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How Nutrition Can Truly Save Your Life

January 31, 2012 in ADD & ADHD, Nutrition, PSAs, Recommended, Tips for Parents, Training with 0 Comments

I love this story and it goes to show you how absolutely important nutrition is in our lives and the lives of our children. It’s powerful enough to bring a women suffering chronic disability from Multiple Sclerosis to healthy in less than a year.

The paleo diet she describes has also been shown to completely reverse type 2 Diabetes, ADHD, and other chronic diseases. Please watch this and then watch it again with your kids. It starts out a little slow but gets better and better each minute. It will truly save your life.

The New Michelle Obama-Inspired USDA Nutrition Guidelines Are a Joke

January 30, 2012 in ADD & ADHD, Nutrition, PSAs with 2 Comments

The USDA is playing you and your children for fools.

I got a chance to look over the highlights of the new USDA nutrition guidelines released last week and I’m far from impressed, though not surprised. The new guidelines are just as much of a joke as the old guidelines, with a few new punchlines. Oc course, they’re receiving praise from nearly everyone involved in CW (conventional wisdom) initiatives, the nutritionally misinformed medical community, and educators (who still haven’t figured out that kids will display ADD-like symptoms if you feed them SIWFMD (stuff I wouldn’t feed my dog) every day for lunch and then confine them to a desk).

Here’s a chart comparing the old nutrition guidelines with the new ones.

There are some decent aspects, such as a call for more vegetables. But, when you dig deeper and find out that pizza now classifies as a vegetable under Michelle Obama’s USDA guidelines, it’s hard not to get skeptical.

It also set a minimum for the amount of tomato sauce on pizza that could count toward vegetable servings.

Under pressure from potato growers and suppliers of school pizza, Congress weighed in and overruled the USDA on both counts.

The result: pizza now counts as a vegetable.

And then there’s an entire section dedicated to grains with an emphasis on whole grains. The USDA think it’s a great idea for kids to eat a poison-filled (Lectins, Gluten, and Phytates are naturally occurring poisons found in grains) substance that is unsuitable for human consumption unless it’s highly processed. It makes sense when you discover that wheat, rice, and corn are among the top five government-subsidized agricultural industries, but it’s sickening when you realize that they’re marketing the causes of childhood obesity and other medical problems to our kids as a healthy nutrition guideline.

Grains have zero nutritional benefits, being classified as an “anti-nutrient” by nutritional scientists who haven’t been paid off by the grain industry. I suggest you read more about why grains are unhealthy. In the meantime, here’s a synopsis of the three poisons found in the very grains the USDA wants your children to get plenty of:

Lectins. They bind to insulin receptors, attack the stomach lining of insects, bind to human intestinal lining, and they seemingly cause leptin resistance. And leptin resistance predicts a “worsening of the features of the metabolic syndrome independently of obesity”.

Gluten. Found in wheat, rye, and barley, Gluten is a composite of the proteins gliadin and glutenin. Around 1% of the population are celiacs, people who are completely and utterly intolerant of any gluten. In celiacs, any gluten in the diet can be disastrous. We’re talking compromised calcium and vitamin D3 levels, hyperparathyroidism, bone defects. Really terrible stuff. And it gets worse: just because you’re not celiac doesn’t mean you aren’t susceptible to the ravages of gluten. As Stephan highlights, one study showed that 29% of asymptomatic (read: not celiac) people nonetheless tested positive for anti-gliadin IgA in their stool. Anti-gliadin IgA is an antibody produced by the gut, and it remains there until it’s dispatched to ward off gliadin – a primary component of gluten. Basically, the only reason anti-gliadin IgA ends up in your stool is because your body sensed an impending threat – gluten. If gluten poses no threat, the anti-gliadin IgA stays in your gut. And to think, most Americans eat this stuff on a daily basis.

Phytates. They make minerals bio-unavailable (so much for all those healthy vitamins and minerals we need from whole grains!), thus rendering null and void the last, remaining argument for cereal grain consumption.

The USDA says that at least half of the grains must be whole grain-rich beginning July 1, 2012. Beginning July 1, 2014, all grains must be whole grain rich. That should be read as: “Beginning July 1, 2014 all grains must be the full-poison variety.”

We’re not done yet. The next category on the list is milk. And the new guidelines say that it must be fat-free (for flavored versions) or 1%. This is a nutritional disaster. From Doctor Mercola:

Milk is thought of as a wholesome food, which is why so many parents give it to their children with every meal. And the truth is, it is wholesome when it’s in its raw form and sourced from cows fed non-contaminated grass and raised in clean conditions.

