers about how to get mad dog mean when you’re fighting for survival. There is truth in his statement, but there is, especially if you are involved in classical martial arts training, a lie.

monster martial artsThe truth is that you have to raise up your desire to survive. You have to be willing to do more than you have ever done before. You have to be willing to fight harder and never give up.

The lie is that emotion increases your desire to win. To understand this, and other things concerning emotion and the martial arts, we have to define what, exactly, emotion is. The odd thing is that if you look in a dictionary you will not find a good definition.

Emotion is not ‘mood,’ or an ‘instinctive state of mind,’ and that sort of definition tells us nothing. So consider this definition: when somebody is unable to accept reality he/she creates a mental turmoil that is emotion. That’s a good one, and I know because I made it up, but we have to look deeper if we are really going to understand emotion, it’s value, and how to handle it.

The Neutronic definition for this concept called emotion is: ‘Motion inside the mind.’ You get angry, and in your mind you want to make motion towards somebody (hit them in the head with a hammer). But it is all in your mind, and, though that can be used, it is also a little less than real.

When you strike another person, would you put energy into your knee? That would be a waste of energy, am I correct? What you want to strive for, as a martial artist, is to put energy only into the fist, or the foot, or the body part you are striking with.

When you put energy into body parts other than the one(s) being used you are being inefficient. This same concept holds true for emotion. Energy put into emotion is not energy put into the desire to win; to win it is best if we increase our desire to win, and we need to get mad dog cool and determined, not extra angry.

Emotion is not to be discouraged, for emotion is a handle by which we can read others, release our own feelings, experience love, and that sort of thing. However, emotion in a fight can inhibit a person’s will to fight. When it comes to Karate Kumite you must increase your desire to win without falling into emotion, or trying to use emotion in any way.

Is there a thug on your block? Want to learn how to fight? Karate Kumite is the fastest and most efficient way to defend yourself in the world. Mouse on overto Monster Martial Arts to find out more.

Karate Chop Is Not The Deadliest Strike One Can Learn In Karate

Karate Chop Touted as Deadly Strike, But it Is Not!

Karate chop him, screamed the actress, and I had to stifle a grin. This was a cinematic effort where neither the actor, the writer, the director knew anything about the real martial arts. They were like those people back in the fifties who used to think that a karate chop to the neck would kill people in their tracks.



When I first began studying the art of Chinese Kenpo Karate I was told that a spear hand strike to the solar plexus or the neck was the deadliest martial arts attack one could deliver. Just stick those steel hard fingers in the soft areas and watch your opponent die. A spear hand was supposed to be better than a karate chop, but only by a little.

Then I heard about the Dim Muk strike, or what is referred to as The Death Touch. You tap a villain on a special spot on their body and they drop dead. Of course, it would take a couple of decades to master the Chi Power necessary, learn all the pressure points and times they were vulnerable to strikes, and by that time I’d be ancient and too slow to deliver such an attack.

One day a student was walking past my Karate instructor holding a piece of thin particle board. He stopped, grinned, and held the board out. Break this, he challenged my instructor.

karate kickMy instructor’s name was Bob Babich, and he was a thin fellow with stringy muscles. Given the target, he sunk his weight, pivoted his hips, and snapped a single finger. A single finger, and when he brought it back, he had left a nice, neat, little hole in the particle board.

Many people think I am telling fairy tales when I relate them this story, but the fact is that the single finger trick could be done by no less than fifty people on Taiwan back in the 1950s. Many kung Fu masters from across China had sought refuge in that little nation to escape communism, and many were able to do this rather unique strike. Unfortunately, there were not enough students willing to undergo the training necessary to such a feat, there weren’t as many people to draw from as in China, and the single finger trick has pretty well died out.

Interestingly, one of the fellows who nibbled at the single finger trick was Bruce Lee. He could stick a finger in a soda (beer) can and leave a hole, and this was back in the day when cans were made of real metal and not this cheap aluminum stuff. This was good, and one wonders whether he would have mastered the single finger trick if he had lived longer.

At any rate, when students ask me what the deadliest karate trick in the world is I tell them about the single finger technique. It is not a made up fable, it is the result of real and dedicated training in arts such as karate, kung fu, or any other legitimate martial art that has stood the test of time. And, as for the karate chop, that is a good karate technique, but it is only the first step on a much more real journey.

Before you learn the one finger trick you have to learn The Secrets of The Punch. Mouse to Monster Martial Arts for that.

