The Truth About the Martial Arts Business with John Graden

In this 13th episode, The Truth About the Martial Arts Business is that martial arts schools have to be responsible and careful of the intentions of their students.

Hi, I’m John Graden, we are in the middle of a massive disruption of law and order. Gun sales are through the roof, and Google searches for self-defense have spiked off the charts. People want to feel safe and secure.

Now that the pandemic has leveled off, anti-fa has taken over sections of big cities and is wreaking violent havoc on innocent Americans.

Undercover recordings of the terrorist group Anti-fa reveal them teaching their members how to gouge eyes, strike the liver and put innocent people into rear-naked chokes.

These are dangerous techniques taught by unscrupulous martial arts instructors who are teaching how to abuse and misuse these skills. That is in contrast to when Melody Shuman discovered that one of the pilots that flew into the World Trade center on 911 had trained in her school in the months leading up to the attack.

One year after 911, I interviewed new york city police commissioner Bernard Kerik. He was protecting Mayor Rudy Giuliani throughout that fateful day.

Mr Kerik is also a 5th-degree black belt and credits much of his success to his martial arts training. He also has an excellent biography describing his amazing story.

He lays out some guidelines for martial arts schools to look out for students who may be abusing their training. I conducted this interview in a hotel lobby in Orlando about a year after the attack.

Next, we often hear the Japanese word kaizen thrown around as a commitment to continuous improvement. Are we seeing kaizen in traditional schools?

AntiFa video teaching eye gouge to followers.

Books by Bernard Kerik

• From Jailer to Jailed
• The Lost Son
• The Grave Above the Grave

Books by John Graden

1. The Truth About the Martial Arts Business
2. Who Killed Walt Bone
3. The Impostor Syndrome

This week the truth about the martial arts business is that if you advertise and teach self-defense in your martial arts school, you better know what you're talking about. 

One steps, basics, and kata are NOT self-defense. They are stylized, formal representations, they are not directly applicable. 

If you are trying to pass off traditional martial arts as self-defense, you are deceiving the public and yourself.

People are NOT seeking  "secret techniques" buried in the bunkai of kata. Bunkai is bunk.

People need real self-defense from a credible source, not some traditional style that was created in a hut on a mountainside decades ago has never changed. In fact, to change the style is martial arts blasphemy. 

According to Google Trends, because of the pandemic and violent riots, searches for self-defense and self-defense training have skyrocketed just like gun sales have soared. That means people are scared and seeking self-defense training.

The single most important skillset you teach are the self-defense skills that may save a student's life. That's why it is so important for you to be able to verify the source and efficacy of the self-defense training that you advertise and teach.

The best source is law enforcement based. Not martial arts. Not military. Law enforcement engages in street fights and confront violent criminals every day. Most military members never engage in a physical fight.

Most martial arts teach outdated skills that were created decades ago without the advantage of video or networking. They had to hide their training, which severely limited any opportunity to collaborate, review, and update the skills. 

In fact, most traditional martial arts take pride in NEVER CHANGING. That is brainwashing pure and simple. To resist upgrading your self-defense skills to honor a style or style creator is a self-imposed ceiling to growth and improvement. You just get better at useless skills.

Self-defense can save students' lives. To teach anything but the most current law enforcement skills is professional neglect that could cost your students' life. 

In this special episode, you're going to listen in on COBRA-Defense founder Chris Sutton teaching adult students in the COBRA ten-week academy, and then you'll hear him teaching COBRA licensees how to teach Cobra to their students.

I'll pop in on occasion to set the scene. These clips come from a variety of sources, so the audio can be a bit spotty at times, but the content is pure gold.

The audience for the first 15-minutes is a class of adults who paid $399 for a Cobra-Defense academy that meets twice a week for 10 weeks.

MartialArtsTeachers.com

JohnGraden.com

MATACertification.com

MATAInsurance.com

SelfDefenseBusiness.com (COBRA-Defense)

What martial arts schools are going to survive in your area? You can be sure, not all of them.

1. What’s going to drive that? Supply and demand.

2. There will be fewer schools to choose from. Make sure you ARE one of them.

3. There will be less demand for traditional training. Make sure you’re NOT depending on it.

Why? Traditional training simply takes too long and is more difficult than it needs to be.

Most people will no longer want to pay a premium for a traditional curriculum full of out-dated and senseless movements. That doesn’t mean there won’t be interest in martial arts and self-defense, but it needs to be FAT-FREE.