Unfortunately, the milk that winds up in most Americans’ glasses is far from this unadulterated state and may be a veritable chemical cocktail containing as many as 20 painkillers, antibiotics, and growth hormones.

Drinking pasteurized 1% milk from hormone-drenched grain fed cows is no better than drinking sugar-water with some added chemicals (read: Coke). Of course, it passes not only as acceptable to USDA guidelines, but as a recommendation. And they think that adding chocolate syrup to this chemical-cocktail is perfectly fine as long as the milk is “fat-free.” Smh.

The USDA guidelines also make a push to limit saturated fat, a vital form of fat to human beings. In fact, saturated fats are good for you. The reason everyone believes otherwise is because the government (read: USDA) paid a scientist named Ancel Keyes a salary of $200,000 a year to convince people that there is a relationship between consumption of saturated fat, blood cholesterol levels, and risk of coronary heart disease.

Keyes’ most famous study, linking consumption of saturated fat with heart disease by country, was released in 1953. But, if you analyze the data that Keyes conveniently discarded from his own study, you find a result that directly contradicts Keyes’ published findings.

The research of Ancel Keys has been criticized by Uffe Ravnskov amongst others for having selection bias when supporting his conclusions. Ravnskov examined the data that Keys used and found no correlation to back up Keys’ findings.

The real causes of increased rates of heart disease and obesity is increased consumption of grains and hydrogenated oils. But the USDA says those are okay while telling you to not give your children saturated fats which are necessary for the optimal function of cell membranes, heart, bones (to assimilate calcium), liver, lungs, hormones, immune system, satiety (reducing hunger), and genetic regulation.

The new USDA guidelines, along with the USDA food pyramid are a prime example of why government should not be involved in this discussion or the health and wellbeing of our children. The findings and recommendations of the USDA are the result of politics, lobby money, and ignorance. And our children suffer while the USDA collect their money, protect their donors, and do the bidding of certain industries against others.

I choose not to be fooled. Nutrition is vital if you want to avoid joining the tribe of millions of fat, sick, and nearly dead people walking the globe. My daughter will be born this Summer and I will make sure she knows the difference between real food and the garbage everyone else eats.

Free Your Feet

November 14, 2011 in Forward Thinking, My Life, PSAs, Training with 0 Comments

If you didn’t already know, I’m anti-shoe. It’s not some hippie OWS thing, it’s a don’t-enjoy-needless-injuries thing. I take showers, I promise.

I’ve talked a bit about why I don’t like shoes, but nothing explains it quite as well as a well-made infographic. This, in a nutshell, is why I am waging a strike against shoes and why you should join me:

Free Your Feet
Courtesy X Ray Technician Schools

Do you have knee pain? Hip pain? Lower back pain? Other lower body joint discomfort? It’s almost certainly your shoes!

The Worst Thing We Can Do To Students

September 27, 2011 in Discipline, Growth, On The Job, PSAs, Success, Teaching, Tips for Parents, Training with 2 Comments


Photo by Adrian Sommerling

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond to it. ~ Lou Holtz

Sometimes the most well-meaning efforts have the biggest negative impact. One of the worst things we can do to students as parents, teachers, and coaches is to save them from failure, save them from the real consequences of their actions, and to save them from feeling pain or disappointment. I have seen the product that is the eternally rescued child and it’s not pretty.

Students who are constantly rescued, saved from failure, guarded from consequences, and shielded from pain and disappointment fail to acquire the necessary tools required to deal with the ups and downs of life. They become entitled blamers, victims of the world, unable to cope with the law of reaping and sowing.

Maturity is when we stop demanding that life meet our demands and begin to meet the demands of life.

Marital arts and countless other sports and activities that children take part in are moving toward a no-fail mindset. Martial arts schools are good at pretending that students are challenged and “put to the test”, but are they really? Look around: they’re removing obstacles that used to stand in the way of success; they’re preparing the path for the child and smoothing out all the rough spots. Less sparring, less board breaking, easier techniques, and less time in between belts are a few examples of this. In many schools, the sole requirement for the next rank is that you have a checking account and a pulse.

