Greenville Academy of Martial Arts

06/02/2026

Karate headlock escape (for when the bully tries to take your lunch money)

06/01/2026

Karate Grab escape (in case you're attacked by a WWE Superstar i guess)

05/29/2026

16. When you step beyond your own gate you face a million enemies.

Another great chapter. Though I do feel the need to highlight that Nakasome's application is primarily about being risk averse while the quote itself seems more geared towards vigilance. There's a subtle distinction, though they're certainly related.

Nakasome's story is about a martial arts master who bows towards his shrine whenever he leaves his house. One day his student asks him what he's praying for and he answers that he's thanking the gods for keeping him safe from accidents like being kicked in the head by passing horses and so forth. And then he asks to be kept safe that day also.

The stusent initially thinks it's silly, then sees the wisdom in it upon reflection.

The story highlights an important aspect of warriorship and one related to principle 15 from yesterday and that is to be risk averse. We avoid unnecessary danger because, like John Lovel of Warrior Poet society says, we are easy to kill.

But when i read the initial principle, I dont see risk aversion so much as a call to vigilance. To be aware, to keep your head in a swivel, to look at people as you pass them and to look for threats indicators.

Certainly these two ideas go hand in hand. We're vigilant because we're risk averse, we exersize risk aversion by being vigilant.

This is in no way a critique, just something I wanted to highlight.

As far as being vigilant goes, there's a helpful color scale someone conceptualized.

White is "I'm safe." It's reserved for in your own home.

Yellow is "I'm aware" it is for any time you're outside your home (or if a stranger is in your house).

Orange is "there's a threat that im monitoring and I'm ready to act ." If someone is yelling, behaving erratically or approaching you aggressively, this is where you ought to be.

Red is engaging the threat. If you have to go from white to red ir yellow to red you're behind and at a serious disadvantage. Awareness is what keeps you from getting caught by surprise and trying to lay catchup.

Finally, black is when you freeze or panic. It's when you don't know what to do or are too afraid to do it. You dont want to be here. Training keeps you from getting here because you've done the thing you need to do in practice so you can slip into it in real life.

So while awareness can help you avoid threats, dealing with them takes Courage. And good awareness doesn't give you courage. Courage is bought with sweat and blood.

05/28/2026

15. Think of the opponent's hands and feet as swords.

I have no critique regarding funakoshi or Nakasome here. Excellent points about avoiding escalating conflict, respecting the capabilities of your oponent, even if they don't have training and not becoming arrogant about your own abilities. All martial artists should have this mindset.

A. We don't know when people do have knives
B. Everyone messes up at some point, even you.
C. Everyone gets lucky at some point, even them.
D. We should be polite and humble anyway.
E. Getting into unenssesary fights is emblematic of a lack of confidence and security.

05/27/2026

13. Make Adjustments according to your opponent
14. The outcome of a battle depends on how one handles emptiness and fullness (Weakness and Strength)

