Category: mentality

The Emotional realm of any self defense encounter is where people are most often attacked first, many times without knowing it.

This manifests itself in the “gut feeling” one gets when in an uncomfortable or unfamiliar environment. Many times you’ll hear someone say, “I just have a bad feeling about this place” or words to that effect. This should be your first indicator to increase your awareness, for a bad situation will beget an emotion.

Often times you will feel a certain emotion before you formulate a clear thought about why a person, place or situation is cause for concern.

To experience the power of emotion, I invite you to try this simple exercise: ask a training partner, close friend, sibling, spouse, etc. to get right in your face, eye-to-eye, and hurl insults at you, screaming and staring intently into your eyes like a Drill Instructor. Even though you know in your mind this person is your friend and will never cause you harm, you will feel uncomfortable, your heart rate will increase, you will get fluttery. Continue reading

How many times have you practiced a certain skill but were unable to grasp it? The harder you tried, the harder it was to perform this skill, until finally you just didn’t care anymore, and then – BAM!  You performed the aforementioned skill flawlessly and with ease.

It seems that I had to re-learn this idea every time I learned a new skill in Wing Chun:  poon sau rolling, stepping, pak sau entries, keeping the wu sau hand up while moving in.  I could go on listing them but any more and I’d probably start weeping,  but you get the point.  Self defense has no room for ego or feelings of doubt or fear, yet self-defense training often involves extensive work in dealing with those topics.

The good news is that once I adopted the mentality of “I’m going to come in here, focus on each drill I’m doing at that moment, put the work in, and f**k it, I’ll get it when I get it,”  things became easier for me and my skills started to improve.

How does this work? Continue reading

No figure in the history of martial arts in America has been surrounded by as much controversy, myth, flamboyance and flat-out bullshit as the late John Keehan, also known as Count Dante. The self-proclaimed “Deadliest Man Alive,”  Keehan was once a respected sensei, undefeated tournament fighter and former Midwest Director of the United States Karate Association (USKA) and the one person responsible for entrenching the martial arts in Chicago and the Midwest during the early to mid-1960’s.

After parting ways with his instructor Robert Trias (the “Father of American Karate” who opened the first dojo in the USA in 1946) Keehan began promoting himself as the “Crown Prince of Death” and offered his booklet, World’s Deadliest Fighting Secrets, for sale in the back of comic books and bodybuilding magazines.

An absolute attention hound and fierce self-promoter, Keehan would walk his pet mountain lion down Continue reading

Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu is best known for his classic work on combat, The Art of War.  This book has to be up there with the Bible as one of the most often quoted or referenced books out there.

Every chapter in this simple little book contains gold nuggets of wisdom for damn near any subject involving any type of conflict with others, from relationships to banking-so much so in face, that so many people have lost touch with the fact that it was created as a guidebook to the mentality and mindset of life or death conflict and combat.

Of the many quotes that have been used, posted and hijacked by everyone looking to make an inspirational meme or poster on the internet, one of my favorites for training Wing Chun for combat, self defense and combat sports such as MMA or sparring goes like this: Continue reading