Training methods: Principles over techniques.

The topic isn't exactly new, and we have had a long KarateTalk about it some years ago, but it is a discussion that pops up again and again. What does all the traditional martial arts stuff even mean in our modern world? Shouldn't we drop the whole philosophy and "deep background" of martial arts - […]

I remember times when the word “Winter” triggered mostly positive emotions: Snow (yay!), holidays, Christmas and baked apples. Today, there seems to be a certain feeling of doom and gloom connected to winter time, maybe partly due to my age, and surely thanks to the pandemic experience of the last years. Winter will be a […]

It has been more than two decades ago when I first started identifying an issue that became a defining topic for my work in the years since then. In the lack of a better term we called it "Entkörperung", back in the days in Germany, when we worked on the violence prevention concept that defined […]

The GLIMPSE series of martial arts knowledge grows. Here, Gary Bohm and Heero Miketta dive in the issue of fear and fear management from a martial arts perspective, but touching topics like conflicts, stress and anxiety as well.

Like with most things that you invest time to learn, you will fantasies/day dream of how good it will be when you reach your goal. This could be learning guitar or learning another language, and the fantasy of that could be playing with Eric Clapton or ordering in fluent Spanish to impress a girl/boy in […]

What can you expect from a self-defence course? You'll learn to use your body - your arms, legs, head - to efficiently fight yourself out of an attack. You learn about risk assessment, typical offender and victim behaviour, you find out how your body reacts to stress and you learn how to leave any threatening […]

The Mancunian Missing Link Karate dojos currently embark on a special venture: Bringing the highly developed Women's Self Defence concept of the German police to England. This raises an important question that we encountered in Germany more than two decades ago: What should be the content of a course like this - and what should […]

A look into our Knife awareness seminars in Manchester: Why Knife AWARENESS, not DEFENSE? Because knife defense techniques are most of the time madness. A knife is a dangerous weapon, and it should not be brought to any conflict, ever. There might be examples of successful defense against a knife, but none of them does […]

I always try to push my students beyond technique. Always trying to open pathways of understanding and giving them the possibility of understanding the underlying general principles, that will crack open, not just that technique, but all of them. The other day we were training a simple drill, where one person (the defender) lies face […]