This section frustrates me. Nakasone spends the whole time expounding on battlefield strategy, but never drills down to how these two points apply to karate.
He does explain how to apply them to public speaking though. Which. I guess is nice.
You could generously apply what Musashi says about “from 1 thing know many,” But the problem is, that works well if you start small scale and generalize to large scale, it’s more difficult from large scale to small scale. Like speaking in generalities verses getting specific, or someone using a lot of abstractions but never concrete terms. Furthermore, if one is going to use battlefield analogies, they must be connected to the thing they analogies for.
For instance, Sensei Lindsey used battlefield tactics in his instructions a lot. But he said how they applied to the topic at hand. If he was explaining how to push the elbow and step on the foot to prevent the opponent from being able to use those limbs or the two limbs on the opposite side of the body that were now unable to get to you because of the position of their body, he would use the analogy of having 4 armies and the opponent having 4 armies and you use two armies to immobilize their 4 armies and now you still have 2 armies to attack them with.
LIkewise, when we talk about getting rid of a leader to demoralize their subordinates, we simply say we cut the head off the snake, no further explanation needed. So we see a small scale to large scale analogy makes intuitive sense, but a large scale to small scale analogy needs explanation.
So, how do we apply these to empty hand fighting?
Glad you asked.
13: Make adjustments according to your opponent.
Their range. If you have longer arms than your oppoent, keeping them at range is your best bet. Use a longer stance, use kicks to keep them away from you, uses evsive footwork to stay away from their hands and feet and take pot shots when available. When you do move in to engage and stop the threat, use a longer stance to keep your head out of their hands range while they are in your hand’s range. If you are shorter, the opposite is true. Use kicks to enter, taking thier balance and buying time to close the distance. Use evasive footwork to slip their punches and get inside their range. Once there, use a shorter stance so you can reach them and they don’t have a range advantage. Once you’re there, turn all your efforts into hurting them and keeping them off balance. If they get their range, grapple you or take the initiative back at all it could go badly for you so keep the initiative as best you can once you’re inside their range.
Their position. If, after your opponent’s first attack, you wind up on their closed side, keep working towards their back. If you wind up on their open side, either physically move them with grappling to make them step thus turning their open side into the closed side, or hurt them badly enough to buy you the time to cross their center and get to their back. SImilarly, if they have a guard with their hands close to their face and chest, try to push their wrists in to freeze it to their body and create openings on that side. If it's out or up too far, attack under it as their ribs are likely exposed.
Their height. If you are shorter than your opponent, you will likely need to attack their legs to create openings to their neck and eyes that are more difficult to reach.
Their weight. Larger, heavier opponents generate more power, so evasion because paramount. Furthermore, they have more “padding” so strikes to the body and ribs become less effective.
Their strength. Stronger opponents are usually not ones you want to grapple with.
Their agility/athleticism. Without specific martial training, a skilled athlete is still hard to make contact with. This is where the adage ‘there’s no first strike in karate’ comes from. Set traps and spring them while they attack if they’re faster than you. Smothering, grappling and attacking their foundation are all a benefit at this stage.
Their mentality/pain tolerance. Fighting an inebriated person, or anyone in an altered state of consciousness makes pain-inflicting techniques less effective, so dealing mechanical damage to limbs, joints eyes and airways becomes more important.
Their skill level. Better opponents can still be beaten, but it takes cheating, surprise, ferocity and luck. A sudden attack, executed violently might work, but there a risk involved. Using a weapon would work, but if the fight was previously empty hand and you escalated it to weapons, it had better be a nonlethal tool like pepper spray or your life was in danger. If your life isn’t in danger and you don’t have a good non-lethal it’s best to avoid weapons: you could find yourself liable in court or they could draw a weapon too. But at this point it sounds like you got into an ego battle with the wrong person and that’s on you buddy. Take your beating and be a wiser man tomorrow.
14. Emptiness and fullness. This is one of the more interesting points and I want to highlight the philosophical undergirdings before i address it. This is based on Yin and yang, a asytem of thought that divides pretty much everything into one of two categories. Empty, full; dark light; dead, living; etc. So the emptiness and fullness can have a lot of applications and interpretatiions because of that. As such, i’m not going to re-list everything i said about about stronger and bigger opponents, assume it applies here too.
Strikes create openings. The ‘fullness’ created by the strike entering your space creates an ‘emptiness’ in thier own. A target. Learn to strike under, over and around their attacks while simultaneously blocking or dodging and you will successful take advantage of the emptiness and fullness in thier attacks.
Power removes balance. When you project power in a direction you take away your own balance in the same direction. SImilarly, if you resist being pulling, your balance becomes vulverable in the opposite direction. Finally, if you throw someone, you are liable to be taken off balance in the same direction you throw them. See my previous post about stances for more. But knowing this, we caa learn to create ‘emptiness’ in our stances to project power. Turning a foot before attempting a throw, entering a wide or deep stance while grappling and pivoting into a punch are examples of this. All of this is necessary, but it can be leveraged–literally. If someone overcommits to a big strike, they’re stuck with that motion. A very skilled defender can throw them. But anyone can take a potshot at them, colliding with their incoming force. This is all based on the emptiness stances create in order to project power. A very stable, rooted stance–full–must be attacked to create inbalance–emptiness
You can create emptiness to draw out attacks. Stepping backward can make an aggressor step forward where your attack is waiting. Creating openings or perceived openings can likewise draw predictable attacks that can be countered. Because we only have 2 arms, we can’t cover every part of ourselves all the time, so our guards are what we do to create this emptiness. Learn to cover judiciously and leave openings where you want attacks to come to set up your counter.
Breathing and relaxation. Breathing in represents softness and out hardness. We should exhale upon strikes or when we’re thrown as being struck while inhaling can hurt us more if it’s to the body especially. Similarly, we should be relaxed at all times during a fight except the moment we strike an opponent where we ‘squeaze’ the attacking hand on contact.
In the end, the point made by nakatome is a salient one: be adaptable, don't be married to specific tactics, but change as the situation dictates. My gripe is that that wasn't all the two principles are saying by a long shot and he never really got around to telling us how to do that as an individual fighting with our empty hands.

