My school, tkfmma, is very much “Doctor Recommended.” Every part of that statement is true. I purposely left out any details so that I could prove the point that context is the key to understanding. This exists as a perfect example of psychological manipulation and exploitation otherwise known as marketing.
I have a wide range of people that train at my school. Virtually every academic level is represented. Many of them have reached the top of educational achievement and have either a MD or PhD. I’m under two PhD grandmasters, one in Education and the other in Business.
Over many years we have been trained by businesses to believe that the phrase, “Doctor Recommended,” only refers to medical doctors. People automatically assume the context without trying to get more information. This is dangerous because forming an opinion based on little to no knowledge is prejudice. You also can’t accurately defend yourself against something if you don’t know what that something is.
In a world where words are so important, few know how to define them and even fewer know the context around them. The English language is absolutely terrible. I know because I speak it! Half of all martial arts is pretty much learning the names. The human body can only move in so many ways but there’s a plethora of different names for each movement! What’s just as bad is when they go the other way.
People that would never judge another by the color of their skin will totally judge someone by the color of the belt around their waist. People will never judge another that came from a different country but they will totally judge someone that came from a different martial art. It’s the same verbs with different nouns. It’s still prejudice and still wrong.
Most have an inability to correctly self-assess and can’t understand how something could be both correct and incorrect at the same time. The difference between the two is context. The “Doctor Recommended” statement is prime example of something that is fundamentally correct and also incorrect based on the context commonly associated with the phrase.
I’ve done the same thing in my bio by stating that I’m a “full time professional mixed martial artist.” Nothing about that statement is false yet people assume that I’m a cage fighter. To break it down, in my state full time is anything 30 hours or more, which I get with just teaching. Professional simple means that I get paid to do what I do. Finally, I couldn’t be more mixed as a martial artist! Just read my bio. Despite this, people think that only cage fighters can be professional mixed martial artists. I’ve even gotten hate mail about it! Granted, it’s all from people in the martial arts industry. This supports my theory that only people in the industry care about the industry and have probably been hit in the head too much.
Knowledge is power and power is control. The easiest way to control someone is to keep them ignorant. To learn as much as possible is to truly defend yourself. At tkfmma, I don’t just teach people to just defend against an attacker. I also teach them to defend against the legal system, against businesses exploiting them, and against a for-profit 4 trillion-dollar industry that makes money off you being unhealthy. That’s why I’m Doctor Recommend!
Malcolm Gladwell created the 10,000 hour rule with the theory that excellence in any skill requires 10,000 hours of practice. In most areas of life this is the norm. If you do the math, 40 hours a week for 50 weeks in one year would be 2,000 hours. After 5 years you have 10,000 hours, you have excellence.
Sadly, this is absent from the martial arts industry. Almost nobody does martial arts 40 hours each week. Even fewer teach that much. When I first started, I noticed that none of my instructors taught with any frequency. I believed that it was just an inherent thing in all martial arts. Then I began to question it with the thought that just because I’ve never seen it done, doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.
Little by little I added classes to my schedule and learned how to do them efficiently. I came to the understanding that most of the instructors in my industry, despite being great martial artists, have no idea how to actually teach. I ended up using teaching practices from outside the industry and really learning how people learn and how to effectively communicate information to them.
10,000 hours was a big deal for me. I felt like my students deserved excellence and that I shouldn’t ask it of them if I wasn’t trying for it myself. It is a goal that few people will get and even fewer will ever try. It took me 12 years, 6 months, 3 weeks, and 1 day to achieve. That’s an average of about 800 hours a year, 66.7 hours a month, 15 hours a week, or 2.2 hours a day. It’s the same as having taught 4 hours a week for a little over 48 years. While working towards 10,000 hours, I taught 6 classes in one day 95 times and 7 classes in a day 12 times. This was also on top of my own training and working out.
I’m not some athletic physical specimen of peak conditioning. If I can do this, then there’s no reason why anyone in the martial arts industry can’t. Often the first person to tell you that you can’t do something is you! The second is probably physics. You can do anything any other person can as long as you try hard enough. Afterall, isn’t that the very definition of Kung Fu.
The Youth Classes
The Fitness Classes
Subcategories
