Martial Arts Education

After launching Cardio Karate during 1996, I realized that it attracted students with completely different needs. They didn’t come to class to learn martial arts, but to lose weight and become healthier. If those students continued to eat junk food, however, then they wouldn’t have received the results they wanted, regardless of how good the ...

You became a martial arts instructor because you believed in a personal philosophy or vision. Your grandfather, aunts, uncles and parents didn’t push you into this career. If your relatives and friends did, then your experience is unique. Most of us believed in “something” that we wanted to pass to a younger generation. Some of ...

It’s time to talk about fitness, more specifically, martial arts fitness; teaching, marketing and making it work for you. No, fitness kickboxing is not dead. In fact, many schools currently have thriving adult fitness programs. The big difference is there are many people that will teach you how to make an after-school program work, but ...

How you introduce Fitness Kickboxing to your new students will have the single biggest impact on the success or failure of your program. You can have the best “butt-kicking” Fitness Kickboxing class in town, but if you don’t develop a systematic approach to introduce kickboxing to your new students, then you’ll always have a small, ...

I don’t need to tell you that there’s a downturn in the martial arts industry. Even the most optimistic martial arts business leaders admit that times are tough. One solution is to add new programming, but many school owners counter that idea with the argument that it will distract from their core business or that ...

Part 5 of a Six-Part Series on Using Kata (or Form) For Martial Arts Development Some years ago, one of my instructors, Koyoshi Nishime Sensei (Cincinnati, Ohio), revealed to me a number of things about kata that I never understood. One of the most important concerned how the development of power was like a two-headed ...

Part 4 of a Six-Part Series on Using Kata (or Form) For Martial Arts Development. Any instructor of my age grew up watching numerous dynamic and powerful boxers (read striking artists) from the 1950’s to the middle of the 1980’s. These men were in the heyday of their sport and, until self-serving and greedy promoters ...

Creating a long-term fitness program in your martial arts school is not as hard as you think. Most likely, you already have one in your conventional martial arts program. All you must do is sell it differently to the adult fitness market than you would to typical prospects looking for conventional martial arts. Fitness students ...

What I have learned during more than 30 years of teaching is the value of paying close attention to my students, with an eye toward learning from them. If you keep your eyes open, then you will invariably have that occasional situation that will cause you to pause and reflect on what you just experienced ...

Last month, I cited our need, as instructors, to help our students discover their weaknesses or failings that we can then help them eliminate. That makes what we do valuable-­and worth whatever we charge for it. Allow me to relate an example, knowing that it might upset a few music fans, but I feel it ...