Join World Combat Association Instructor, INKKS co-founder, and internationally recognized practical karate expert, Noah Legel, Renshi, for a bunkai seminar on the kata Wansu in Roanoke, IL, on Jan. 25th 2025.
My thoughts on the false belief that legitimacy and popularity are related in martial arts, using KishimotoDi as an example.
On Saturday, June 1st, 2024, I taught a webinar for the International Neoclassical Karate Kobudo Society (INKKS) on the first kata of the KishimotoDi system, Tachimura no Naihanchi. This style is at risk of dying out, with only a couple hundred practitioners, worldwide, and less than two dozen who know all four kata of the system, so it really fills […]
A review and testimonials of my recent seminar, Kakedameshi: The Original Kumite of Karate, hosted by Shorei Ryu Karate Studios of Bradley, IL.
The majority of karate schools, today, fall into two camps, both of which are almost entirely creations of Post-WW2 Japan: That said, there is a third camp that has been growing in popularity: I honestly don’t think I need to go into much detail on how the first two train, because they are so popular; they almost exclusively follow a […]
Bunkai (lit. “take apart, analyze”), in the context of karate, is the practice of breaking down kata and working on developing applications for their movements, but sometimes it can be hard for karateka to figure out how to apply kata movements on their own. This is compounded by the fact that many instructors still only teach basic “block-punch-kick” applications for […]
Learn how to spar using your kata through the practice of kakedameshi, the original kumite of karate!
Over the course of 2023, I have worked with several like-minded martial artists on the development of a style-agnostic organization for the development and promotion of effective, pragmatic, neoclassical karate and kobudo methods the world over. The vision is to have a non-profit organization that actively supports its members, providing training opportunities, educational materials, training modules, curriculum development, and more! […]
Elite Sports reached out to me, a while back, and was kind enough to send me one of their Bulgarian Bags, for free, to test out and review. This is a hojo undo kigu (supplementary training tool) that I have been interested in trying out for quite some time–and I even have a tire inner tube stashed away specifically for […]
Drills are a hallmark of martial arts training, the world over, regardless of art or style, and they come in many different forms, with different intentions. In general, though, how do we define what a “drill” is, and how do we know if they are any good?
Most karateka spend a great deal of time learning and practicing kata, which is fitting, given that the kata are templates for the curriculum of karate, but as the art has morphed into a tradition-based art over the past century, the way that people train and practice kata has changed. As recently as the mid-20th Century CE, kata were regularly taught differently to […]
Most martial artists have seen the so-called “Wing Chun dummy,” which is actually called a muk yan jong in Cantonese, or mu ren zhuang in Mandarin, meaning “wooden man post.” This training tool was widely popularized by Bruce Lee and, more recently, the Ip Man series of movies, starting Donnie Yen. While these dummies were developed for Chinese martial arts, […]
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