Before I get into this week’s update, if you’re in the area and you compete, I’d urge you to head to Galesburg for the 2015 GAMA Open Championship Tournament. I wrote a letter to the competitors after last year’s tournament, and it holds true today. I’m excited to see the competition this year.

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Nĭ hăo!

This week kicked off the first of a six-week class on learning Chinese. I was mostly interested in learning it to complement my martial arts. When I was a senior in high school, I took an eight-week class on learning Japanese, and I still feel like it helps me understand some aspects of karate. I thought, “Why not try the same for my Chinese martial arts background?” I also learned a bit about myself looking through the Chinese zodiac information.

Onto this week in martial arts…

The thing they never told you about being a black belt is that nothing changes. I agree with Jesse here:

[Y]ou’re still the Exact Same Dude. … You still have trouble with self-confidence, motivation or injuries.

Just like the day before – when you didn’t have your black belt yet.

Jesse goes on to explain what he feels is the most important purpose of karate. I’ll let you click through for that one. Can’t give all his good stuff away.

Another major fight has been signed this week. If it was a decade ago. Bellator announced this week that Kimbo Slice would fight Ken Shamrock on June 20. I’m not particularly excited by this fight, especially after last week’s Pacquiao vs. Mayweather announcement. If anything, I would have timed the release of this announcement better. You already have two guys whose prime is in question in the boxing match, and now this.

Here are 52 weird facts you didn’t know about Bruce Lee. Thanks to my friend Jeff Tillett for posting that.

Taekwondo’s kicks helped differentiate it from other arts of its day. Fightland’s Sascha Matuszak has an informative article on the development of taekwondo stemming out of the art’s early superstars who learned from Gichin Funakoshi. During the 1960s, Matuszak writes that taekwondo “was powerful and lethal in the hands of trained masters, and awe-inspiring when men like Nam Tae Hi jumped over men and broke boards with flying kicks in staged sessions.”

Before I’m finished here, I have two plugs.

Tomorrow is a women’s self-defense seminar in Morton, Ill., hosted by the best person to be presenting this type of course in central Illinois.

And in April, I’ll be at the USA Martial Arts Hall of Fame teaching a yoga seminar.

Two plugs before I get into today’s column…

First, Kim Aldus will be teaching a women’s self-defense class on March 1 in Morton, Illinois. I know of at least one other person teaching women’s self-defense in this area, and let me tell you: Kim Aldus is hands-down the best.

Also, I’ll be teaching a yoga seminar at the USA Martial Arts Hall of Fame in Indianapolis in April.

John Cena was arrested on an episode of Parks & Recreation this week for stealing Johnny Karate’s guitar … I guess? I’ve never seen a full episode of Parks and Rec, so I can’t provide you with any insightful context about this clip. All I know is wrestling and martial arts have briefly come together and I get to share that combination in this column. Oh, happy day.

Manny Pacquiao vs. Floyd “Money” Mayweather is officially on. I’ve honestly never watched these guys fight, but I know they’re two of the best fighters on the planet, so I’d probably find a way to see this match. I’m only slightly familiar with Mayweather, and that’s when he fired off a couple shots into Big Show’s face in 2008.

A 3-year-old recites her school’s creed in this week’s viral martial arts video. A friend sent this to me on Thursday night, and it has since racked up more than 2 million views. I have mixed reactions. On the one hand, I think it’s good that this kid (and others like her) are able to perform this way. On the other hand, this is basically cheerleading. It represents blind obedience to choreography, which I guess you could argue is martial arts anyway. I’m torn.

“Situational awareness” is a term we martial arts folks hear about quite often. But you might be asking yourself what it entails. The Art of Manliness has a primer on How to Develop The Situational Awareness Of Jason Bourne. It’s a long read, but it provides lots of practical information.

Situational awareness is a mindset that you have to purposefully cultivate. You want to get to the point that it’s just something you do without having to think about it. To get to that point, you have to practice it regularly.

(Don’t confuse this site with The Alphabet of Manliness.)