Learn Karate By the Simple Trick of Flipping The Matrix

Learn Karate the Right Way!

To learn Karate or Taekwondo or Kenpo, or to learn any martial art, there are many different methods. Unfortunately, most training methods work in limited ways. There is one training tool, however, that can be used in any martial art, and drives the learning curve straight up the wall.


Most methods of learning, you see, rely on monkey see monkey do, which is pretty much the slowest and most inefficient, martial arts method in existence. The fastest and most up to date method for learning a martial art is by the science of matrixing. No offense, but if you live in some out of the way place and haven’t come across matrixing, you could probably do a quick google search on matrix karate, or matrix aikido, and find out what it is.

At any rate, there are some rather simple methods one can use if one decides to learn by Kung videos, learn taekwondo online, or whatever. The first method, though it is still of the monkey see monkey do variety, is to learn a form or martial arts kata. The learning curve starts to take off, however, when one realizes that they can practice the form facing in any of the four directions of the compass.

One faces in a certain direction when learning a form, maybe because they are watching a martial arts video, gets used to the direction, even uses key things in the environment to orient themselves. So to start facing north instead of south is actually a good thing. One quickly discards environmental cues and starts inputting the form without need for external reference points.

A second way to learn self defense forms is to simply do them on both the right and the left side. Everybody comes across this one pretty quickly. To do the Kung Fu forms, or the karate techniques on both the right side and the left side tends to ‘wake up the brain,’ and to make the student consider martial arts moves in new lights.

learn karate onlineThe third way of studying martial arts forms is to do the moves in reverse. Do your Karate kata backwards-not just the order of blocks and kicks and such in reverse order, but reverse motion the moves themselves-and the martial arts are quickly going to open up. Not many people have experienced this little trick, it is hard to do, but man…does it work!

Now, we have actually left most martial artists behind with the last thing we did, and that’s too bad, because things are about to come undone. Once one learns how to write a matrix on a martial art-be it karate or kung fu or whatever martial art they practice-they think they have opened up wide new horizons of martial arts. They have only scratched the hide of the monster, however, for there are two other things that one can do that are simple and yet have profound results.

First, one can put matrixes together; just as the matrixes use basic techniques to open up other techniques, one can use whole matrixes to open up other matrixes. Second, one can actually flip, or reverse, matrixes, and this one opens up the mind and causes massive amounts of data to unfold. Of course, one has to learn how to write a matrix first, and then do a few of them, but once they have done this they will be able to reverse the matrix and learn martial arts faster; they will be able to learn Karate or taekwondo or any martial art they want faster than Neo can play hop scotch.

Learn Martial Arts, learn Karate or Kenpo or whatever, by learning the fastest and most efficient training method in existence. Mouse to Monster Martial Arts.

This page has been about how to learn karate through the fastest and easiest methods known to man.

Your Martial Art Doesn’t Work, and the Hells Angel Threw Me Through a Wall

Does Your Martial Art Work?

outlaw karateI had studied Chinese Kenpo Karate for two years. I was an instructor, and I had written the training manual for my school.Then I ran into a Hells Angel.

The story actually started when the restaurant I was working at hired a geeky looking kid. I didn’t like him much, but then one day I saw him kick a wall. The wall shook like the 1906 earthquake, and I knew that he knew something I didn’t.

So I got to know him, and he said he studied Kang Duk Won Korean Karate. He said he didn’t know it well, which I found hard to believe because I had seen him kick a wall harder than a donkey kicks a pervert. He said, however, that his brother knew a lot more than him, and let’s go talk to him.

So that night, I think it was a Tuesday, we went down to a house in Sunnyvale to meet his brother. As we pulled up Alex said to me, “I should probably tell you that my brother is a Hells Angel.” I blinked, but, naive me, heck…I knew Kenpo, right?

His brother was a couple inches under six feet, a little shorter than me, but he had the outlaw look in his eyes. We talked martial arts for a while, and then he boldly stated, “Your Martial Art doesn’t work.” Then he wrapped two of the gnarliest fists I had ever seen into my shirt front and told me to work my first technique on him.

I began to move. I held his fists in place with one hand and brought my forearm up to break his elbows, I struck his wrists with my nerve paralyzing downward chop, and when I went to chop him in the neck he tossed me through a wall. Yes he did…all the way through the wall.

