Episode 338 - Sensei Andrew Moores

Sensei Andrew Moores is a martial arts practitioner and instructor at the Atlantic Karate Training Center in New Hampshire.

...Train hard, but that's dojo stuff. That's your gym. There's an agreement between you and your training partner. When there's violence on the street, there isn't an agreement...

Episode 338 - Sensei Andrew Moores

As a kid who always loved martial arts, the journey never ended for him even when he took a break to do other things. Sensei Andrew Moores is a passionate martial artist who has a broad perspective on the martial arts. Sensei Andrew Moores shared a lot about his view on how to use martial arts on the real situations so listen to learn more!

Sensei Andrew Moores is a martial arts practitioner and instructor at the Atlantic Karate Training Center in New Hampshire. ...Train hard, but that's dojo stuff. That's your gym. There's an agreement between you and your training partner. When there's violence on the street, there isn't an agreement...

Show Notes

On this episode, we mentioned Tony Blauer and Bill "Superfoot" Wallace.You may visit the Atlantic Karate training center here and on Facebook.

Show Transcript

You can read the transcript below or download here.Jeremy Lesniak:Hey there, thanks for tuning in. This is whistlekick Martial Arts Radio episode 338. Today, my guest is Sensei Andrew Moores. My name's Jeremy Lesniak, I'm your host for the show. I'm the founder at whistlekick and I am dedicating my life to sharing and growing the traditional martial arts through everything that we're doing with this show, with whistlekick, and with the multitude of other projects that we've got fingers and hands, and sometimes even toes, wedged into. If you want to see all of those, head on over whistlekick.com and find out, see everything that we've got going, see all the things that keep me up late at night. If you've been listening for a while, may you could leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts or on Stitcher or wherever you get your podcast from - those positive review help people the show and let's be honest, if you don't like the show, you're probably not listening. But if you don't like the show, let me know why; I want to know why. Doesn't mean we're gonna change it but I would like to know. And of course, I'm always open to feedback - positive, negative - hopefully it's constructive. Just trying to make this better. And the more feedback you give me, the better I can do my job.Let's talk about today's guest. Is it possible to be a die-hard, dedicated, passionate traditional martial artist and still find value, still find importance, in the more modernized concepts that someone call more modern martial arts or self-defense focused arts? I would say yes and so would today's guest. Sensei Andrew Moores is a passionate, if nothing else, immensely passionate traditional martial artist but he also looks at the world through a very broad perspective that goes far beyond what his initial art time. We'll get into that, we'll get into a lot of other good stuff so rather than giving you a synopsis here, I'll just step back and let you listen to my conversation with Sensei Andrew Moores.Sensei Moores, welcome to whistlekick Martial Arts Radio.Andrew Moores:Thank you very much for having me.Jeremy Lesniak:Oh, it's a pleasure to have you, yet another referral from a member of our community; I guess we can say. Somebody that I know fairly well, somebody that you know and kind of put us together and said hey, we gotta get you on the show. And here you are, you're on the show.Andrew Moores:Yeah, it was a very passionate introduction, too. I was flattered by it so I appreciate the introduction and getting to meet you.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah. Well, you know, we start in a pretty obvious way but I can't think of a better way to really start. So let's get this of the way and let's use it as a springboard to the rest of the things we're going to talk about. How did you become a martial artist?Andrew Moores:You know, 1982, I believe, 03:33 7 years olds, 6 years olds, and just always loved the martial arts, and bugged and bugged my parents and I was the youngest of three. And they carved me down to a martial arts school. And I remember they're getting started and it was in a basement - a shady basement of a shady plaza. But I remember before that, I don't know if, you know, my foggy memory, but I remember seeing a - I share this story too often but I'll share it with you - I was in Papa Gino's with my mom and I saw this man slap a woman. And at the age of six or seven, you don't have a reference point for that - you don't get it, you know. And I grew up in a very affluent area in New Hampshire and just the violence, the worst kid scenario is that kid always stole my chocolate milk money. So I remember seeing it and I remember having feeling of helplessness - just confusion but helplessness. Like I wanted to help but not really knowing what or how to do and that really stuck with me for many, many years, and brought me, you know... Even that helps, you know, my competitive career - trying to dissolve that helplessness feeling and I know a lot of martial artists don't... they train, they train, they train but when it comes to the street, reality, it's 05:18 the dojo book 05:19 for something really happen? And so that helpless feeling really drove a lot of my career since Papa Gino's in the Newington Mall, 30 or 27 or 30 something years ago.