Here’s a collection of Street Fighter moves as performed in the UFC. I don’t even want to post any GIFs here for fear it might make you not click that link. Of note here: Dudes getting slammed on their hands, and one-handed shoulder throws. Fightland has really shot up the ranks of my favorite martial arts blog to follow.

Also, I’ve never played Street Fighter. True story.

Have you logged a martial arts workout with a fitness tracker? I just got the Fitbit ChargeHR this week, so I was both happy and disappointed in this StackExchange topic – I thought it would have more answers, but so far contains mostly conjecture and generalisms. Of all three workouts I did this week with it on, though, my heart rate was highest when I was doing martial arts over DDPYoga.

Crime is up in Peoria. That’s according to data from the Peoria Police Department. My analysis, however, showed that overall, crime is down in the city over the past 15 years. Significantly. My plea is for martial arts instructors to stop throwing out the “crime is going up all the time” phrase when they’re talking about self-defense.

That’s it for this week!

Instructors who teach martial arts and self-defense love to make an argument for their services by proclaiming, “Well, the crime rate is going up.”

The evidence for this argument usually quickly follows, with the person saying something to the effect of, “Look at all the reports in the media.”

If you’ve heard this from anybody recently, at least in central Illinois, they’d be right if they were referring to the past year.

However, my analysis suggests that crime has declined significantly in Peoria in the past 15 years.

Crime From 2013-2014 Is Up 7 Percent

Source: Peoria Police Department

Data provided by the Peoria Police Department shows that the crime rate increased by 7 percent from 2013 to 2014.

Murder, robbery, and aggravated assault and battery are crimes that are down from year to year, while criminal sexual assault and are up.

A Downward Trend in Crime Since 1999

Source: Peoria Police Department

Total person crimes are down 8 percent year over year and down approximately 30 percent since 1999.

Total property crimes, though up 9 percent from in 2014, are down about 47 percent since 1999.

Combined, total person and property crimes are up 7 percent from 2013-2014, but are down about 45 percent since 1999.

Peoria’s Decline in Crime Is In Line With The State’s and The Nation’s

Statewide, crime estimates from the FBI show that Illinois has also seen a downward trend between 1999 and 2012, the most recent year for which estimates are available.

In Illinois, the reported incidents of violent crime has declined from approximately 83,000 reports to 53,000. What’s more, the violent crime rate per 100,000 people has declined from about 690 to 415.

The violent crime estimates nationwide has declined, too, from approximately 1.4 million in 1999 to 1.2 million in 2012. This equates to a decline from about 523 to 387 incidents per 100,000 people.

So the next time you hear a martial arts instructor say that crime is going up, do your homework and check the stats.

I think it’s a great idea to learn how to protect yourself, but I think instructors should be ashamed of themselves trying to gain business with fear mongering.

Get your stretch on April 18 in Indianapolis with me when I teach a yoga seminar at the USA Martial Arts Hall of Fame in Indianapolis on April 18! I’m so happy to be teaching this seminar after attending and being inducted at my first Hall of Fame event last year.

I think it’s super cool that I’m on the same flyer with a bunch of people whose seminars I’ve been to in the past, people I consider my friends, as well as my Chinese martial arts instructor, Steve Aldus, and freakin’ Superfoot Bill Wallace.

Now, onto this week’s roundup…

In what I assume is the complete anthology of martial arts in sitcoms, Sarah Kurchak of FIGHTLAND has pulled together clips and GIFs dating all the way back to 1996. I think my favorite clip from it right now is a clip from what I consider a classic episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” in which Charlie trains for an underground fight by hawking Sweet Dee’s steroids mixing them with amphetamines. The best quote of the episode, though, goes to Dee herself: “I will eat your babies, bitch!”

When robot overlords take over the world, I’d hoped we’d be able to outsmart them by, I dunno, kicking them or something. Too bad, according to NPR. This four-legged, 160-pound robot can take a pretty solid kick from an adult male without tumbling over. I have to wonder what kind of cool fight science we can learn from a machine that can take a kick.

