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How to Use Ground Fighting to Stay OFF the Ground and Why
On the street – 80-90% of all fights end up on the ground. This is enough awareness to make the case for learning to fight on the ground and it is the fuel behind the cage fighting craze.
The Gracie family started the UFC and dominated the cage fighting arena by having a training background in [...] -
How to Defend Yourself from a Grab
There are a variety of reasons to take a martial arts class – but one of the most frequent is to learn the art of self-defense. Even with all of the self-discipline you learn, being able to defend yourself can build up a great deal of self-confidence that doesn’t come through reading about martial [...]
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How to Fix Your Martial Arts Woes – And Where!
You’ve heard it said before. “If you want to learn to speak German, there’s no better place to be on the Earth than Germany.” Why do so many people say this? Because it’s true! If you want to get fully immersed in a new skill, it’s often simple smarts that tell [...]
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How to Condition Train for Martial Arts
One of the great advantages to taking a martial arts class is that it boosts your discipline and gives you an excuse to stay in shape. After all, you can’t spar at your highest level unless you’re breathing easily and your weight isn’t dragging you down. But for the more advanced sparring enthusiasts [...]
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What Makes Karate Karate?
Many of us have heard of martial arts films. We’ve seen them, we’ve heard of fighting styles like karate, kung fu, and tae kwon do. However, if we were ever asked to differentiate between the styles, how many of us in the west would really know how? We throw out the term [...]
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The Karate Primer: Understanding the Goals of Karate
If you’ve ever seen a movie fight sequence, there’s a good chance you already know what the public perception of “karate” looks like. A hand chop here, a punch and block there; essentially, it looks like choreographed dancing. But in reality, Karate is more than fighting well enough that you look good; it’s about [...]
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What is Grappling, and Is It a Martial Art?
Have you ever heard of “grappling” before? Okay, you’ve heard it in the title to this article, but if you’re not very exposed to the world of mixed martial arts, there’s a good chance you might not have heard of grappling. Grappling is a specific discipline and method of exercise that can be [...]
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How to Use Your Body Weight in Martial Arts
Understanding martial arts can often feel like a study in physics – understanding leverage, force, momentum, and yes, body weight, can make the difference between someone who knows his stuff and someone who’s destined to stay at white belt forever. If you’re a Newtonian at heart (Force = mass times acceleration), then this article [...]
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Four Tips for Better Karate Footwork
Whenever you’re engaged in any activity that involves your own movement, it goes without saying that your footwork is absolutely vital. Good footwork keeps you quick, grounded, mobile, agile, and ready to adapt to different situations. Bad footwork will mean you’re susceptible to quick attacks and won’t have the leverage to hold your [...]
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The History of Tae Kwon Do
The term “Tae Kwon Do” loosely translates as “the art of punching and kicking,” or, in martial arts terms, “striking.” Remember that in martial arts, there is not only one way to fight: many people view martial arts as being limited to karate chops and wood-breaking. But when it comes to a [...]