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah. Take us back a bit to that moment. You know, you're 6 years old - you're young - but clearly, you had enough context for life and what went on that it made an impact on you. You're still remembering it today, I'm hearing some emotion in your voice. What do you remember about how you felt?Andrew Moores:Well, you know, there's a little part I skipped over. It's that helpless feeling and then you fast-forward so if I was 6 years old, fast-forward 12, 13 years, I trained in the martial arts for several years, stopped, you know, ran track at the collegiate level. And I was walking home from a party with a friend who lived in my apartment building. And her boyfriend or ex-boyfriend had come up from Boston. They had broken up, and you know, this is years before the cellphones so there wasn't that phone call or texting argument. He came up to have a conversation and yet two of his buddies with him. And I remember that helpless feeling that I had back when I was at Papa Gino's as a six-year old. And here I am, a collegiate athlete, knowing that if the verbal spit hits the fan, I'll be all out running but I gotta protect her. So I used my mouth and my brains and everything fine, walked her home and that next morning, I called a mutual friend who had a school and I got started less than 48 – started back in the martial arts 48 hours later after a six year hiatus. And that drive to squash that helpless feeling was the hardest fire of my career, so far.Jeremy Lesniak:Now, it sounds like you're maybe being diplomatic or, you know, maybe there's some subtlety in here that you're intentionally leaving as such. And if that's the case, I don't want you to feel pressured to share more than you want to share. You're describing a scenario, you know, this ex-boyfriend and a couple of buddies kind of popping up and it sounds like it could have gone sideways - like really badly.Andrew Moores:Oh, absolutely. I mean the two buddies ---Jeremy Lesniak:But it didn't.Andrew Moores:No, it didn't. I mean the two buddies behind him, you know, here I'm walking a friend of mine, she lived in the apartment across the hall from me. It was a weird night; it was a "riot" had broken out at the university. And there was SWAT teams there calming the students down and... sorry, not SWAT teams but riot teams there. 08:43 fall night. And the two buddies were behind the ex-boyfriend. You know, they 'oh, let's go f 'em up. Come on, man, let's just drop this guy. You know why he's with your girl', and you know, egging them on. And I don't know where it was or where it came from, inside I was a little puppy dog like 'oh my gosh, what's going on?', and even a fleeting moment of yeah, you really should have stuck with the martial arts then. What came out of my mouth was very different and I had nothing really to lose. And what I told him, that nullified the situation.Jeremy Lesniak:What did you say?Andrew Moores:I said something along the lines that I, I obviously, you know... Your voice, I was serious but yet I was friendly. I said that, you know, I'm going to be walking her home and no matter what happens, nothing is going to happen to her. And I, you know, there' s some sharp language that I might have used in there that I don't think is necessarily appropriate for your podcast, but it was very firm that she was going home as she wanted to go home. And I basically over my dead body, the same thing going to happen. My words didn't instigate but he knew I was serious but I'd rather that nothing happen. And it worked; he just backed off. His buddies were like, what the hell is going on? What are you doing? But I think he just saw that I was pretty serious. Now inside, I was like oh my god, someone help. There's like 50 police officers on the street right next door; somebody? Anyone? But on the outside, I knew I had to be more of a howler and make sure he knew I was serious.Jeremy Lesniak:You know, I've often heard people say that when crap starts going down, most people will kinda chaotic and riled up and everything. But it's the person who doesn't, the person who stays calm in that chaos that you need to watch out for. And it sounds like that was almost your approach. You didn't rise or lower yourself - however you want to look at it - to what they were putting out there. You just kinda stayed centered, I guess, if I can say, that he didn't know how to react to that.Andrew Moores:Yeah, I think that was my ---Jeremy Lesniak:So they moved on because, again, that is a very intimidating thing to see that level of confidence in a heated situation.Andrew Moores:It is and what's... You know, Tony Blauer, who's been a guest in your show and a mentor, someone I trained with for a number of years and you know, he says very eloquently that you don't fight fire with fire; you fight fire with water. And that, this occasion happen maybe 10 years before I met Tony or 5 years and.... very true. I remember when I heard Tony say that and I go, 'oh, yeah' I mean a flashback to that night. I don't think it was natural skill, I'm not telling like look, you know, I knew this stuff before, no. I think it was either: a) dumb luck or just innate... I gotta calm the situation down and... Because, you know, I didn't want anything to go down, she didn't want anything to go down, and I don't think the boyfriend really wanted anything to go down. The only one that really wanted to go down was the two drunk buddies, you know, pacing back and forth. And I don't know if they really wanted to go down. I think they're much more of howlers than I had to be so... But we all got out of it and that night, I remember looking at the phone number on a phone book for my old martial arts school that I kind of moved on. And I couldn't wait to call, but I called the next morning 'cause I thought a 1 a.m. phone call would be a little sketchy. You know that feeling? And I think a lot of martial artists have that feeling, I think a lot of martial artists had the feeling this was my drawn to training with Tony Blauer was you have great punches and kicks and elbows and blocks and your solid guard and your passes, your mounts, and your jokes, da-da-da-da. But yet we saw this little puppy dog inside us that can get a little bit nervous and are not sure what to do and that analysis-paralysis will enter the equation. And so that, even after I've won some large full-contact tournaments and then competed the international level, I still got that itch and that burning desire to handle that uncomfortableness of not knowing exactly what to do or is this really going down? How to deal with the mental and the psychological side of real violence. And that led me to Tony and by far, I think the best in the world when it comes to training men, women, children, professional martial artists, law enforcement, military, on how to deal with the mental and psychological side of violence in addition to the physical skills.Jeremy Lesniak:I would argue that the psychological piece - being able to understand that is far more important. Because if you understand that, the physical skills become, in a sense, less important or at least ---Andrew Moores:Absolutely. Again, not to keep quoting Tony, I promise he's not paid me money but you know, the proverbial grandma who defeated the bad guy with her purse because she got pissed with indignation of how dare you. And she just smothered them. You know, where did she get her black belt from?  