Kim Aldus is hosting a women’s self-defense seminar on March 1 in Morton. She is the real deal. Other women in this area are claiming they’re teaching women’s self-defense, but nobody has the credentials that Mrs. Aldus does – a black belt in at least three different styles, multiple-time USA Martial Arts Hall of Fame inductee, and is the only women’s self-defense instructor I know that brings an attorney in to tell you about Illinois law.

Plato, as in the Greek philosopher, was a martial artist – a wrestler, specifically. The article at Psychology Today discusses the relationship between martial arts and the philosophies they teach:

Learning to fight (and not to fight) can be excellent for Plato’s “strength and health” but can also develop the virtues that philosophers, east and west, have defended. The martial arts have also matured within rich philosophical traditions, and illuminate the to-and-fro between ideas and practice and between cultures over the centuries. And finally, the martial arts can challenge scholars with puzzles in ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind.

I got a glimpse of krav maga last Saturday, thanks to Mr. Kelly O’Keefe. I hadn’t gotten the chance to work with him, and I’m glad I was able to. Krav maga is really just a collection of other empty-hand martial arts.

There are three kinds of people in this world, according to Kelly O’Keefe: Sheep, predators, and sheep dogs.

He says you don’t want to be a sheep because sheep are followers. And you don’t want to be a predator. Instead, he says, be a sheep dog because you’ll help the rest of the herd.

Via Tora Hakutsuru Kan

Mr. O’Keefe taught a krav maga seminar today at Tora Hakutsuru Kan Martial Arts Academy in Morton.

Krav maga, he says, is a martial art the Israelis developed from other empty-hand self-defense systems. Some of the more advanced techniques are unique to krav maga, but he said advanced martial artists shouldn’t see anything they really hadn’t seen before.

Since I didn’t know anything about krav maga, I expected to come to class and learn some funky new martial art like I seem to at almost every other seminar I go to. But, it wasn’t clear to me where “krav maga” started and stopped and other martial arts came into play.

And I think that’s by design.

Via Tora Hakutsuru Kan

What I mean by that is some of the drills that we did. He taught us what he called a “burst,” advocating to strike two techniques in succession – for example, execute two back-to-back strikes to the eyes in case one misses. He taught a few sparring combinations that looked like kickboxing. He taught us how to get into a guard position, and then how to escape from the guard position into a mount.

In other words, none of what he taught was unique to krav maga. They are all things you can find in other martial arts. The creators of krav maga, he said, just took what worked and discarded the rest.

The most enlightening portions of the day to me were working sparring with knives and disarming an attacker of a gun.

Mr. O’Keefe is also a law enforcement officer, and is proficient in both areas.

Knife sparring is something I’ve only ever come into contact with in the abstract, but I’ve never held a wooden knife (in this case) and tried to cut anybody with it. When you get hit with the knife, it makes you think about how often you’re really getting cut.

The disarms against a gun were new for me, too – again, it’s all been abstract thought to this point.

In another blog for another day, I’ll explain the inner conflict I’ve had about concealed carry since it became legal in Illinois – some might say I’m just not accepting reality. It was fairly obvious from those around me, though, that I was embedded in a group of people that heavily favored concealed carry.

Mr. O’Keefe, who has certified hundreds of people for concealed carry of a firearm, taught several ways to disarm a would-be attacker of his gun.

It was also interesting to hear some of the legal ramifications involved, as well.

Via Tora Hakutsuru Kan

For instance, earlier in the class, Mr. O’Keefe mentioned that if a person balls up his fist at you, you would be able to defend yourself. However, if that same person pulls a gun on you and you disarm him of it and shoot him, you’re not so much defending yourself as you are murdering him. I asked what the rationale was behind that. He said in the first scenario (assuming no weapons are involved), you would think the person is going to hurt you, so you do something about it. In the scenario with the gun, once you take it from him, you become armed against an unarmed person. I had thought because the person had pulled the gun in the first place, that was enough of an act of aggression, but it turns out I was wrong. If he reaches for something or moves toward you, then you can resume defending yourself.

Obviously, I am not a trained firearms instructor, nor am I an attorney, so I may be munging some details here. But that’s the gist of what I learned from that situation.

I learned to be a sheep dog.