We’re NOT talking MMA. Any school that emphasizes grappling is faced with a massive wall during this hyper-vigilant social distancing season.

The ideal curriculum ONLY teaches the best from martial arts, kickboxing, self-defense, weapons, and grappling (when ready). It is time to eliminate the smoke and mirrors of traditional training.

How would your martial arts skills work for you as a maximum-security prison guard, street cop, or county sheriff?

Joe Lewis black belt Chris Sutton has trained in nearly a dozen different martial arts styles and he also held each one of those jobs. His first fight with an inmate was over a single Reeses Cup™. Find out if his martial arts training helped or hindered him.

Also, learn how the Police Academy 10-week training program compared to his martial arts training.

Here are more show notes from this fascinating interview with Chris Sutton.

Websites:

SelfDefenseBusiness.com

MartialArtsTeachers.com

EmpowerKickboxing.com

JohnGraden.com

:38 Corrections officer

:40 Care, custody, and control of some of the worst criminals in the world

1:05 Law enforcement boot camp for felons

1:40 Maximum Security Prison Guard

1:43 Street cop

1: 50 Talking to crime victims

2:00 Capturing criminals

2:10 What they will kill you for

2:30 Did martial arts help or hinder your job?

2:40 Gets into a fight over Reeses Cup

3:10 Inmate gets knocked out

3:35 Chris went to 13 different public schools in Tampa Bay as a kid

3:48 Using martial arts against violent criminals

3:58 Feelings during a real fight

4:25 Cobra was developed to be market-friendly, easy to learn with maximum impact

4:40 What you learn in the Police Academy

4:44 Why does it take 4-5 years to earn a black belt yet Police Academy graduates go straight to the streets

4:50 What he created in COBRA

5:30 Why COBRA is designed for everyone to progress together

5:35 How he decides what to teach and include in the course

5:45 What is different about COBRA vs Krav Maga

6:52 If you need help today, who would you call to help market your self-defense program?

7:50 Companies that call COBRA for training

9:00 COBRA in contrast to what's out there

9:15 Living a life of quiet desperation not making money

9:30 How would you teach a real estate safety seminar

9:40 How COBRA tests programs before releasing them to members

10:30 What support COBRA provides for instructors

11:00 What a new member gets when they join COBRA

11:30 Do you need a school to teach COBRA

12:00 How to create income 24 hours a day

12:10 What succeeds at COBRA and who tends to fail

13:30 The income potential for COBRA

14:00 The difference between selling yourself vs selling your program

15:10 Some COBRA success stories

16:00 The house that COBRA built

16:16 You don't need to attend a COBRA certification seminar

17:15 The importance of following the COBRA system

MartialArtsTeachers.com

JohnGraden.com

MATACertification.com

MATAInsurance.com

SelfDefenseBusiness.com (COBRA-Defense)

Mike Anderson is one of the most unheralded pioneers of sport karate and kickboxing around the world.

In 1973, he forever changed the sport of point karate by being the first promoter to require competitors to wear safety gear.

In 1974, he created the professional karate association (PKA) and hosted the first PKA World Championships in Los Angeles. The event was  broadcast as an ABC Special and it was one of the highest-rated shows of the year. 

The event audience was full of stars from movies and TV. They all saw Joe Lewis, Bill Wallace, Jeff Smith, and Isais Duenas as the first PKA World Champions. That show catapulted them into the sports first superstars.

After the show's huge success, Mike sold his shares in the PKA to his partners Don and Judy Quine for one dollar.

He then traveled to Germany to form the World Association of Kickboxing Organizations or WAKO with his friend and student George Bruckner from Berlin.

Over the course of the next few weeks, you're going to learn the stuff behind the stuff. Not only will you learn what famous black belts were hired by Mike to run secret CIA operations in Iran, why he sold the PKA for a dollar after its highly successful debut. 

Mike has a 155 IQ. He speaks five languages and has lived a life straight out of a James Bond book.

He has been one of my best friends since the mid-70s as I described in my book, Who Killed Walt Bone.

After part 1 of my Mike Anderson series, you'll get your Teach Like a Pro teaching tip of the week straight from the MATA Certification program at MATACertification.com.

Quick warning, the audio on this interview with Mike could be better, but it's a question of style vs substance. The substance is so strong, a little warbling in the audio is not an issue.

If the COVID-19 shut down ends in time for martial arts schools to run summer camps, here is a podcast that will help you to plan, promote, and profit from a successful martial arts summer camp.