But by pretending that every child is succeeding, we’re actually failing all of them. By guarding them from frustration and consequences, we’re missing valuable coaching moments that could be used to develop strong-willed leaders who won’t take no for an answer. Instead, we’re breeding an army of future husbands, wives, friends, neighbors, workers, and parents who expect life to bend around them, to lay down at their presence, and to submit to their will.

What we must do as coaches, teachers, and parents is to show students how to leap the hurdles presented to them by life. Life is full of hurdles and you can either jump them or you can’t. But expecting our children and our students to be Olympic hurdlers in their teens and adult life when we’ve removed all of their opportunities to practice jumping as a child is irrational and irresponsible. If you save them from failure now, you set them up for failure later. And failure later is generally far more painful.

Last week I wrote about the secret recipe for being a great coach. The second half of that recipe says that successful coaching depends on the coach’s willingness to tell the truth. Our students and children need us to tell them the truth about life so they have every opportunity to build the tools required to cope with that truth. It’s important to understand that the truth will find them one way or the other; let’s tell them the truth now and help them navigate it so it doesn’t kick them in the teeth later (martial artists should take that literally).

Form Over Function Will Be the Downfall of Martial Arts

September 19, 2011 in Competition, Forward Thinking, On The Job, PSAs, Teaching, Training with 3 Comments

I’ve talked at length over the past few years about how the martial arts industry is shooting itself in the foot. I’ve written some of my points down (here’s 10 of them in one article, here’s one, and here’s another) and there’s still a lot more to come, including some big ones. In keeping with the theme, I’d like to expose another straw that’s been heaped on the camel’s back by martial arts schools across the globe, but especially here in the U.S.: form over function.

Thousands of years ago, martial arts was about function. People in many parts of the world needed it for survival. For many others it was about developing dominating hand-to-hand combat tactics for military personnel. Martial arts training in those times wasn’t a game, wasn’t a hobby, and certainly wasn’t a joke.

As you can imagine, modern-day citizens who live in relatively safe societies have different goals than their 2000 year old counterparts. We’re not interested in kicking people off horses and learning how to maim someone’s face with a Kama. Instead, we’re interested in not getting fat, teaching our kids discipline, focus, and respect, and participating in a sport/activity that engages us.

Because of this shift, many martial arts have switched gears and become martial sports. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is growing wildly as a sport. Wrestling, Taekwondo, and Judo have all been adopted as Olympic sports. And mixed martial arts — a combination of dozens of arts — is gaining in mainstream popularity with no sign of slowing. In a major move, the UFC just signed a multiyear deal with Fox Sports.

I think that was a great move. Sports are popular. Sports have rules. Martial sports are exciting. And you can create a huge industry around sports. But what is the heart of a martial sport? It’s a physical competition against another human being. For martial sports, which are spawned by ancient arts that gave their practitioners nasty combat skills, the competition must center around combat. Taekwondo, Judo, Wrestling, Boxing, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and the UFC have all figured that out.

But thousands of schools around the globe are taking combat out of martial arts. They’re removing the function and replacing it with form. They’re taking something inherently useful to society and making it useless. They’ve removed all sparring and physical contact from the curriculum, they’re putting an emphasis on kata and forms patterns, they’re replacing combat with board breaking (and often not even using real boards), and they’re filling the gaps with games, fitness, and fluff.

Sparring is the most important aspect of martial arts in terms of function. It’s the only aspect of training that teaches you pin point timing, distance, feinting, the application of power and technique, and self-defense. But there are schools awarding Black Belts to students who have never participated in a single sparring match. It’s the equivalent of awarding NFL contracts to people who have only played flag football.

“…there are schools awarding Black Belts to students who have never participated in a single sparring match. It’s the equivalent of awarding NFL contracts to people who have only played flag football.”

The industry can’t survive the long-term repercussions of this. It’s a cancer. When you give Black Belts to students who can’t spar, you create future instructors who can’t spar. These instructors are impotent as teachers of the next generation. The side effects are students who have a false sense of security and an industry knee-deep in mediocrity and empty martial arts curriculum. And that kills long-term profit.

The industry has already damaged itself enough. The industry associations are encouraging schools to remove sparring from their curriculums because it results in higher dropout rates. But I’ve already explained why only bad teachers water down curriculum. Real teachers prepare the student for the path, not the path for the student.

Martial arts training is about function and removing the functional aspects is akin to removing the soul of the martial art you teach. Scrubbing out the most challenging parts of your curriculum may help short-term retention, but good luck surviving when nobody wants your product because it no longer has any function. If this trend becomes more widespread, the industry will suffer another major body blow to its reputation. And at this point, I’m not sure how many more of those we can survive.

