So I started 2020 excited for Kung Fu. I was looking forward to growing my tiny school into a less tiny school, find a permanent place to teach out of, and start to fulfill me dream of bringing Kung Fu online. At the time I had these thoughts, I was at my teacher's Chinese New Year Party in Massachusetts so naturally, most of what I was thinking about was Kung Fu-centric.

Then March happened and everything changed and the world shut down.

If COVID taught me anything, it is that in times of extreme pressure and stress, you can either focus on the negative, or watch a lot of Netflix and stoke the faint embers of hope. And so, after finishing a few seasons of Parks and Recreation, I decided to transform my home into teaching studio. I bought everything my students would need, purchased 1300 square feet of mats ('cause who doesn't love hip throws?!?), and upgraded my lighting and camera equipment to a professional level ('cause I didn't want my virtual students to try and figure out what we were working through the haze of a low-resolution web camera).

Over the various shutdowns, re-openings, and additional shutdowns my students and I endured during the year, I was reminded of the oft-used martial arts marketing tag-line of "transferrable skills" (more or less a fancy way of saying that training martial arts helps develop your mind and character to endure any challenge life throws at you).

Kung Fu helped me survive the pandemic. Practicing forms helped balance my mind, and create the best learning environment I could for my students helped me turn my home into something I'd been looking for for years: a permanent place where I could share my passion for Kung Fu with my students.

Looking forward to 2021 and achieving my next goal: bringing my love of Kung Fu online (stay tuned for updates on that one).

Practice hard, be humble, and become your best.

4 years ago, I wanted to learn how to fight. I'd been practicing Traditional Chinese Martial Arts for many years by that point, but had never really gotten into Sanshou. A friend of mine who was a professional MMA fighter was taking on training clients. I reached out to him, discussed my goals, and we got started training for a Leitai competition.

Over the course of that journey, I learned more about myself and martial arts than I ever thought I would. While I learned countless lessons that I value, there four that resonate with me the most.

1. Your mindset is critical to your ability to fight and protect yourself. I love forms, but there are some things that forms just cannot teach you when it comes to fighting another person. If you're stepping into the ring, you have to come to terms with that choice in your mind, the choice that you are willfully choosing to put yourself in a place where, for however long the rounds are, you are going to (potentially) hurt and be hurt by another person. That is something you need to come to terms with BEFORE the fight - when the bell rings is NOT the right time.
2. Fighting takes a toll on everyone involved in your life. Serious fight preparation is time consuming - hours in the gym, hours in training, day in, day out. Training consumed my life - I got up at 5 AM to train, worked an 8 hour job, trained after work. That's time I wasn't spending with my wife, friends, and cats. Yeah, it's lonely when you're the only one in the gym every night, but it's lonelier for those left at home. My wife was (and continues to be) supportive of everything I do as it relates to martial arts and life in general. And if you're lucky enough to have someone who supports you in your fighting, know what support really means - they are supporting your choice to intentionally do something that takes you away from them and puts you in harm's way. And that is a mental burden you are asking them to bear.
3. Fighting will make your forms better - especially if you learned them predominantly for performance. Once you learn foot movement, angles, slips, feints, and head movement in the context of a fight, you'll see how those principles are interpreted and expressed in your forms. Now, not only do you have a new context in which to practice forms, you can begin to adapt them to improve your fight game.
4. Finally, invest in quality gear. Trust me, your body and sparring partners will thank you. My personal training gear, all told, cost about $800 or so. Expensive up front, but that gear has lasted thousands of hours of training and is still in great condition.

I love Kung Fu (which is probably not a surprise to anyone since I opened a Kung Fu school). In any conversation that I can even tangentially slip in some reference to it, I will. This inevitably leads to the "Why did you choose Kung Fu?".

I'd like to say that I had always dreamed about Kung Fu, that I grew up watching Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan and said to myself "One day…". The truth is much more pedestrian - I'd started a job teaching Latin at a high school in Massachusetts and literally next to my apartment building was a Kung Fu school and thought "This seems like a fun way to spend most of my part-time teacher salary".

At the time, I didn't know that Kung Fu (roughly translated) means "hard work". But I found out quick. Every class consisted of at least 125 pushups, 125 crunches, tons of stretching, and after that gauntlet, we'd learn some Shaolin Long Fist. For the first few months, that voice in my head saying "quit" would be on repeat. But what kept me going was what keeps a lot of us going through challenging times: the community of the school was supportive, the teacher was inspirational in a way I have not encountered in any other martial arts instructor, and I realized that, despite the voice in my head, I was blasting through barriers I had struggled against for years. I was getting stronger, losing weight, gaining confidence.

But those don't really explain why I chose Kung Fu, just why I love that school. Seriously, that place is amazing - multiple times a year, I will drive the 8 hours from Maryland to Massachusetts to train for 2 hours on a Saturday, and then drive back home on Sunday.

Why I chose Kung Fu is that I liked the person that I was becoming through its practice. I've become more caring, patient, fearless, and devoted because of Kung Fu. Regardless of what style you practice and why, we all share this common thread: we are what our practice of martial arts has made us.

Kung Fu has made me a better human being.

​That's why I chose it.