Useful Information

In 2010, I took forty years of my experience as a student, competitor, instructor, coach, and referee in several different martial arts at the club, regional, national and organizational levels, and more than a quarter of a century as a university professor as well as fifteen years as an entrepreneur and distilled them into a masterclass book about coaching martial arts. The coaching book exists for only one reason: To help you, the coach. 

My goal in writing the book was to provide coaches with the tools necessary to help them to be an effective bridge between their students and the knowledge they seek. As an instructor, a coach, sensei, teacher or whatever you call yourself, you touch the lives of your students. I want to help you perform that task in the most positive, effective and efficient fashion possible. If you wish to become a truly successful instructor, it is important that you acquire the skills required of a successful teacher; this is where this book can help you. Use it and succeed. It will help you in many areas of your life. 

I have been training in the martial arts since 1969, and over the years, through multiple disciplines, I have learned that the Way of the Warrior has much to teach us about how to live life. What you have here then, published in 2025, is a series of lessons and insights drawn from more than half a century of learning and growing. Some of the lessons are clearly specific to walking the path of the martial artist, but in reality, most of them can be applied to any aspect of your life’s journey. How we choose to walk through life is largely a matter of decision and commitment. We have a choice to see opportunity or problems. We have a choice to move with compassion or anger. We have a choice to move with understanding or resistance. Walking the martial way is about learning to dig deep into the lessons of life and to keep searching beyond what at first sight, seems like the answer. Walking the path of the martial artist, is embarking on a journey with no destination. I make no claim to having any special insight, knowledge or wisdom, but if my words help you to find to your own path through the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, that life seems so ready to launch towards us, then I am content. So even though this book may seem like it is about me, it is not. I wrote it for YOU. 

Shortly after I published Moving and Breathing in 2025, I was asked a wide variety of questions from friends who read the book. The nature of their questions and comments suggested that I was not done writing. Furthermore, when clients from my coaching world and my clinical practice along with students in the Dojo, my Taiji classes, and even in my University classes asked me yet more questions, it became clear to me that I had indeed published the first edition too quickly and that there was much left unsaid, and there were many ideas that I had not explored in writing. In gratitude for, and on the basis of, all the input I have received, I decided to expand the first edition. Consequently, what here we have here is the Magnum Opus edition. The Magnum Opus edition contains revisions of the original chapters along with at least twenty additional chapters. 

After more than fifty years of walking my chosen path, watching, studying, learning, listening and meditating upon the nature of a life's journey, I like to think that the book contains some of my best writing ... but that is for you to assess.

The book has still been written for YOU, I hope that you find it to be of value in your own journey through life, regardless of whether you are a martial artist or not.

Lastly, but by no means least, we have a colleague, Pete Starr who began training in the martial way more than sixty years ago. Pete has written many enlightening books concerning concerning the biomechanics and kinesiology of martial techniques as well as what it truly means to walk the martial path and make it a lifelong journey.  Pete comes comes from a predominately Chinese and Karate background, so his path up the mountain has been somewhat different to ours, but his insights are both pragmatic and practical, and his wisdom is equally profound. You can see some of his articles here.