Unsolicited Advice, Worrying About Yourself, and Learning Boundaries

September 12, 2011 in Discipline, Forward Thinking, PSAs, Teaching, Tips for Parents with 0 Comments

I can’t go a single day without multiple students worrying about what other students are doing in class; not in an inquisitive way but more in a I’m the boss and I didn’t authorize that kind of way. Worry about yourself.

I can’t go a single day without a fellow adult giving me some sort of advice that I didn’t ask for. If you have a pulse, you’ve probably shared the same experience. And depending on who your friends and family are, you might have that experience far more or far less often. Nobody wants unsolicited advice.

The best tip I ever heard about behavior was don’t be yourself. It’s not right to act a fool, say whatever comes to your mind, do whatever action pops in your head, and then excuse it all away with: well that’s just me. Bridle yourself.

All three of these things are common personal boundary violations and they’re disrespectful to others. A personal boundary is a marker of where I end and you begin. The basis for healthy communication and relationships is an understanding and a respect for boundaries.

Worrying about others implies that you have some sort of responsibility for that person. And while you are responsible for the wellbeing of others, the true extent of that responsibility is only to protect them from you. Kids are so responsible when it comes to what others are up to, even when they have absolutely no responsibility for themselves. It’s not cute or kind; they’re worried about others because they’re compelled to control them.

Giving unsolicited advice is when you give someone who isn’t listening counseling they didn’t ask for, offering recommendations you probably aren’t even following yourself. It’s relationally unhealthy because it communicates that you believe the person you’re advising (without consent) is weak, powerless, unable to make rational personal decisions, unable to deal with reality on their own accord, and unable to care-for or take responsibility for themselves. Without you, they’d be lost, lonely people. That may not define how you feel at the time, but how you feel about you and how other people feel about you doesn’t always align. Trust me, your unsolicited advice is not welcome.

Which brings us around to unbridled self-expression. You don’t like my worrying and my advice? That’s just who I am! You’re fabulous, I’m sure, but you’re out of control. Unbridled self-expression is the inability to censor your words and actions. Here’s how it feels to others: Someone walks up to you, throws up on your shoes, and walks away. Not cool.

We are not born with personal boundaries. They must be taught or learned. And kids learn best by observation. So as martial arts teachers and parents, it’s important for us to do two things: model healthy boundaries and teach healthy boundaries. Every. Chance. We. Get. Lest we create another generation of relationally unhealthy adults.

Maybe it’s not ADHD. Maybe it’s FIADHD.

July 22, 2011 in Nutrition, PSAs, Tips for Parents with 2 Comments

Maybe your child doesn’t have ADHD. Maybe they have FIADHD. That’s Food-Induced Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

My wife taught a preschool camp this week and she took a picture of one of the sack lunches one of the children brought.

Exhibit A:

Starting on the left we have a preservative, carbohydrate-laden sandwich package branded as Smuckers Uncrustables (23g carbs and 10g sugar). It’s highly refined peanut butter and jelly sandwiched between two pieces of highly refined and nutritionless bread. Hat tip for the “whole wheat” marketing. (Shoot me).

Next we have Publix fruit snacks: sugar and artificial flavoring pressed into fun, bite-sized shapes (22g carbs, 13g sugar). Hat tip to the “100% daily value of Vitamin C”. (laughable). Your child will be overweight and borderline Diabetic, but they won’t catch as many colds!

Next to that is a cup full of assorted Goldfish crackers (20g carbs). More refined, artificially flavored carbohydrates pressed into fun shapes. Here son, have a handful of preservative-coated sodium. From the Goldfish website: “Everyone loves Goldfish crackers: tasty, fun, wholesome treats. The snack that smiles back” :) (How cute).

If you’re not sure what wholesome means, the dictionary defines it as “Conducive to or suggestive of good health and physical well-being.” Dear Pepperidge Farm, you’re a joke.

Behind the Goldfish we have some good old-fashioned Animal Crackers (42g carbs, 8g sugar). Surely Animal Crackers have a “plus side” like there’s been a “plus side” to every other piece of garbage in this pile. Let’s see what Stauffer’s has to say: “A great tasting snack for adults and children that is low-fat, and available in 13 fun animal shapes.” Low fat, huh? I wonder if they know what effect sugar and carbohydrates have on insulin and what effect insulin has on fat storage. Or maybe they just hope you’re ignorant and won’t catch on to the fact that Animal Crackers are making kids fat.