This interview was conducted in Jim King's school in Altamonte Springs, FL. There is some background noise because it is a very busy school.

NOTE: This was recorded in 2017.

Summer Camp with Jim King

:15 Three strategies to recover.

 1:00 Why summer camp.

1:30 Resources for summer camp info.

1:45 Jim King intro.

1:50 Hardcore traditional karate based.

2:00 Jim has 156 students in his asp.

2:45 Jim shares his numbers.

3:40 How a martial arts summer camp feeds martial arts after school programs.

7:45 Define martial arts summer camp.

8:40 What should martial arts school owners do starting in April?

13:40 Structure of each day.

20:00 Transportation.

24:30 Field Trips.

Live Jim King Info Call

Teach Like a Pro Tip of the Week:

Name, Question or Question, Name?

Imagine if you are on national TV with millions of people watching. The reporter says, "Our next guest says he is a self-defense expert."

He turns to you and asks, "What qualifies you as a self-defense instructor. I mean, this is a serious subject. Why should we listen to you?"

What would you say? 

In this episode, we pose that question to COBRA-Defense founder Chris Sutton and learned his unique analogy and rock-solid advice for anyone in the self-defense or martial arts business.

• Learn the difference between a real self-defense lesson and a martial arts self-defense lesson.
• What is the best way to reduce the learning curve?
• The time that police officer Sutton shot a guy in the head who then shot a child.
• Why foul language, embarrassing students, and even hurting them is not necessary for a self-defense class.
• How an "attention diversion drill" can make a parent cry watching his or her child.
• How to give students instant value and reprogram their mind before they ever learn a physical move.
• What is missing from martial arts that COBRA has?
• How martial arts respond to the question, "Who are you training your students for?"
• How to describe what you offer to prospects
• The difference between military and law enforcement training
• What is Killer School?
• What three brothers have left footprints on Chris's head?
• Why would Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines need active shooter training?

Links

MartialArtsTeachers.com

SelfDefenseBusiness.com

MATAPodcast.com

MATACertification.com

Our guest today is one my mentors and the mentor to thousands, Mr Brian Tracy. Brian is not only one of the world's leading motivational speaker and sales coach, he is a black belt and a contributing author to the MATA Instructor Certification program at MATACertification.com

After the interview, our Teach Like a Pro Tip of the Week for martial arts instructors is on How to Correct Skills in the classroom.

Please be sure to subscribe, share with your friends and post a review. You can also submit a comment, request, or suggestion by clicking the Ask Mr Graden Anything button in the show notes below or at MartialArtsTeachers.com

• Why curriculum is critical to the sales process
• Holding on to old methods and old ways that don't get you results
• Martial arts teachers become convinced that these are the only ways there are because they are the only ways they know.
• Martial arts instructors rule-Anything Worth Learning Is Worth Doing Poorly at First.
• The key to successful teaching in a Martial Arts School is that the students must like the instructor
• The key to running a successful Martial Arts School is referral by happy students

005: With the coronavirus pandemic blanketing the world, many martial arts school owners can’t conduct group classes for at least the next month or two.

This creates beehive of complexity and questions. Our guest, The Lease Coach, gives us the answers.

004: Our guest today is one my mentors and the mentor to thousands, Mr Brian Tracy.

Brian is not only one of the world's leading motivational speaker and sales coach, he is a martial artist and a contributing author to the MATA Instructor Certification program at MATACertification.com

In this episode, he shares the key mental strategies to sell martial arts and the common mistake black belts make in marketing their school. He also tells you how to destroy your credibility and the importance of getting each class right with a mixture of what is taught and how it's taught. 

After the interview, our Teach Like a Pro Tip of the Week is on Classroom Pacing.

Please be sure to subscribe, share with your friends and post a review. You can also submit a comment, request, or suggestion by clicking the Ask Mr Graden Anything button in the show notes below

Show Highlights

• Why curriculum is critical to the sales process
• the danger of focusing on self-esteem in the marital arts classroom
• What adults want in martial arts
• What adults won't tell you (I need confidence)
• MATA goals to dramatically increase the number of people learning martial arts
• Black Belt Eyes
• How to go from black belt eyes to marketing eyes.
• How to destroy your credibility
• The combination of what is taught and how it's taught
• What adults want in class
• Intense, vigorous classes are best
• You have to work students hard to release endomorphines
• Associate the class with a hit of endomorphine