Innholdsfortegnelse for August - September 2016 i Black Belt Magazine

The rise of social media has been a boon to the martial arts. Social media sites allow us to connect with our peers, to stay up to date on our favorite schools and instructors, and to get news on upcoming fight flicks and just about everything else. Of course, the best place to do your one-stop social media shopping for all things martial arts is Black Belt’s Facebook page (facebook.com/BlackBeltMagazine), Twitter feed (@Black_Belt_Mag) and YouTube channel (youtube.com/user/BlackBeltLLC). Unfortunately, social media also can be a space in which people comment without considering the big picture. We see it every day as we monitor exchanges on our Facebook page, as well as comments on Twitter and YouTube. Because many of the people who post also read Black Belt, I figured I’d weigh…

To demonstrate, he ducked under my punch and pinched the nerve beneath my lat, then twisted his body and grabbed my leg. He lifted me up and threw me on my back. “Wrestler against boxer, the wrestler has to be willing to sacrifice,” he added. “He will get hit several times, but then he can throw the boxer.” Chamreun’s Khmer-wrestling response focused on a technique that had him grabbing me around the midsection and turning his knuckles into the small of my back. When he applied pressure, I could feel bone grinding on bone. Once again, he lifted me up and threw me down. “In the old days, Khmer kickboxing — bradal serey — was done without gloves and no rules,” Chamreun said. “These types of grappling moves were common.”…

While everyone dreams of fighting on television and making millions, very few ever get that far. Just earning a decent living in the sport is tough. “I’ve had guys who came to fight for me, thinking they’d make $10,000 for their first fight — which is ridiculous,” Lou Neglia said. Heading up one of the world’s most successful regional MMA promotions, the New Jersey–based Ring of Combat, Neglia knows just how hard it is to make significant money in the sport. “It’s like boxing: Floyd Mayweather Jr. is making millions, but most other guys are making nothing,” Neglia said. “You have to work your way up to the higher levels, but people forget that the journey to a fight is often harder than the fight itself. You have to cut…

Look up hayabusa online, and you’ll discover that it’s the Japanese word for peregrine falcon, a bird of prey that can be found pretty much anyplace on earth that humans inhabit. If the company that bears the name of that powerful avian has its way, the products it makes for martial artists and MMA fighters will become equally ubiquitous. Founded in Canada in 2006, Hayabusa Fightwear Inc. is the brainchild of a cadre of martial artists. One is a karate black belt who cross-trained in judo and sambo and now competes in muay Thai and jiu-jitsu. Another practices MMA and jiujitsu and is competitive in tournaments. They hatched Hayabusa to manufacture and deliver to end-users gear and apparel of the highest quality, goods that would meet the needs of martial…

For me, the moment to see would have been the development of karate in the early 1950s. I’ve always been fascinated by the events that unfolded during this decade, not only for karate but also for Japan and its culture. Some of my interest was spawned by one of my sensei, who was a young man in Japan at that time and whose stories captured my imagination. He talked about the comical sights of Japanese men, particularly in the countryside, learning to wear modern Western clothing — for instance, with leather belts tied around their waists over untucked shirttails. It was also an era when Japan was emerging from the horrific poverty of the war and its immediate aftermath. My sensei spoke of it as zassho shiru jidai, the “time…

People tend to underestimate the usefulness of feudal samurai military arts in modern self-defense situations. They say the ancient weapons are no longer practical and the movements needed to wield them are no longer effective. I counter by arguing that this is a misunderstanding based on the fact that few of these arts are still practiced with their original intent and that even fewer have been consciously applied to a modern military environment. Weapons lay at the core of samurai training because the goal was to prevail in lethal combat, whether on or off the battlefield. This is fundamentally different from non-weapons-based training and fighting. When weapons are involved, an exchange of force is simply unacceptable because the consequence of failure is death — of you and maybe even your…

If you’ve trained long enough, you might already know what you’re about to read in this article. However, the information is so valuable, so life-changing, that it’s worth repeating a) so newcomers can see the big picture, b) so you can remind yourself of the benefits of going to the dojo and c) so you can use it to recruit others to our cause. In addition to teaching you how to defend yourself, martial arts training prepares you for life. This applies to the young as well as the not so young, to those who strike as well as those who grapple. A good instructor in any art will have had an endless stream of students report that they’ve enjoyed success in their professional and personal lives because of their…

Good self-defense technique shouldn’t rely on strength alone, although strength and power generation certainly help when it comes to effective application. We’re not being sexist or denigrating either gender, but an honest assessment of men and women reveals that actual differences exist only in strength and mass. Generally, all other differences — balance, speed, agility, coordination, flexibility, intensity and so on — have more variability between people than between genders. GOOD SELF-DEFENSE technique shouldn’t rely on strength alone, although strength and power generation certainly help when it comes to effective application. Think of selfdefense in these terms: Much of traditional Japanese jujitsu relies on strength, but Brazilian jiu-jitsu was specifically developed by Helio Gracie to rely on technique rather than strength. A sickly youth at the time, Gracie was forced…

It’s not hard to envision an 8-year-old boy from rural China being entranced by a giant tree, especially when that tree is more than 1,500 years old, when it has a girth so great that encircling its trunk takes five men with arms extended, when its root system is said to extend under half the temple complex in which the youth lives. That tree, a Ginkgo biloba, was planted at Shaolin shortly after the temple was founded in the fifth century. It was there when young Wang Bo began his Shaolin training in 1997, and it’s there now. For one and a half millennia, it’s provided shade and sustenance for the monks of Shaolin, not to mention inspiration for the propagation of their style of kung fu. “What makes our…