My grandfather used to pack parachutes for the Royal Air Force at one stage in his service during the Second World War. I think I may have inherited my dry sense of humour from him. He used to leave little messages written on rolled-up bits of paper in his parachutes that read something like: “If […]
At the end of this month, my time as a consulting engineer working in the building industry is coming to a close. Nearly nine years ago now, I came out of a lengthy hiatus from my work as an engineer and project manager and joined the team at a local Engineering Consultancy firm here in […]
I want to remind you first of my over-arching disclaimer to all of my discussions about self-defence. The goal of self-defence is to make yourself and those around you safe. If you can accomplish that without physical intervention, then this is always the better option. I do not recommend fighting unless there is no other […]
Over the years that we have run our martial arts centre here in Australia, we’ve had inquiries from various people who have expressed concern about whether they were actually too old to do Kung Fu. Well… You got me started. I’m 44 years old this year. Am I also too old to do Kung […]
I wanted to call this article: “Is an unarmed, trained martial arts master/combat professional/self-defence expert as lethal as an average person with a knife?”, but this is a rather long and ponderous title and is a bit too click-baitey for my liking. For most people wanting to get into martial arts or combat training or […]
The hero of the story suddenly stops in his tracks. He lowers his fully-automatic rifle, his usually stoic emotionless face creases with momentary concern. “Hang on… I’ve got a bad feeling about this…” This is usually the point in the movie when the big badass boss monster makes its appearance for the epic final battle […]
There were two news stories which caught my attention this morning. I thought I’d share them with you. The first story was regarding a pair of hikers in Cape Town, South Africa. A middle-aged married couple, who were walking in the Table Mountain National Park a few days ago. They were approached by a […]
When I first started studying and training Kung Fu, my very good friends didn’t miss the opportunity to make sure that a certain song got played at parties more often than not and also made certain that I knew that I was expected to put on a dance performance. The best bunch of blokes you […]
There are some hilarious videos on Youtube which capture people trying to do physical training in weird and wonderful ways. These videos are often entitled “Gym Fail” videos. My favourite is the bloke on the cable pulley machine doing powered jumps using the falling weight stack to catapult himself into the air. He really looks […]
When we talk about training for self-defence or combat, we often talk about cross-training because of the unpredictable nature of the event that we are training for. Cross-training basically amounts to training in other disciplines to compliment your performance in your chosen discipline. Cross-training assists in this way by exposing athletes to new and varied […]