And it wasn't... It was her will to survive, his indignation of how dare you and just her mental and psychological skills. And she may have a bad hip and had a cane and she used that cane. She smacked him and the real bad guy ran off and yeah. I mean it's like a little boy at the edge of a diving board, right? He knows how to swim, he knows how to jump but he's sitting there, his legs shaking before his first dive; and that analysis paralysis. And I'm not ashamed to admit it and I think a lot of martial artists, and I think men, are. And I think this is silly but you know, you train your butt off, you train hard but that's dojo stuff. That's your gym; there's agreement between you and your training partner. When it's violence in the street, there isn't an agreement. I'm not talking about two guys squirming off and look like boxers outside a bar 'cause that has pseudo agreement to it. I'm talking real life or death violence. And the psychological side and emotional side are just huge, huge. I do lectures are different corporations - I just got email today about going next week to train the entire teaching staff at a local university - sorry, local community college here - on violence. And my talk is nothing physical. It is on the emotional and the psychological side, the PowerPoint presentation. I'm not teaching a palm-heel-strike or eye poke or knee to the groin - it is all psychological and emotional side to dealing with violence and then if you rewind a few steps before that, we're talking about how to avoid the violence all together and understanding, you know, your intuition and how that plays into your awareness and survival skills. And we, we all spend two hours of PowerPoint presentation in a fancy suit and we do not talk about what's the best elbow strike to throw. Because at the end of the day, no one says hey, what did you throw? What did you do? Or no one grazed you hey, you know Jeremy did a nice job with that elbow strike to the bad guy. I'm gonna give you a B rating on that elbow strike; no one does. It's more like did you throw it? And even a poor elbow strike to the face is gonna suck. So you know, did you throw it? And that's not physical - that's a mental and emotional side to dealing with something that's very scary. But it's enlightening, it's a refreshing when you meet seasoned and... what it is, it's not as much to martial artists. My big paradigm shift with all the scheme not from martial artists that train, train, train but from law enforcement and the military guys. The guys that really see the stuff, see the bad stuff. They're honest. I remember sitting in a talk with Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman here at Sig Arms Academy and he was talking about the different things that your body goes through when dealing with violence. And we're talking about the, you know, vascular construction and 18:39 exclusion and one of the last things is, you know, avoiding of the bowels. And I'm like, what? And he 18:46 his PowerPoint presentation. And I'm like what are you talking about? Now I'm in a room full of law enforcement and military, and I'm the only, at least one of us but 18:59 only civilian in this room. In the seminar was Lt. Colonel Grossman and we're all like... I'm looking around and I'm seeing all these heads nod up and down. And I'm like what are you talking about avoiding of the bowels? And one of the gentleman goes like - next to me - he goes well, LA SWAT Team calls it the combat crap. And I'm like, what? And he was... My time with law enforcement and military that really understood that these guys... martial artists, we play warriors. We play it, we put the gi on, we bow - we play warriors. The law enforcement and military, they are warriors - day in, day out. Some of them, yes, might have, you know, a nice BS badge they can wear but most of them... I mean there is... I remember this, I'm in this really bad situation and I was scared out of my mind. And you know what, that's refreshing. Like the fact that these warriors give themselves permission to be scared, to be afraid, and then how do they deal with that? You know, how do you deal with that emotion? You just bury it and say well I was just... I'm a wimp and I'm just not gonna tell my buddies? Or do you start going through fear management training? And you're doing scenario training that will help you inoculate each of that emotion? And that was a big paradigm shift for me to who I want to spend time with and I didn't have time in my life to train with; you know, folks that are just going to BS their way through and tell me these things are... they're full of crap. I want one guys that were just you know what, here's what I was thinking, I was scared out of my mind and then I got home and I trained it till I wasn't afraid anymore. So that was as big part of my... a road I've taken and I visit often.Jeremy Lesniak:Sure. Well we've kind of book-ended in a sense - where you started and a lot of where you are now. I know there are other elements to what you're doing now and I know we're gonna get into them - I'm hoping we're going to get into them at least.Andrew Moores:Sure.Jeremy Lesniak:But there are a couple of big steps there so where we left off, you were ready to get back into martial arts - you made the phone call. So I'm assuming you started training again and I'm assuming that at some point you made the decision I need more around - let's call it reality combatives or whatever term people want to apply to that - and then you also mentioned that you did some full-contact on a pretty high level. So those are quite disparate forks in your path. I mean whether one was a tangent from the other, or maybe there's a loop, you know. How do we navigate that highway to get... catches us up to now?Andrew Moores:Yeah. I think the martial arts world is just a beautiful, passionate world that is very dysfunctional in a sense of... you know, the body moves on a certain number of ways - we can push, we can pull, we can rotate, we can change levels set. That's really it, right? So when you're born and the obstetrician doesn't say to your mom hey, congratulations we have a Taekwondo specialist here; or hey, congratulations your kid's a Judo guy; or congratulations your child's a reality --- We do it. We have got a Karate punch, sure. Is there a boxer's punch? Sure. Is there little fine differences? There are. You know, I have