Welcome to first part of the 2021 end of year podcast! I’ve answered as many of your questions as I can on a wide range of topics! Thanks to everyone who submitted them!

Bob is my co-host for these ones (it does not go well!) and this year we have a single sponsor! If you are new to this silliness, you’ll quickly understand!

This part covers the Self-Defense, Kata and Bunkai questions!

Part 2 covers Training and General Karate Questions.

Part 3 covers Teaching and Miscellaneous questions.

Thanks for all your support in 2021!

All the best,

Iain

In this podcast I talk with Jesse Enkamp! We recorded this impromptu conversation at the Karate Nerd Experience in Sweden in 2019. Jesse and I had just finished recorded some YouTube videos together and Jesse suggested doing a podcast. I said that I didn’t have my recoding equipment and Jesse suggested using the voice recording function on my phone … which worked incredibly well!

With no plan, we sat down in the reception of the venue, hit record, and had the conversation you are about to hear! I thoroughly enjoyed our chat, and we covered a wide range of topics! The key theme that seemed to develop was the benefits of taking a broad approach to karate. We also cover improving kata, bunkai, self-defence, training methods, karate’s evolution, shuhari, and loads more!

In this podcast I chat with Dan Trailescu (Aikidoka and Reality Based Self-Defence Instructor). It’s a great conversation and I am sure you will enjoy it! Dan has 15 years of martial arts experience, focused on Aikido and reality-based self-defence. He teaches communication, conflict resolution, and self-defence to university students, martial artists and business professionals. He holds a 3rd degree black belt in Aikido and is a certified instructor for Conflict Communications. He also has a postgraduate degree in Counselling Studies, with a focus on the psychology of self-defence instruction, and runs Luceo Training Ltd, a communication skills training company, as well as harmandharmony.com, a website dedicated to practical martial arts training.

PART 2: In this podcast Randy Brown (Mantis Boxing & BJJ Coach) and I talk about the evolution of traditional martial arts, the role of forms, martial arts dogma, pseudo-history vs real history, and a whole host of other topics!

For quite some time, people had been telling me that I should talk to Randy because our approaches had much in common. Apparently, Randy was getting told the same. It turns out people were right! We originally planned to chat for around 1 hour, but after 2.5 hours we were still going strong (which is why I have split this podcast into three parts!).