100 Lessons

As a martial arts consumer advocate, I offer all martial arts instructors the following challenge: what are you teaching your students in the first 100 lessons that is going to help them in a fight for the rest of their lives? Because believe me, that is the ONLY reason why they walked in the doors to your school in the first place.* They were:

• NOT looking for a new "lifestyle."
• NOT looking for a way to spend their free time which they figured they had too much of.
• NOT looking for a way to spend their money which they figured they had too much of.
• NOT looking for a life long commitment to a new art to perfect.

They were willing to train hard to learn how to fight, and it's very unlikely they intended to spend more than a year doing it. It is also very unlikely they were planning to train more than twice a week. For YOU to make good on YOUR promise of teaching "Martial Arts", you have 50 weeks x 2 lessons = 100 lessons to make your teaching worth while.*

But YOU devoted YOUR life to the martial arts, and have so much to share! Cool story bro, not what the customer hand in mind when they walked in the door. If YOU can't provide SERIOUS customer value in the first 100 lessons, you shouldn't be wasting new student's time and money.*

Before you start raging about how I am not bowing to my betters here*, let me give you a few examples of martial arts that most definitely will permanently improve a student's odds of surviving a fight inside of 100 lessons:

1. Collegiate wrestling: in 100 lessons they might not win any matches at any tournaments, but for the rest of their lives they will have a few basic tools and strategies that will make them devastating against someone their size and weight, all other things being equal.
2. Same goes for Boxing: Almost nothing can prevent someone from learning a few very useful combos and footwork combined with serious sparring experience to back it up with in 100 boxing lessons. The vast majority of potential attackers will be dropped by a jab-straight combo, for the rest of the student's lives, and they'll never forget how to do it.

That is how useful your martial arts teachings need to be in the first 100 lessons. One of the best martial arts in the first 100 lessons is traditional Muay Thai. Muay Thai in the first 100 lessons will cover:

• Kicks to the leg, attacking and defending.
• Really amazing options for what to do when someone tries to grab you on the street.
• Attacking and defending punches and elbows to the head.
• Footwork.
• A few basic throws and foot sweeps that are very practical. 
• The safe, continuous, hands-on sparring to back this all up with.

And here I will offer unsolicited advice to grappling instructors: position before submission, right? The concept behind wrestling, the mantra of BJJ! I didn't start learning ground fighting until around the time I turned 40, and I can tell you for sure that many grappling instructors forget exactly how important "position before submission" is to beginners:

• Why teach me a straight arm bar if I don't know how to sprawl first?
• Why teach me teach me how to get a wizard grip if I can't even land a single take down in sparring?
• Why work on a kimura if I can't even do a side control escape?
• Why get into transitioning from an arm bar in guard to a triangle in guard if I don't even have an "around the world" drill down, with no understanding of dominant position theory?

The fact is "position before submission" is something far more important to the first 100 lessons than most grappling instructors seem to grasp.*

Now we get into less established martial arts. Judo is arguably the most deadly martial art of all time, but it is notoriously bad at teaching self defense in the first 100 lessons. More exotic Olympic martial arts fare far worse: fencers and karateka will learn virtually nothing of self defense value in their first 100 lessons. Olympic Style Tae Kwon Do fares better, but not by much. In the first 100 days, none of these less established Olympic Martial Arts holds a candle to Collegiate Wrestling, Boxing, or Muay Thai in the first 100 lessons.*

Then we get into the theoretical martial arts, like Systema, Wing Chun, Aikido, Tai Chi (my personal favorite martial art), and Silat. These martial arts have a particular burden of proof, so notorious they have been for not developing any actionable fighting skill at all. There are definitely exceptions: in all theoretical martial arts there seem to be people who are serious about and decent at fighting, but in all these arts these fighting instructors are rare. But to these rare saints of martial theory I propose: what are you doing to teach your students how to fight in the first 100 lessons?* (Update 2022... I taught this kid Yang style Tai Chi Saber well enough to fight with in less than 50 lessons...)

Then we have the truly great martial arts of hope: Kudo, Combat BJJ, Combat Sambo, MMA-lessons-at-MMA-gyms and sparring-oriented Kali. The promise is that from one point of view or another, you will be primed and ready to take on just about anyone who would dare to try to lay hands on you, teaching a very wide variety of self defense options, covering at least two of the three following ranges: grappling, striking, and weapons. But the question I have there is: with such a wide variety of techniques, how do you know any one student is mastering techniques well enough to be able to execute those techniques in an emergency? Does your art have enough focus for the student to master useful fighting techniques in just only 100 lessons?

*Yeah yeah yeah, I know, you can kick my ass, and blah blah blah, you already know every damned thing that there is to know about martial arts. Cool story bro. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to keep you from wasting a lot of time in your student's first 100 lessons.