He laughed and helped me up, and then he told me to grab his shirt front. I did, and he showed me the self defense technique from his martial arts school. He reached over and punched me in the chest so hard that…that’s right, I went right through the wall again.

This is a true story, and being tossed through a wall twice changed my life, definitely changed the way I was learning martial arts, and prompted me down the road to other martial arts and how to really make them work. I spent over a half dozen years at the Kang Duk Won Korean Karate school, worked alongside all manner of people, including hells angels and other outlaw bikers. Included in my education was why a martial art doesn’t work.

Amreican Karate

The Worst Karate Dojo in the World…the Best Martial Arts Training Hall on the Planet!

He ran the Best Martial Arts Dojo on the Planet!


I often tell people about this, got reminded of it in a newsletter recently, and I want to talk again about the worst dojo in the world.
It was cold in the winter, and we had no heat.
It was hot in the summer and we had no air conditioning.
The bag was ripped and stitched together until it looked like a child of Frankenstein.
The mat was made of sail, and it was ripped and stitched and duc taped until it looked like Frankenstein’s rug.
The front windows had big cracks in them, and duc tape held them together.
There were no back windows, just bars and a shallow alley.
There was a hole in the corner of the ceiling in the changing room and rain poured in.
The toilet was slanted 30 degrees, and it was old and corroded.
Now, that was the bad. Here is some good.
The teacher knew his martial arts. There was electricity in the air when he taught.
He could get us to know his martial arts.
The students were all supremely dedicated.
Lot of hells angels, they made sure everything was kept real.
No girls or kids. They had separate classes.
No contracts, everything conducted on handshake.
The classes were so crowded we had to learn how to survive in a mob. (Imagine thirty people in a car and a half garage)
No talk about theory, just sweat until we couldn’t walk.
I frequently couldn’t press the pedals in my volkswagon, my shins were that bruised from blocking. I would drive home ‘clutchless.’
There was a golden glow to it all. This was chi energy, and it was pushed into every student there. It was irrefutable.

I stayed at that school for some five years. Got my black belt, and my life was changed.
If you want that art that I studied, it was Karate before Funakoshi came along. Check it out at Kang Duk Won.

Tough Chuck Norris Karate Movie Star…was He Really That Tough?

Are You Chuck Norris Tough?


For the last half dozen years the legend of just how tough Chuck Norris really is has been growing. Hundreds of ‘factoids’ had Chuck doing everything from conquering the martians to ending the war, uh, all wars, and all with a grunt and spinning side kick.
So how tough was he?
He learned Korean Karate (Tang Soo Do) in Korea. An assignment in that country would make anybody tough. The winters are long and hard, the summers are boilers. In addition he is supposed to have earned his black belt in just over a year.
He taught martial arts, and eventually made his way into the movies. Movies don’t make a person tough, on the contrary, they usually soften a person up, compromise his morals.
Chuck did have his troubles, an out of wedlock child, but any compromising he did seems to have faded, he must have learned his lessons, and in finding a more moral (Christian) base for life he seems to have found his true toughness.
He has promoted drug awareness through his programs, and fought the spread of AIDS.
In addition, the martial arts programs he started are in full swing. His Chun Kuk Do martial art has thousands of followers world wide.
So how tough was Chuck Norris? Well, he beat Hollywood, and he helps the downtrodden. All those other factoids, like Chuck scaring the devil into closing down hell, or convincing Obama not to run again, they are just icing on the cake. If you want real tough martial arts, the best martial arts on the planet, drop by Learn Karate Online. Pick up a free martial arts book on the upper right home page of Learn Karate Online.

Free Karate Lesson Online Nearly Done!

Been working hard on this Free Karate Lesson Online. Check out the video, it’s a good example of how I take things apart so you really can understand them, and then I’ll tell you about the free Karate…

I wanted to cover stances, blocks, footwork, and get the student to actually do a small form. The trick is to keep it simple, and make sure the steps are quick and easy.
After all, people want to do the bam and slam of UFC type sports, and I want to convince them that Karate, as an art, has more to offer.
You don’t want to wrestle on the street.
You want to maximize your blocks and strikes.
You want to build some of that famous knock out power that Karate power is famous for.
On this last, you can’t develop this while wearing gloves. Gloves stop the transmittal of energy, and thereby the hands are demoted to mere bludgeons.
Anyay, check out the free lesson at my site, Learn Karate Online. And it really is free. I don’t even ask for your address. I’m figuring that the benefits of the lesson will be so obvious that people will want to sign up for the newsletter, or just order right on the spot. That’s Learn Karate Online.