some great friends, some of bests of bestfriends that, you know, if I had an emergency at 4 in the morning, they would be up and help me out as fast as they could. That they like 22:50 such a diverse or you're jumping a lot of different roads and I don't think do. I really feel my strength and conditioning road I take, my martial arts road I take, and we do a traditional Karate style. I've spent a long time with folks like Antonio Blauer that everyone's like well how do you blend those two? And I don't think there is a big difference from the physical side of things. Because, you know, no one comes out wow you're a BlauerTactical person, you're born. We push, we pull, we change levels, we rotate, and we got our locomotion and that's it. And so to answer your question... So I trained a few years in college, when I get back in doing college, but something was missing and I had nothing to do with the reality or I've you know, fix filling that void of can I take care of myself in a bad situation. It was my teacher. This teacher I hooked up with was kind of the closest guy who has the same style I had done as a kid but I didn't feel as though it had the... It wasn't the teacher I was looking for. And got introduced to a gentleman named Stephen Perry who became my teacher because when I met him, immediately, I go this is the person I want to train with. And it had nothing to do with how hard he hit or punch or tough he was or not or... but just was this is who I want to call Sensei. And so I had left my other school before my black belt test to start a whole brand different style of Karate and it was the best decision I ever made. I start off as a white belt and worked even harder to... 'cause I was chasing that belt at the time, worked even harder to train in there 8 days a week to get the most I could but it was most importantly that I had the teacher that I wanted, that I felt I could train under.Jeremy Lesniak:When you made that decision to step into this school with this other gentleman, the one that you really wanted to call Sensei, I'm assuming there was some fear, some anxiety about making that transition?Andrew Moores:You know, there was. It was a personal fear and nothing to do with belt rank and nothing to do with anything other than I had quit Karate when I was 12 years old and I... took some of my high school and some of my college years off to run in track and field - compete in track field - and then I started off then I get back into it and then I "quit" from that school. And I had this little chip on my shoulders, hey are you quitting? You know, are you a quitter? Is this when things are getting tough, are you a quitter? Are you a quitter? And so that was my biggest obstacle - was to shut that voice up and then prove to myself, first and foremost, that you know, when I was a kid quit because I was about to test for my, I think it was my brown belt as a kid. It was a big test and I quit and you know... Talk about the emotional and psychological side of things here; I'm a grown and competed the highest levels of track and field, and full-contact Karate but I still had, you know, the impression when I was a young boy of you know... in trying to prove that wrong. So you know, that was my biggest thing. Putting that white belt on, I was more proud to put that white belt on than my brow belt at my other school. It meant more to me; it was the right path. I was driving down the right road as opposed to wondering is this really gonna take me to my... the vacation spot I want to get to.Jeremy Lesniak:Now a lot of the folks that we have listening have cross-trained or trained in multiple schools for reasons of choice or reasons of necessityAndrew Moores:Yup.Jeremy Lesniak:And I have no idea what percentage that is. I know we also have a large contingent of folks who have trained faithfully and happily in a single school under a single instructor for many, many years.Andrew Moores:See it's funny you say that is such a... it's a conundrum.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah.Andrew Moores:In the martial arts, we have, you know, people that have 21 year experiences. So they train in this style for one year, this guy for one year, this for one year, but they've been training for 20 years but it's 21 year experiences. On the flip-side, we've got guys that do to do anything else but their one thing for 20 years. And those are two ends of the spectrum and I think you have to find a healthy middle ground - I'm not saying slab-dab in the middle but at something - that you're not a jack-of-all-trades but by god, get yourself out of your comfort zone and your "style" and train, understand. If you're not a grappler well you better bloody understand how to not get taken down to the ground. And if you are a grappler, you better understand what to do on your feet not just... Okay, let's go to our buts not. So it's... You know, I see it in the UFC with guys that are mixed martial artists - I see it, everyone sees it - either they're mixed martial artists, they're not martial artists. They train in everything, there are guys that have a good foundation of a base in one style will be Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or Judo or boxing or wrestling or Karate and then they need to, and should out of necessity, venture off and understand okay, I'm a stand-up fighter so now I get... my clenching sucks. So I gotta get, you know, eat some humble pie and start getting in with guys that are catch wrestlers or Thai guy or whatever it is. You know, I gotta work my clench game and my ground game stinks so I gotta join a good BJJ school and I get a good teacher who's gonna take care of me and really teach me. But it's that fine line - you gotta constantly, constantly... My biased opinion - be sure that you are training all the avenues because there's, you know. The bad guy doesn't care what style you studied, you know. If that's why you're training for 29:50 self-defense ten-point. Now on the street, your style does not matter. You and I are square off one day, no one's gonna know oh that's guy a Karate guy or that guy's a boxer or that guy's a --- no. It's an ugly bloody, disgusting, uncomfortable, awful mess that you gotta prepare yourself for. And it's not a style specific but with that being said, you gotta have some commitment and get a good foundation and not just be a squirrel or a squirrel watcher and just... oh, look at that. I'm gonna do that, oh I'm gonna try that, I want to try that, I want to try that. When I see it in strength and conditioning all the time. It's like people are following this great program and they go on YouTube University and they all of a sudden they go, wait I'm not doing this. I have clients - I have athletes, I have professional athletes that will say hey, how about this? I just... Where did you hear about this? Well I saw it on UFC highlight film for upcoming fight and he was using this equipment. I wanna try it, that's really cool. And I'm like great, cool. But let's calm down and let's follow this path and then let's see how we can add that in but let's not just completely jump off our road here. And the strength and conditioning in the martial arts world purely, for all the greats and all the bad follow such a parallel path. That's when people say wow, you have, you know, these two worlds that you play with on a high level, how do you do it? I go, they really are... they're like brothers. They're you know, maybe half-brothers or maybe, you know, brothers just don't really look alike each other necessarily but they really are. All the egos are there, all the hypocrisy is there; that's the bad stuff. But there's the movements - how the body moves - there's the beauty that you can get from the both sides of the beautiful activities, there's the... Not just the physical, I'm talking about the emotional, on the spirit and the well-being that you can get from both activities is just something. So they really are... cousins, maybe? Brothers, half-brothers, step-brothers, you know? Something like that.Jeremy Lesniak:We've talked about it a lot on the show. I mean you're checking a lot of boxes in and listeners, you're probably hearing some things coming out of Sensei Moores's mouth that, you know, are 95% the words that I've used in the past. For example, there are only so many ways to move the body and --- There really is.Jeremy Lesniak:The way I extended and only so many of them makes sense through the lens of combat. You know, this weekend I was with... I was taking a box and burn seminar with the 20 Jeffries who's an Olympic bronze medalists. And great, great system on how, you know, teach... People have no idea about martial arts or boxing and how, you know, great system of padwork is, let's be honest, a lot of martial artists just suck at padwork and there's no system on how to teach it and train it and hold the pads. And I'm not talking hand position I'm like how do you get the best from your student or best from your athlete? So, you know, training with Tony Jeffries and I'm sitting there, you know, I'm just watching this Olympic caliber boxer that... I'm like yeah but you know, he pushes, he pulls, he rotates, changes levels and we got locomotion, right? So now, you can look at every martial art and you'd find me anybody coming. Watch a football game, watch a baseball, watch even the, they call is sport, golf and the human body just moves certain way. And I don't care what color of gi you wear or what belt you put on; we're all human beings. And we're just move in those ash.Jeremy Lesniak:Let's shift gears a little bit now. Let's talk about some of the stories. I mean we've talked a lot about your mindset, we've talked a lot about psychology and, you know, we've kinda hinted a bit about some of the things that have happened in your time as a martial artist and some of the things that you've done. One of my favorite questions, probably my very favorite question to ask - the listeners know this - is about your favorite story. So when you consider your time as a martial artist, what's your favorite story that came out of that time? What would be the first chapter, maybe, in your autobiography? The one that would hook them in. Oh, that's a tough one. I get, you know... My passionate things that I do in a daily basis. I pinch myself every single time I bow in to teach classes as a... You know, I'm teaching five-year olds up to 75-year olds. And I still pinch myself like really, is this... This is what I wanted to do when I was seven years old - I wanna teach Karate my entire life. This is phenomenal. And so I spend a lot of time with making my analogies is... To get my point across, I'll give a story from my career. So I got a lot of stories and when you put me on the spot, I can't think of any that would be my absolute favorite. One that I tell quite often was when I was competing in the Okinawan Karate Championship and get my head handed to me in the semi-finals. And he was such a much better fighter and actually deserve to win and... Watching the finals, they're competing, he's competing against the gentleman from Argentina. And it was a white belt lesson on the biggest of the Karate stage. And they were two to two, they were pacing back and forth, next person who scores that anything remotely close is gonna win this, you know, the biggest coveted title in Okinawan Karate and there was a noise that the gentleman that beat me, he looked over, took his 36:21 focus off his opponent. And that nanosecond, the gentleman from Argentina threw a beautiful front kick, hit him and send him all the way back to Spain. We opened the doors so we could go flying back out, toss him his passport and bags and, there you go, pal. It was a great lesson that I laughed at in my mid-20's  but then as I'm teaching and I'm hearing myself talk to my students from five years old all the way to 75-year old thinking you know what, it's all about the basics. And that's a white felt lesson: focus. Whether it be focusing your eyes, your mind, your body, and at the biggest of stage, we can talk about the fanciest stuff - how many different ways to throw a reverse punch or blah, blah, blah, no. It comes down to the basics. Whether you're competing at a full contact, boxing, MMA or really it's an ugly situation on the street, it's the basics. It's nothing fancy. So that led me to I don't care about learning for me, personally - Kabudo or some weapons - I'm still trying to get my jab reverse punch solid. I'm... 37 years later I'm still trying to punch harder and faster and better or more efficient, understand 37:48 I'm getting older and I'm not as fast as I used to be but I'm trying to pick up on the cues and the pre-contact cues sooner. I don't have time to play with the Tonto or Sai or Bo. I have this burning desire to just get better at front kick, a roundhouse, a knee, an elbow, and a punch. And let me get better at those things and I'll be a happy martial artist.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah. When I teach - you know, as I'm travelling around - a lot of what I'm teaching is borrowed from the things that I've learned with Bill Wallace and my time with him and the Superfoot folks. And when he teaches, it's jab, cross, hook, uppercut, round, side, hook it.Andrew Moores:Yeah.Jeremy Lesniak:That's it.Andrew Moores:Yep.Jeremy Lesniak:But from those 7 techniques, you know, if you consider a three-technique combination, I mean that's seven to the third, what's 49 times 7, you know. It's over 300 different combinations. Nobody's mastering 300 combinations in any amount of time.Andrew Moores:And he absolutely has those techniques mastered. I remember I was in college and he came to do a seminar and pulls me out because I'm part of the youngest of the guys and. you know, we could grab the old guy and he could look like a stud. But Sensei Wallace polls me out of the crowd and he tells me, I’m gonna kick you to the stomach, chest, head, chest - or something like that. And he tells me order - he tells me exactly what he's going to do. And he goes, block them. And I’m like okay, this will be easy. And all of a sudden, he plants those three or four kicks and I didn't even touch one of them. And that was a neat, neat day of okay. That's the... mastering just the basics, getting really go to that. And it kinda goes right back to our guy that does, you know, 21 year experiences - how does he really have a good solid, solid understanding where I'm 30 years later, still trying to get great at my jab reverse punch? And when we have intro lessons with our brand new students, I tell them look guys, I'm still trying to get good at this stuff, that I'm still trying to improve on this stuff that you and I are working on your day one. And we live in a squirrel society of what's next, what's next society that, you know. That's what the traditional martial arts to me is - that we just focus on the basics, basics, basics, basics - in Japanese, it's Kihon. Just focus on the basics, get really good at them and shine from there as opposed to okay guys, today we'll learn something brand new, and the next day today we'll do something brand new, the next day we'll do something brand new. I don't think that flies very well.Jeremy Lesniak:It doesn't and actually, I like your use of that word - fly. Because when I'm teaching basics, I will often switch the word off. It's basics but it's also your fundamentals or your foundation, and so now we visual image. And what do we know, we can only build a structure so big based on a fixed foundation. If we can broaden out that foundation, if we can widen it out, we can go taller. The better your jab, the easier time you're going to have in throwing whatever's following it. And I think people get trapped in this idea that we work on fundamental movements simply for the personal development side, the idea of, you know, I've done this punch a million times and I'm becoming a better person because I've done that punch a million times. And yeah, that's true but there's a whole other side of it. And if you look at the best fighters in the world in any combat discipline, they've all mastered the basics, the foundation.Andrew Moores:I think is Jimmy Pedro and I... In the Olympics, he only competed with three or four throws and I think I want to say it was just three but maybe I'm wrong and it was a very small number and how many throws that or techniques that there are in Judo, and that's it. It's the basics, basics, basics. And for the strength and conditioning or the main... It's a human trait - we want more complex. We want bigger and, how do I say, shinier or it's too simple. It's not simple. It's do this consistently and that's why everyone misses. My biggest holes and things that I feel like I actually should have done this better, it comes down to consistency, you know. Being a... consistently lifting or consistently doing this or consistently doing that, and you have consistency to your training. There's a thousand ways to do what you're trying to do. I mean the people say, hey how do I get stronger? And they're trying to make a... this awful like okay I'm gonna do this percent and then on this day and this lift you're doing this percent of blah, blah, blah, blah --- there really isn't You know, you'll consistently lift the main lifts, whatever be the three, four main lifts, get stronger. Let's grow your general strength, let's grow your relative strength, improve that and let's get to your functional specific strength but you need that good foundation. It's just not this squirrel mentality will strike. Oh, let's go do this, let's go do this. And the squirrels don't have that consistency. I love this quote, I heard this quote years ago. I was at a business meeting and I wrote it down, you know --- ordinary things done on a consistent basis produce extraordinary results. Nothing fancy - ordinary done on a daily basis over and over and over again will produce that extra results that everyone's looking for and that is not just martial arts, that's not just training. That's business, that's relationships with your kids, you know, coming in and sitting down and listening when your kids say dad, dad I wanna show you this, getting down on your knee, what do you got? You don't need to go and now the flip side to this, you ignored your kid, you didn't do what you're supposed to do as a mom or a dad and you just drop a ton of money on them, and to make up for the crap you should have done or crap you did do, however you want to look at it. It's that consistency. Another feel, there's a period in my life that I did threat assessment and protection work and it was the exact same thing. It was the basics, we didn't have to get very fancy when we're dealing with whether be a domestic violence situation or a stocking situation or a workplace violence situation where we're looking at and from assessment standpoint, what's it likely that this could result to something violent happening to the client. It wasn't fancy. It was super simple. You know, we have strength and conditioning martial arts, and risk and threat assessment. I mean all is the exact same stuff. Let's pull a top chef in here, a mechanic, and a carpenter, and I'm sure they're gonna say the exact same thing. And it's something I'm very passionate about because of my nature... is I am that squirrel, you know? From my attention