Lastly, we have an unidentified grape juice box (read: sugar-water) to wash it all down with (26g carbs, 23g sugar). Need I say more?

That’s 133 grams of carbohydrates and 54 grams of sugar total: a perfect recipe for spiking insulin, which promotes fat storage, leads to insulin resistance, and causes a myriad of health problems and behavior disorders. This is not to mention the gluten (a naturally occurring poison), the anti-nutrient grains, the chemicals, and the preservatives.

I’ve taught thousands of children over a decade. Your child doesn’t have ADHD. And you won’t convince me they have ADHD until they show ADHD symptoms after they’ve been eating clean for at least 6 months.  That means no grains, no gluten, low carb, low sugar, natural whole foods.

Until then, your child has food-induced ADHD. There is no way a child can function properly and focus after eating the above pictured lunch. And it doesn’t have to be that bad. The Uncrustable and the juice box alone would have done it.

Imagine breakfast on top of that: french toast, syrup, juice, and a donut? What’s for dinner? Chuck E. Cheese’s!

Everywhere I go I see the same garbage being fed to kids. Three square meals a day of it. If that means I’m calling you out, you’re absolutely right, I’m calling you out.

No problem if you’re in denial, here’s a handy list of available excuses:

  • But, I’m too busy.
  • But, they’re too picky.
  • But, we’re on a budget.
  • But, that’s what all their friends eat.
  • But, I can’t cook.
  • But, I don’t know anything about real nutrition.
  • But, I do what the government food pyramid tells me to do.
  • But, it said it was healthy on the package!
  • But, they get a toy when we go through the drive through and I love seeing that smile on their cute little face!

Choose one of the above (or a few). Parrot them when pressured to actually parent.

Or, you can step up, make some changes and help your child. They are all victims of the above excuses. They are victims of poor decision-making. They are victims of a lack of leadership. They are victims of the marketing on the packages. They are victims of a school system that not only fails to teach them nutrition, but serves them the same garbage and then medicate them for the symptoms it causes.

Look around, everyone is obese. What we think we know (what the government pyramid told us) is wrong. What we’re doing to our kids and ourselves is wrong. Stop worrying about who is going to get kicked off the island and which celebrity can dance and figure out how you’re going to make some changes for your children.

I hope I wasn’t unclear.

A classic parent-child exchange from my trip to Publix

June 30, 2011 in PSAs, Teaching, Tips for Parents with 5 Comments

I was walking into Publix so I could deposit a check at the Suntrust inside. As I strolled through the shopping cart area, a mom with her two kids was grabbing one of the carts with the child seats built in. Apparently they come in two colors: green and blue.

The mom chose the green one because it was closest, but of course that’s not the one the younger sister wanted. So the younger sister bypasses mom, runs to the blue cart, and starts pulling it out while yelling, “No, I want the blue one!”. I think she repeated it about 8 times as mom tried to get the older sister strapped into the green one.

Mom continued to pull out the green cart, hoping she’d give up. “No, No, No, I want the blue one!” said the younger sister in a whiney voice with more than a hint of bad attitude and the old foot stomp/bounce-and-whine routine.

This is the moment of truth! Are you going to seize the opportunity to teach an invaluable lesson about attitude, politeness, and making requests rather than demands or are you going to organize your goals around avoiding the bad situations, getting the whining to stop by any means necessary, and making life as easy as possible for you?

As I walked back outside after making my deposit, I passed the family again. They were ready to shop now that they had switched to a blue cart. Parenting fail.

Before you start countering with “choose your battles”, it was more than clear that this situation had an important lesson within it. And truthfully, “choosing your battles” is often just a convenient excuse for lazy parents. The only clear choice in this situation was to parent-up and take the time to teach the lesson.

It would have gone something like this: ”Sarah, I would be happy to let you ride in the blue cart, but your attitude and tone is unacceptable, so today we’re going to ride in the green cart. Next time, if you’d like the blue cart, you can ask politely, ‘Mom, may we ride in the blue cart instead?’”

What’s the worst that’s going to happen? She throws a fit because she didn’t get her way? Is that all? Good. Then you can explain that you have to leave the store unless she can calm down and ride in the cart. You are willing to leave the store aren’t you? Parenting is more important than grocery shopping, yes?