Exploring Karate Chi Power Through a Variety of Arts

I just wrote a post for one of my other blogs about energy. The post is at…
http://alcase.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/the-different-chi-power-manifestations-of-the-martial-arts/
I was sort of loose in that post, so let me nail it down for your progress.
Oh, check out the video first, then I’ll tell you.

Karate is one of the best places to start energy manifestation (chi power and all that), because it starts with a simple explosion. Once you can explode, however, you need to figure out what to do with the energy that you have exploded.
Shaolin might turn and roll it, Pa Kua might spiral it, Tai Chi will suspend it, and so on. Every system has specific things they do with energy. Even the same systems will emphasize different progressions of this thing called Chi power.
That said, it can take too long to develop chi without Karate. And it can take too long to develop chi power even in Karate unless you have proper matrixing. Matrixing is logical and will enhance all progress and speed of progress.
The most important thing,however, is to change courses when you learn how to explode. You must ‘go backwards,’ learn how to empty yourself, and try different manipulations of the body if you want to find different manifestations of energy.
A Karate student who just keeps doing the same old same old will tend to stagnate. You know a lot of people drop out of Karate after getting their black belt in that hard art? They know, intuitively, that karate, once so wild and wooley and invigorating, has become a stop point. They know that they must seek elsewhere to continue their upward progress.
Anyway, that all said, stop by LearnKarateOnline (dot)net if you want to start your journey in that basic and yet most advanced art, or if you want to revitalize the things that you learned long ago, but which you need to pick up again in order to progress onward.

not all systems explode

A Simple Martial Arts injury Results from Incorrect Training Methods

Within the Karate Fist is Great Spirit

I lay on the floor gasping, suffering from the simple martial arts injury of…having the air knocked out of me.

It was a simple punch to the belly, didn’t really even hurt much, but I couldn’t breath. The rest of the class gathered around, stared as my face turned red.

The instructor stepped in, pushed me flat on my back, grabbed a hold of my belt, and jerked upward. Air flooded back in, and suddenly I could breath.

This injury was pretty common back then. And the usual practice was to bear hug the sufferer from the rear and lift him up. This would stretch out the muscles, causing them to relax, and then you could breath. At least I think this is what was happening. Sort of CPR for the Karate induced injury, if you get my drift.

The second method I have described. The guy is flat on his back, you jerk up on his belt, and the muscles relax and he starts breathing.

The important thing here, however, is that we were being taught incorrectly to suffer such an injury in the first place.

Later, I went to a more traditional dojo, and we were taught to tighten the belly on impact, when punching, when blocking, when kicking. Basically, when the body expanded, or was impacted upon. Once I learned that, i never had the breath knocked out of me again.

Drop by Monster Martial Arts, there are all sorts of tips, for everything from injuries to techniques to…whatever.

I have a confession to make, I used to practice Shotokan Katas while I was going to an Ed Parker Chinese Kenpo Karate style martial arts school.

I kow, heresy, I am impure, oh sob and moan.

But, on my behalf, Kenpo was originally Shotokan. Check out the video, and then I’ll tell you about it.

You didn’t know that Ed Parker Kenpo Karate was originally a shotokan based hard style of Karate? But it’s true! If you look at the first book Ed Parker wrote, it is a sequence of techniques that, when put together, make up the forms of Shotokan.

Mind you, it might not have been Shotokan proper, might even have been Isshin ryu, or shito ryu, or something like that, but the point is made. Chinese Kenpo was originally basic Japanese Okianwan Karate.

Why did it change? Because Parker never got his black belt (Oh, I think he did, but not from Thunderbolt Chow). So he taught a bunch of fellows Karate, ran out of stuff to teach, and started teaching a type of made up Kung Fu.

Look, I know a few dunderheads will get upset with this history, but it’s fairly accurate, there are a slightly different versions out there, but it seems to hold up when you do a little basic net research, and especially when you see that first book.

So, when I say I was doing Shotokan Karate (the Heians out of the Best Karate seriess by Nakayama, while I was studying at an Ed Parker Chinese Kenpo Karate style of martial arts school, that isn’t a bad thing. Heck, if it was good enough for Ed. Right? Check out my site, Monster Martial Arts,  lots of books and courses and things, all the way back to the martial arts taught in the sixties.