16/02/2026
2026 is the year of the Fire Horse. What a fitting year for the Chinese Martial Arts and Health Centre Australia to be celebrating its 20th anniversary. That’s right, 20 years ago, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, we made the commitment to open an Australian branch of the Chinese Martial Arts and Health Centre here in Toowoomba, teaching the venerable and powerful Chang Hong system of traditional Chinese martial arts. Over these past 20 years we have faced many hardships, setbacks and challenges. Personal challenges, injuries and setbacks aside, small-town regional Australia is not a very forgiving environment in which to open a traditional martial arts school. The people here are salt-of-the-earth and have many great qualities, but open-mindedness is not one of them. Luxury big-city perspectives are far more accepting of new things. Martial arts schools open and shut down frequently around here on the doorstep of the Outback. The bush is unforgiving. The hardships that we faced over the years have run the entire gamut. From the occasional egotistical clown walking into a class to challenge our fighting abilities (confident in the “fact” that traditional martial arts are no good) only to get themselves knocked around or sent to ground in confused disgrace, all the way up to people in positions of power who attempted to abuse their authority to discredit and malign us only to be brutally overturned and embarrassed on the battleground of open public discourse. We’ve been fighting all this time. We’ve been in the trenches. And sometimes it’s hard to see the results of your efforts when the hardships loom so large in your field of view. But this is a year to celebrate the undeniable fact that WE’RE STILL HERE! All those detractors who tried to kick us when we were down can stick that bitter w**d into their pipes and collectively smoke it, LOL. But, in a very fundamental way, we have made a difference beyond just existing. Our research is slowly making waves and changing perspectives. The relevance and hidden power of traditional Chang Hong is now a scientifically irrefutable fact. It is as irrefutable as the continued existence of the CMAHCA in the face of the nay-sayers, quiet backstabbers and smiling assassins. This screenshot shows how the scientific research that we have been conducting is slowly changing what is revealed by performing an AI search on the role of intra-abdominal pressure in martial arts. When we embarked on this research journey, the sports-science textbooks were literally at odds with what I said I could physically do. I even remember in the early days telling Sherri’s supervisor what I knew I could do and how it was at odds with the texts. I remember him responding dismissively with something like: “Well, we’ll just have to see what the results show.” To his credit, he became a true believer after seeing the results first-hand. It’s been a fight. Indeed, it has. But that’s what we do here. We fight. Time to pick up our new weapons, freshly hardened and tempered in the furnace of peer-reviewed scientific journals, and charge into the future with renewed vigour.
