Posts

Showing posts from May, 2020

Travis Stevens on How to Fix USA Judo

Image
Travis Stevens on YouTube, https://youtu.be/xLNpi2HHPsU Travis Stevens, American judo Olympian, spent over two hours on YouTube describing how to fix the American competitive judo system. He said he has spent several years advocating these changes and pitching it to multiple audiences. This post is my attempt to summarize his main points. I thought his presentation was compelling, so I wanted to capture highlights. If you want it straight from him, please watch the video. The First Step: Startup Revenue Through Seminars The First Step The first step is to hire a coach to perform two main functions. The first is to teach judo cadets, those under age 18 years of age. The second is to have that coach teach 18 seminars per year, across the US. (That's 18 seminars, not just seminars for 18 year olds.) Figure 1 below shows the revenue that a single seminar could generate, depending on the attendance and the cost per person. Figure 2 shows shows the revenue that 18 seminars could generat

Burton Richardson on Knife Defense

Image
I just watched the free online seminar by Burton and Sarah Richardson on Black Belt Magazine's Facebook channel . I've known about Burton for years and I love his approach and style. When you realize he's also a BJJ black belt, you know as a jiujitsu person you can't ignore his advice. I joined his seminar late but the material I watched involved knife defenses. Having a few years of Krav Maga Global experience, I had trained several forms of knife defense. However, I was never really comfortable with approaches like the "360" and related motions. I felt like I was not going to have a chance against anyone in a live scenario. After describing that running and compliance were the best ways to survive an encounter with a knife, Burton explained that getting two hands on the knife hand for knife control was the best physical self defense method. I agree with this. Burton demonstrated two methods to accomplish this goal. The first was the Russian tie method found