Martial Arts Unlocked
To Parents Congratulations on making the decision to pursue martial-arts education for your child and/or family. An investment of this type will be extremely rewarding on many levels. It is my intent to help you along the way in selecting the ideal program for you and your family.It is likely that, at some point, your child will want to take a martial-arts course because of something he saw in a movie or because of a friend’s request like every good parent, you will begin researching. When this happens, where do you start and what do you ask? Perhaps you start by looking on the Internet for random ideas about martial arts. You find a few sites in your area and begin to read about them while stumbling over several terms ending in -do, -jiujitsu, or -chi. But do you even know what those mean?
Then you will narrow down your search to a select few schools based on what the sites look like or maybe even some nicely written copy. Nowadays, with the Internet fl ooded with information about the arts, this material is not hard to find. After that, you have an interview with an instructor or call the school, and 90 percent or more of that interaction is based upon what you have just learned. After you use all that information up, you are at the mercy of a school owner, salesperson, or program director. From this point forward, a school’s representative can lead you down the rabbit hole; alternatively, if you’re lucky, he or she will give you a better understanding of what it is the school provides and how its representatives can help.
Beginning your research for a martial-arts school can be a bit overwhelming. The media is constantly drawing attention to the wrong areas of sports, news,and public information. Given this, how do you know what, when, and where to look for quality information? There are so many resources and media portrayals regarding what martial arts is and how it should be taught, practiced, and used that, often, people take a shot in the dark. Doing so is not wrong; instead, what it means is that people just do not have enough information to search properly, and when they find something, they ask the wrong questions.
One of my biggest challenges as a martial-arts school owner and educator is helping people overcome their predispositions about martial arts, which can include their recent research or what they learned in the past under their own great grand master, master, or something similar. I have trudged long enough through less-than-favorable displays of martial-arts media, sporting events, and actual programs claiming fame based on one thing or another. Such outlandish claims not only do a great injustice to my fellow martial artists but are also unjust to you, the consumer, who may not know enough to choose the right program for your family. It is my sincere hope that the knowledge you gain from reading this book will lead you to the ideal program for your martial-arts education.
As a martial-arts professional, I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that there is no one school that will fit all people. I have written this book with the purest intention of educating people who may not have the benefit of a personal consultation with me to understand how martial-arts schools diff er and how the business works. In this book, I will not be sharing knowledge about martial-arts styles or giving you a list of instructors who can perform the fastest side kicks. However, I will explain to you what I have learned after thirty-plus years spent in the martial arts(as a student, athlete, employee, teacher, and school owner); there are profound degrees of separation among martial-arts schools. This book is dedicated to arming people like you with better questions to ask when searching for your ideal school. After all, I believe you are not only choosing a school; you are choosing a whole support system for yourself and your family.
From my family to yours, enjoy.
(To purchase this book online visit www.martialartsunlocked.com or stop by your local bookstore. To learn more about Baeplex visit www.Baeplex.com)
Master Joseph Ash
BAEPLEX Family Martial Arts Center, Inc.
Author: Martial Arts Unlocked
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