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.

Martial Elements

From my consumer advocacy POV, I see martial arts as having 6 elements of training: Conditioning, Kata, Focused Sparring, Basic Sparring, Advanced Sparring and Fighting. Here I am going to give examples of each from Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ,) Muay Thai and other martial arts.


Conditioning: are exercises considered to be critical to the martial art, but which do not have exact martial application. For example, jumping rope is almost universal in Muay Thai:

In some martial arts the standing shoulder roll is actually meant to be used to pick up weapons on the ground, or to roll out of a throw back on to your feet free back into striking or fleeing range, but BJJ isn't focused on weapons, or escaping grappling range. Yes there are BJJ techniques that use motions very similar to the standing shoulder roll, just as there are Muay Thai techniques that could be seen as similar to jump roping. Yet most BJJ classes I have seen train newbies to do a standing shoulder roll as part of the conditioning part of their class:

Before we get into kata, notice that some martial arts have mediation, stretching or dance exercises without a lot of clear martial arts moves denoted. These should be considered conditioning exercises rather than considered kata:

In Tai Chi and other traditional martial arts, horse-stance mediation is clearly in the category of conditioning, with no viable combat application to the exercise what so ever:

There is a lot of debate out there and yet to be had about what types of conditioning are the most effective, but everyone who knows what they are talking about agrees that conditioning is important for martial arts proficiency.


Kata: are exercises that explain the theory behind how the specific martial arts moves are supposed to work. They may or may not be good conditioning, but the point is to further perfect the ideal version of the technique. An example of Kata in Muay Thai is working with Thai Pads:

The "around the world" drill is common in BJJ, and is an example of Kata in BJJ:

Not all traditional martial arts dances are strictly conditioning, some are also legitimate kata:

(Before we go on to focused sparring, notice that the word "drills" could mean all sorts of things, including any of these kata exercises. One popular phrase is "drills with resistance," meaning that some how you are doing kata, but someone is making it hard for you to do that kata. The people who coined this phrase meant for kata to transition into what I call focused sparring... so a "drill" could refer to a kata practice or a focused sparring practice.)


Sparring: Sparring differs from Kata in that sparring moves past the theory and into what happens when you really attack someone. In sparring, neither side is taking turns, instead both sides are protecting themselves while also attacking.


Focused Sparring: focused sparring means to spar with a very narrow range of techniques, in order to practice and develop those very specific techniques. The best example is probably "positionals" from BJJ:

Here's an example of people training with Muay Thai technique using only kicks and no punches or elbows:

Something very important here is that sparring must focus on moves people would actually use in a fight, as demonstrated in kata. Sparring that does not resemble kata is conditioning, not sparring.

(Another phrase I often here that is similar is "technical sparring." Like "drilling with resistance," technical sparring means different things to different people, sometimes it refers to trying to spar safety, and other times it refers to what I call focused sparring, and sometimes it means other things all together.)


Free Sparring: free sparring is sparring, allowing the most of thed techniques in that martial art. Free sparring allows you to test your moves and strategy against someone who has a wide range of possibilities to stop you from succeeding. In free sparring we become fully prepared to take on someone in a fight. In BJJ this is called "rolling", and as I said before it doesn't involve much shoulder rolling:

Muay Thai is known for allowing a wide range of striking techniques, but sparring as safely as possible:

From a martial arts consumer advocacy POV, the genius of both Muay Thai and BJJ is that they: 1) have the widest possible range of techniques for what they are focusing on (grappling in the case of BJJ and striking in the case of Muay Thai,) while 2) also having the safest possible practices and culture around sparring. When it comes to the value of putting your time and money into martial arts training, it's hard to beat these two styles, largely because of their free sparring practices!


Basic Sparring: most free sparring martial arts have a safety form of free sparring that they do most often, which I call "Basic Sparring." In Muay Thai this might be "controlled contact, no elbows." In BJJ this might be "starting from the knees," free sparring without stand up take downs.

But taking an example from Kali, though they often spar using a wide range of punches and kicks, the majority of their sparring focuses on weapons only.  The stockier person in the following kali (basic) sparring video is a well known Muay Thai instructor in the Seattle Area:

In Tai Chi and some other traditional martial arts, "push hands" moves beyond conditioning and drills into the realm of sumo-like basic sparring:

Basic sparring is a safety oriented, frequently practiced type of free sparring that focuses on that martial arts most commonly used techniques.


Advanced Sparring: martial arts need to do free sparring with the full range of techniques they profess to teach, and this is what I call "Advanced Sparring." In Muay Thai if the intensity of the sparring goes beyond their normal safety oriented free sparring practice and includes elbow strikes in preparation for a professional bout, you are definitely looking at advanced sparring there. Likewise in BJJ if they are starting standing up and slapping each other around to show each other where they are vulnerable to strikes, you are seeing some advanced sparring in that art.

Following that first Kali example, he's an example of what I would call Kali advanced sparring, where they are incorporating more than weapon strikes in their sparring:

Back to Tai Chi sparring example, it is common for serious Tai Chi schools to fully apply their Tai Chi into Chinese Kickboxing (I myself learned most of the Tai Chi I know from the same person who taught me most of the kickboxing I know):

Fighting: is where we are showing ours skills against someone showing their skills, for the record. Practice time is over, and now in a fight it is time to go for it, 100%. In BJJ, this happens primarily in the form of tournaments:

In Muay Thai this happens in organized matches that where a fighter trains to fight another specific fighter usually for weeks before the two fighters have their confrontation:

There is a myth that in order to fight and train to fight that there has to be clear winners and losers, and that there must be a highly competitive spirit. An example of how this is not true is in Filipino Martial Arts there are sometimes Tipons (gatherings) where fighters show up for the express purpose of finding other fighters to duel. Once you step into the ring at a Tipon the object isn't so much to destroy your opponent as it is to survive the confrontation. This is my most physically painful Tipon fight I have had: