Articles by Jeff Westfall

Treating Martial Arts Students Like Grownups A common habit among martial arts instructors that I find to be intellectually lazy and frequently boorish is that of over-using the word “never.”. As the title of this article asserts, I think that an instructor should never say never. I can’t tell you [Read More]

Martial Cinema Tropes The advent of the sport called “mixed martial arts” was a pivotal point in the history of the wider culture of the martial arts, and more importantly also marked a significant alteration in the perception of the martial arts that is held by the huge fraction of [Read More]

A prejudice common in the martial arts world is to automatically assume that training in the country of origin of a given martial art is superior to training anywhere else. I call it the “Training Overseas Fallacy.” I’ve practiced one martial art or another for forty-eight years, and taught for [Read More]

If you’ve been training in the martial arts for more than a little while, you have probably had awkward interactions with other people when they found out about your martial arts “habit.”  I’ve been practicing a variety of fighting arts for forty seven years, and I can tell you that [Read More]

A common prejudice among educated humans in both academia AND the martial arts is a bias against people who are self-taught. The nerdy word for these self-taught people is “autodidacts.” While I agree with the opinion that, especially in highly technical areas of expertise, formal training is nearly always the [Read More]

In the year 2018 we are, unfortunately, becoming more and more ideologically polarized. The vast majority of people have figuratively, if not literally, joined one of two tribes, much to the detriment of our society. Unless you are a hermit living in a cave somewhere, part of your daily life [Read More]