See, if you do it right the first few times, you’ll have years of productive grocery shopping ahead of you along with a child who knows how to communicate effectively. If you give in because you’re the parent that “chooses your battles”, you’ve got a long, painful road ahead of you. I’ve seen the teenage products of parents who spent years giving in; it’s not a pretty sight.

Shoot, I’ve seen the 8 year old products of parents who use the classic ineffective parenting techniques of “give in if it’s an easy fix,” “bribe if you need to,” “avoid the bad thing by any means necessary,” and so on. Hint: they’re not easy kids to work with. Giving in or choosing your battles might be easy now, but it’s not parenting and it fails your child.

Only bad teachers water down curriculum (do you?)

January 21, 2011 in PSAs with 0 Comments

Martial arts seems to lose another piece of its soul as each year passes.

It’s no secret that standards are being conveniently overlooked, history forgotten, and the meaning of Black Belt traded away little by little. And in the process, students are being neglected the opportunity to experience the amazing aspects of martial arts that used to allure.

My analysis? The bad teachers are responsible.

It seems like such a simple statement, but I want to sit with it for a minute because it has more insight to offer than you may realize at first glance.

Too difficult? Dumb it down!

It’s no secret that free sparring tends to be one of the leading reasons for low retention in martial arts schools. People just don’t like getting kicked and punched and they quickly decide that “this martial arts thing” is not for them.

Instructors and owners have caught on and severely limited free sparring or removed it all together from their curriculum.

The end result is that there are now thousands of martial arts schools across the country that have no free sparring component in their curriculum and thousands of Black Belts have been awarded to students who have never participated in a single sparring match.

Another area I’ve noticed losing a little tradition is board breaking. A quick YouTube search reveals that students at many martial arts schools no longer have to break real boards. The board breaking component is still there, but I saw a Black Belt test where the student was breaking the ultra-thin demo boards my four year olds break instead of the real ones.

And apparently, someone somewhere decided that to retain kids in martial arts, you have to play games for 20 minutes every class.

Students across the board are doing fewer pushups, practicing easier techniques, and memorizing fewer forms. Curriculums are getting thinner and students engage in less physical contact. Yet they’re being awarded more stripes, stars, and belts and achieving the rank of Black Belt faster than ever before.

Today’s martial arts schools, students, and standards share no resemblance to the schools, students, and standards of old. This isn’t a knock on change, it’s a knock on the fact that the change wasn’t for the better.

What happened?

Money is an obvious motive, but I’d argue the problem goes well beyond that. The buck stops with bad, ineffective teachers.

Bad teachers water down curriculum because they have no solution for guiding their students through difficult areas of training.

It doesn’t take any teaching ability to give a belt to a student who doesn’t deserve it in order to retain them (keep them from dropping out). A good instructor, on the other hand, has the skill and patience to sit down with the student, motivate them, and inspire them.

It’s easy to remove psychologically and physically challenging aspects of your curriculum (like sparring and board breaking) to avoid a higher drop out rate. It’s more difficult to build trust over time and navigate psychological barriers in order to lead less-confident students to success.

It’s simpler and more profitable to add belts to your rank system so students test more often and never have to display a respectable level of patience. It’s not so easy to teach them delayed gratification and long-term goal setting.

Martial arts training was designed to be difficult; to place obstacles before students in order to build character, strength, courage, and leadership through the conquering of those obstacles.

But sub-par, so-called teachers who lack the advanced skills required to help students navigate these obstacles have instead removed them altogether, effectively castrating the meaning and worth of their programs and doing lasting damage to the image of Black Belt and the profitability of schools across the globe.

Are you one of the good ones or one of the bad ones? Which do you want to be?

If you don’t have the skills required to do your job the right way, at least have the integrity to not spoil it for your students and the rest of us.

How to open a champagne bottle with a saber (and how it relates to teaching martial arts)

January 10, 2011 in PSAs with 0 Comments

Did you know you can open a champagne bottle with a saber?

My first question was: why would you ever want to do that?

The obvious answer is: because it’s freakin’ cool dude!

And that’s the problem.

Watch the video. The guy is indeed successful and the technique is repeatable. But you lose half the bottle and 1/3 of the champagne in the process. And it looks dangerous. The cost/benefit ratio is unbalanced toward the you’re an idiot side.

Yet, if you think about it, martial arts teachers have been doing this same type nonsense for the past few decades. We teach and market stuff that looks cool but has very little practical use. And our students suffer: they waste their money and live with a false sense of security.

Put the saber down and keep it real.

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