05/19/2026

On Stance

There are three hallmarks of a good stance. They are stability, mobility and Power. Stability is the ability to not be moved, mobility to move if you want to and power the ability to move another. Sometimes, we sacrifice on of these in favor of another. It is a dangerous prospect to throw everything away for the sake of one thing only. The famous “Superman punch” seen in MMA comes to mind. And obviously we should never adopt a stance that restricts us in all three.

A bad foundation would fit into this second to last category. Giving everything up for the sake of one attribute of stance. Giving up everything for power would smack of the “Lunge punch.” A spawn of 20th century karate kickboxing where the step and punch found in kata was reinterpreted into diving forward into a single strike throwing caution to the wind, planning yourself in place and hoping the strike landed. The aforementioned superman punch employs a similar one legged stance.

One might point at Okinawan karate’s one-legged postures where practitioners spend time turning, double kicking or stepping from a position with one leg up. I would argue this doesn’t meet the parameter’s of ‘bad stance’ as the goal much of later karate training is to optimize stability while on one leg (where the superman punch gets your shoulders out over your knees making stability dependent on the opponent being hit in the face so as not to capitalize on your position), the one legged position is extremely mobile as to leg that’s up is already halfway to stepping in any direction and the method of coming up on one leg is often used specifically to generate power, such as in the Kata Chinto. Coming forward on one leg can drive a lot of power into the opponent, while staying mobile and the stability sacrifice being mitigated by the karate training that prepared one for such maneuvers.

Another blunder would be to sacrifice mobility and power for stability, creating a deep and wide stance that has foundation for days, but nothing can be done from it. An additional problem this creates is that it collapses under its own weight so to speak: a deep and wide stance is easily targeted by kicks, and often runs into a jack of all trades master of none situation. Where a front stance might be strong forward and backwards, but weak side to side, and a good horse stance with toes slightly inwards facing would be strong side to side and against pressure from the front it will cave if pushed from the rear. Meanwhile a wide stance with toes outwards face would cave if pushed from the front but its strengths also are better suited from the side and it can whether storms from being pulled from the front.

These all have areas they excel in and areas where they falter. This is because they’re stances designed for specialized situation, trading stability in one direction for power in the same. A jack of all trades stance however, would have no power in any direction and not have nearly as much stability in all directions as the specialized stances have in the directions they specialize in.

The discussion of which direction a stance is powerful and which direction it’s stable is a topic for another day. Suffice it to say, a specialized stance has both, but in different directions, while a generalized stance no power and not as much stability as it would otherwise appear.

There’s a final stance type that might give pause and that is the all mobility, no power or stability stance. This would be a stance where your feet are very close together, even touching, Without stepping it’s difficult to generate power and if pushed or grappled your foundation isn’t; strong enough to whether the storm. There’s a caveat here that i would argue a too-small stance is easy to recover from because of its mobility and it's hard to lose all power generation because mobility gives the chance to move which in turn generates power.

There it is. If your stances aren't serving these purposes they need to be reevaluate and if you haven't evaluated the purpose of your stances, maybe it's time.

05/18/2026

05/10/2026

Day camps for students out of school every month this summer! Great for brand new beginners and seasoned trainees alike. Great for kids and teens! Use this as a foot in the door for martial arts training, a summer diversion, or a bit of something we don't train all that often if you or your child is already my student.

05/09/2026