issues as a kid or my anxiety issue as a kid, I'm ready to move on to the next thing. And another great quote is the goal is to keep the goal the goal - Dan John who is a well-known strength coach. I remember him saying that years ago: the goal is to keep the goal the goal. And I have to remind myself that in daily basis even though I'm on my little soapbox here preaching that crap. That you have to just get... What's your goal? What's goal to get done today? What's goal? I'm want to get stronger. What's my goal? I need to teach better. What's my goal and just keeping your goal. Just keep that - your consistent goal; the sky is the limit. Whether be martial arts fitness strength conditioning, competing, you name it. It is just those basics done consistently over and over and over again. And yes it's boring, yes there's a discipline that will form from it but my 46:52 that uncomfortable because you just want to move on to a different movement or different technique or different philosophy or different idea and scratch that itch. But the best thing is don't scratch that itch. And stay at the path.Jeremy Lesniak:You know, I will challenge that statement a little bit - that it's boring - 'cause it doesn't have to be. You can train that same jab ---Andrew Moores:Oh, absolutely.Jeremy Lesniak:--- an infinite number of ways.Andrew Moores:No, I agree. And I'm...Jeremy Lesniak:We get bogged down in down, right?  A lot of times, martial arts is taught by people who are not terribly imaginative and the only things in their toolbox are the things that they're, unfortunately in most of the cases from what I've seen, the single instructor that they had had. And so they're kind of... they're not innovating martial arts. They're passing martial arts on. And so if they only know three ways to train that jab or back fist or whatever you want to call it, straight punch, yeah. It's gonna get boring.Andrew Moores:They're just regurgitating. And so as a teacher, the beauty --- This is what I sink my teeth into and what keeps me up at night is coming up with new ways to make their front kick better, their reverse punch better, whatever may be, better. I'm talking from a technical standpoint. So I came from a world where you did your 10,000 front kicks and you become good at it. So how do I get better at --- well keep doing front kicks and you sit there just slamming your head against the wall. And I met some wonderful teachers, my original teacher, Stephen Perry, one of my teachers now, Sensei Ron Fagan, who really lets... Okay, let's break the front kick down, let's break the roundhouse kick down. What are we doing? Okay, let's break this kick down in four different movements. Might be the knee driving, might be a hip rocking action, might be the extensions of foot, whatever. And now let's come over drills to make the knee drive of the roundhouse, the knee drive of the front kick, the knee drive of the side kick or the hip rocking - is a hip rocking on a snap or were you locking out on the thrust? How do we make the individual components of that one kick better? And now, let's come up with drills to build the skills to do that. And that stuff gets me out. I'm sitting here almost drooling on my computer talking about it because that's fun. You know, how do you get someone... Anyone can build a, you know lovely... You see people like oh look at my great students. And like the kid would... He's a phenomenal athlete. He would be graded anything he did. Find me the teacher who has uncoordinated students and made them into great martial artists and that's the guy that I want to sit down with and say he, what did you do? How do you get that 72-year old who's got more fake parts in his body than 49:58 How do you get them to develop a good front kick? What did you do? Your single leg strength work you did so he brings up his leg, cool. And how do you deal with this, this, and this? What are the drills? That's the stuff that keeps me up at night. And so going right back to your point, it doesn't get boring. I mean 37 years late, I'm still trying to make a jab, a reverse punch and a front kick and a side kick - maybe a side kick - a roundhouse kick better. And how do I, more importantly, my biggest passion is how do I make my students better, better than me, have them stand on my shoulders? I'd become insignificant and they just find me a small village move me there. So that's fun; that's exciting. I can't imagine in the martial arts ever getting boring with that being your drive.Jeremy Lesniak:Fully agree. If you couldAndrew Moores:I mean we have...Jeremy Lesniak:Go aheadAndrew Moores:Sorry. No, I was just saying, you know, when it comes to our front-kick standpoint, our five to seven-year olds, we have 10 major front kick drills that these kids do and then not even throwing a front kick. They are trained the different components of the front kick. The next older group, because we divided the curriculum, you know, obviously by age and ability but there's a little science behind it when it comes to the bio motor skills set that the kids have, students have. So now, we've got another 5-8 drills that we consistently use just for the front kick that will add on to those 10 and they're still not necessarily doing a full-fledged front kick. And then we get to our teen and adults which is a totally different motor skills set and they are now drilling X, Y, Z; we're working on the ball of foot. We're making sure the knee is driving correctly and the foot position, the knee position, the hip position. And it's fun and exciting, they've got a great sweat going on, it's not like we're just sitting there pontificating on how to do a front kick is they are drilling from an athletic standpoint. How to make the kick better as opposed to the school of we'll just throw your 10,00 front kicks. And yeah, you have to throw 10,000 front kicks. But imagine if you can get better and you’re doing a pretty darn great at 1,000 front kicks because you trained by design and not by accident. And then once you get to that 1,000, put your 9,000 more in because now, obviously, you'll be even better. But it's by design. And I think just, you know, I'm frustrated with the number of years that I trained that it wasn't by design. It was just well, just do the front kick. We would just kick harder. How do I get harder kick since, I just kicked harder. And yeah, I'm trying to become a harder kicker and take martial arts, now compare it to