22/09/2025
A funny thing is that the vast majority of my friends didn't know about my martial arts experience until lately as I never had any need to tell them about it, they have seen me compete in a few tournaments and that was the only times that they became aware of my passion, seeing me compete in a submission wrestling and the fist Latosa Escrima world elimination tournament which surprised them how brutal it was for people who have never seen it.
I have always seen my martial arts training as something very personal and a challenge to myself and not against others, as I had the philosophy that there are always bigger fishes in the ocean no matter how good you believe that you are, you can always encounter someone who is better no matter what title or whatever piece of paper as evidence evidence of how "superior" you are.
I have always preferred to be the eternal student instead of being what I call "master of disaster", when the ego is so full that it blocks the ability to accept that you can never reach the state of perfection as there is always room for improvement, refuse to reflect that you can learn more from others that train another style, stop believing that you are the only one who has discovered the ultimate truth, be open to have been wrong with previous assumptions and not the ultimate master by being on the top of a hierarchy in a single organization. The title master is not good for a lot of egos and creates more problems than solutions for improving your skillset.
What matters is not how many years you have trained but how many hours you have spent during a single month and years, training twice for an hour every week for several decades is not the same as training several hours every day for a few years 5 times every week, with no resistance training of complying that makes you look good to outsiders, getting exposed to sparring against some of the best fighters from the beginning, which doesn't need to be full force but experience that you have to be humble to be able to continue, despite constant defeat for a very long time before you feel like you have a chance to survive sparring and training in general. It forces you to leave the ego before training in most cases and it keeps the worst psychopaths from training as they have a hard time experiencing defeat on a regular basis, but I have seen an increase with what I view as the wrong psychological profile training as MMA and BJJ as it has becomed so popular.
My personal approach with my identity towards other people should not be based on my martial arts skills, something that is hard to understand unless you really are genuinely interested in martial arts culture, but on everything else that I believe matters more in personal relationships as your shared moral values or different views, serious political debates on opinions with no condescending views except if they are truly repulsive, common interests like movies, creative artist you like to watch or listen to or food cultures that you like to explore.
My father was chocked when he saw me fight an elimination knock down tournament in the late 80ies and win in my weight class in the biggest bracket with 3 fights in the junior division that was an experiment. I was awarded the title as the best technical fighter for my KO and control of my opponents from the senior division, I sadly destroyed my 🏆 on my way home on staircase in the train station, no photos and I only saw the video footage from the tournament once and it is lost as it was never digitised. He was a very loving person and he had never smacked me, but he said that he was happy to never have slapped me after watching one of my most brutal fight and KO.
My performance show in the break with breaking boards with a split flying kick with persons sitting on top of the others shoulders with one jump try to break several boards on opposite sides of each other failed, I only broke the boards on one side as the problem was that it requires those holding the boards to keep a very stable position. The 3 first persons failed breaking the boards that they usually had no problems with and had never failed before, but the first failure spread the insecurity and created a huge pressure that made them all fail and being the last one with an insane flying kick didn't help as everyone's flowstate broke down. When you start to focus too much on not failing and focus on perfect technique, the odds of failure rises and that is seen in every kind of sport, the loss of flowstate.
I used to show the rules for what techniques were allowed in the beginning of knock down tournaments for 3 years, by showing them first in slow motion and then with full speed. The last technique looked so realistic with a flying spinning heel kick, but it was due to the other that suddenly tried to KO me in the end of the demo, I lost my temper and the crowd went crazy about how insane control it looked like, I didn't want to hurt him as we both had to compete but I didn't pull the force of my kick with the last technique, he didn't get any injuries and won his weight class.
Mastering any kind of art is a lifelong journey and not a destination, depending on personal perspectives the goals can differ, but my own is the one that I should never believe that I reached the top of the mountain, but find better routes to a top with no end.