Truth in Martial Arts!
Pretty fast, if it wasn’t for progress.
What progress?
Well, Chuck Norris got his black belt in a year and a half.
Mike Stone, who many considered the best karate fighter in the world, got his in about seven months.
Of course this was back in the sixties, before…progress.
The progress I am speaking of was the Tracey Brothers.
The Tracey Brothers are responsible for the spread of karate (Kenpo) throughout the United States. I believe they had over a thousand schools.
But with that expansion came certain business decisions that weren’t always the best.
For instance, people came in, signed up for Kenpo karate, then left. It was a struggle to keep students. Their solution was to hire a fellow from the Arthur Murray Dance Studios to write up contracts for them. The contracts tended to keep students from leaving, and they were designed for four years. The length of a car contract at the time, which led to many referring to these contracts as ‘car contracts.’
The system was expanded to eight belt levels to black belt, and the number of techniques was expanded to 40 techniques per belt. Teaching the student a technique or two a week took about four years. Thus, it now took four years to get to black belt, instead of a year. So the reason it takes so long is rooted in the greed need for money, not for any reasons having to do with quality or how long it takes a person to ‘mature’ as a martial artist.
To be honest, there were some truly good martial artist back then. For the instructors were not far removed from the original Asian teachings. But, as time went on, and instructors no longer spent their lives learning, but could absorb a system in four years, and then go start their own school, the quality of instruction, and the the quality of the resulting students, tended to fall badly.
I was very fortunate. My instructor was taught by the original Asian instructors, fellows who spent their lives in the martial arts, fellows like Mas Oyama, who could kill bulls with a single chop.
And, as time went on and I saw the quality of the martial arts falling, I focused on the arts and techniques from before the four year contracts. That’s how I came up with the concept of Matrixing, the idea of organizing the martial arts with logic. The idea that a fellow could earn a black belt in a year, or less.
My idea was successful, so successful that I have over 700 pages of wins, of testimonials to the efficiency of my matrixing methods. You can read a few of them on the lower right hand column of the home page of MonsterMartialArts.com. Or you can read a bunch of them here…http://monstermartialarts.com/testimonials/.
Of course I got attacked a lot for my ideas, people had invested a lot in four years and didn’t want me to speak ill of the ‘method’ that got them there. And, a lot of people think that they are right and I am wrong, simply because people have an aversion to learning anything new.
But, the proof is in the pudding. You should go to the testimonial page and do a search for your art. There’s a chance somebody who studied your art got enlightened by my matrixing methods.
Well, that’s about it for this newsletter, you guys and gals have a great work out, and may the Matrix be with you.
Al
PS ~ A little treat, here’s the real way to do the second technique from Pinan/Heian one.
Learn the right way, the matrixed way, to do your martial arts, and you will end up chuckling at some of the so called ‘masters.’
A Caution: When you order one of my courses, all my videos are on Youtube. They should stay up there forever. EXCEPT, sometimes Youtube says ‘This video is no longer there!’ But it is.
If a link doesn’t work, try copy and paste.
If C and P doesn’t work, try a different browser.
If a different browser doesn’t work, try a different computer.
If a different computer doesn’t work, just try loading it a few times. (This is the method that worked best for me.)
If all else fails, write me at aganzul@gmail.com.
Have you read Insanica?
