Editorial

Martial arts is a lot like religion, and going to a martial arts school is a lot like going to a church.

You find your school / gym that you like, go inside and socialize with the teacher and the students, and if they seem like a good fit, you dedicate either a few months, or a few decades of your life spending time with them.

However, much like religion (or a belief system), martial arts can vary between quality, instruction, and practicality. Some martial arts schools can be great, while others are downright dangerous scams or cults.

One of the worst examples of a fraudulent martial arts teacher is a YouTuber by the name of Dominick Izzo Wing Chun, who has been proven by multiple sources as a cult leader, liar, and fraud who made up an entire online persona just to make money off unsuspecting victims.

Many people are often enamoured with the martial arts, and what they represent.

Little do people know, the generally accepted "idea" of the martial arts, which mostly come from fictional action movies, stage / fight choreography, or other forms of art or pop culture where martial arts are featured, are rooted more in make believe fantasies rather than in reality.

Often times, people who do not train seriously in martial arts or have a beginner's / low level understanding of them, assume that technique and skill will always overcome size, strength, speed, and athleticism.

Yet if that were true, there would be no such thing as weight classes in martial arts, combat sports, and in the Olympics, or gender divisions in professional sports.

There is an intrinsic problem that exists in many forms of non-competitive, "self-defense" martial arts - mostly older martial arts styles, but can be applied to any martial art that does not contain or emphasize a competitive sports component.

As defined and modified for the Kung Fu community: The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability regarding the effectiveness of their Kung Fu in a real fighting scenario.

This tends to occur because of the general Kung Fu practitioners' lack of self-awareness, which comes from the lack of real, non-compliant sparring training, which prevents some Kung Fu practitioners from accurately assessing their own skills.

Thanks to the overwhelming number of LARPers in the Kung Fu community, Kung Fu is dying a slow and steady death.

No one who trains seriously wants to be associated with LARPers, and people from other martial arts communities can't take Kung Fu practitioners seriously because Kung Fu's reputation has been all but eroded by Kung Fu LARPers.

Let's cut the crap and get right down to it - we hate fake martial arts teachers.

The reason why we're calling out fake martial arts teachers is because they promote unsafe training environments that could get their students seriously hurt or even killed, scam innocent people out of their hard earned money, and contribute to a cult-like culture that is scummy and predatory.

Not only do these fake martial arts teachers profit off of unsuspecting students, they ruin the legitimacy and image of real martial artists who practice their art seriously.

Here is our list of the top signs or traits of a fake martial arts teacher. If your teacher or some other teacher you know matches most of the signs on this list - run away - as they are most likely a fake!

The definition of a "McDojo" is a martial arts school that is solely established to make money instead of genuinely teaching martial arts.

Are you concerned that you, someone you know, or your child may be stepping into a McDojo to learn martial arts?

Read on to find out the top signs of a McDojo, and if your school has checked off the majority of these boxes, your school might very well be a McDojo!

Have you ever met someone who claimed they practiced martial arts, or that they were a master of a certain style, but you weren't quite sure if they were legit, or just full of crap?

Or are you tired of the constant lies and excuse making that fake martial artists keep telling themselves, and other people, when their martial arts fails them during sparring / fighting?

We know we are.

Here are the top most commonly seen / heard lies that fake martial artists will peddle in order to protect their fragile egos, and what they really mean when they say this.

In the world of martial arts, most of us were first exposed to it through movies and media - such as Kung Fu classics made by the Shaw Brothers' studios, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, the Karate Kid movies, or some similar combination of the above.

The romanticized idea of martial arts was always presented to us more or less in a very classical way: Learn martial arts, defeat the bully, exact revenge on the bad guy, win the tournament, and become the hero.

To us, martial arts was about training as hard as you could, winning the most amount of competitions as you could (in forms or fighting, or both), becoming a tough, hardened bad ass with world class martial arts / fighting skills, and becoming the best version of yourself that you possibly could be in the process.

Former Two-Division UFC Champion Georges St-Pierre, the definition of a model martial artist and champion.

The mindset of a true martial artist was to continue to train for life as an eternal student to keep bettering oneself on the path of perfection (perfection of course, doesn't exist), and continue to seek new challenges, conquer new plateaus and reach ever new heights - as long as the body was able and the circumstances allowed it.

We had always thought this was the way of the warrior, and the "hardcore" path that everyone took to mastering their martial arts.

Then we realized, we were in the minority that held that mindset or belief.