baseball. If I ask my coach say hey, how do I get a better swing in baseball? Or my bobsled coach, how do I get a better start? How do I get into the sled better? And he said, well just get into the sled better. Like, what? What are you talking about?Jeremy Lesniak:Why do you think that happens? Why is martial arts so -Andrew Moores:53:12Jeremy Lesniak:Okay, yeah. We'll use that word.Andrew Moores:I think tradition, I think loyalty to our teacher, I think... I'll go to a strength and conditioning conference or train with folks or be with a collegiate sports team and I'll how these guys move and explode. And then I go to a martial arts thing the next weekend and people are like oh, lifting weights is ridiculous; it's gonna slow you down. And you're sitting there, really? Let's go over to the Patriots weight room and tell those guys they're slow and they're not 53:50 and they have no idea how to just develop speed because we're all just humans. We move all the same. When you become a martial artist, you don't all suddenly mutant into a different species. We're still human. And martial arts has had this idea of...and don't get me wrong; I love the martial arts. I love traditional martial arts. I am a 54:15 and you don't get much more from a Karate standpoint of traditional martial art. I've never put a black gi on in my life 54:24 determines non-traditional versus non-traditional but to give you an idea, you know, I love that I train a traditional martial art. But my glasses that I choose to look at things for my students first, for me and for my martial art 54:39 is how do we make it better? How do we move the body better? Not because my... One of the biggest things and blessing is my teacher, Sensei Perry, and one of my current teachers, Sensei Ron Fagan, it wasn't about us, it's not about them. It is about how we make the next generation better stand on our shoulders. Because that's how it has to happen. In a hundred years, martial arts better be, should be better by design. Not because of better athletes, not because of technology. They should be better because of the blood, sweat and tears that the teachers put in, sitting down there with their notebook and trying to come up with better ideas of how to make the students improve on X, Y, Z; stand on their shoulders. Make them better. I'm excited for the day that my students have had it; when my student does something better than me. My ego, sure takes a ding, but a big smile comes on my face because it's like, goo. Good, stand on my shoulders. Be better than me. And you know, why martial artists... Maybe his ego, maybe it's the romantic side of you know, the Sensei and the student or the Senpai and the Kohai, the senior, the junior and... You always want to keep your... You put your Sensei on a pedestal and you shoot from respect and sacrifice standpoint but understanding my responsibility despite of the, you know... If you can sum up my teaching, Jeremy, is my responsibility isn't to my teachers. My responsibility... Or nor is it to my style. My responsibility is to my students. And then it gets even heavier from there - my responsibility is to my students' students and then my students' students’ students. And that keeps me up at night and makes me think about my legacy and am I following the right path as far as my concern for making students better, you know?Jeremy Lesniak:Let's face it, if you're not making your students better than you, then martial arts is getting worse.Andrew Moores:Absolutely. I mean it doesn't... grab a scrap piece of paper and you put today's martial arts at level 10 and then well, my student's not as good as me and then become level 8 or they're not 57:07 But you know, the broken clock is right twice a day and a really bad teacher can produce great students because... but wasn't by design. It's because 57:25 The students are phenomenal athlete. They would be a great chess player. They'd be great at croquet, right? But are they, you know... That's why I have some older students. I mean I got professional fighters fun to train with, don't get me wrong. But my gosh, what pushes my buns is a student who's got fake left and I see... I'm afraid I'm trying not to you know, doubles too much privacy here but... Yeah, hip replacement, knee replacement, shoulder replacement, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, they get up and they say Sensei, you know, I want to train. You're like, okay. Well you got someone with the two left feet and you gotta make them into a decent martial artists and you know... That stuff. That's just... sink your teeth into and... But I think there's a lot of folks out there, unfortunately, that don't see it that way. They just say what can my student do for me as opposed to what can I do for my student?Jeremy Lesniak:So well put. So tell the audience now what do you have going on and how they might reach you. You know, you've said some pretty poignant stuff today, some stuff that I'm pretty sure is gonna connect with a lot of the folks that we have listening. And they may want to follow you on social media if that's a thing for you or find your website or email you or whatever communication methods you want to put out. So you know, let's step into commercial time now and you can stand on a soapbox and tell people all that stuff.Andrew Moores:I don't have a great black belt in social media. I'm probably a mid-range green belt but atlantickarate.com is our school website. One thing we're launching, hopefully in 12 months from - I won't say hopefully, I'm taking that out. You and I were talking prior to this. In 12 months from nowJeremy Lesniak:Right. It's gonna happen.Andrew Moores:It's happening. I'm telling everybody and to hold myself accountable like Muhammad Ali held himself accountable for his training. Martial Athlete is going to be a huge project for, I'd say, us - my staff here, myself. Developing the martial artist as an athlete and I'm not taking the combatives or the self-defense side out of it but look at it from an athletic standpoint. So, you know, what fuels my fire is... 10,000 front kicks or how can we get that support leg to be stronger? The left leg when he brings his right to throw a right front kick or a roundhouse kick, how we get that stronger, how we work on his mobility? And from his knee, hip and feet or her knee, hip and feet, how do we make that so at 1,000 reps, they are 10 times better than I was at that stage? And how can we look from a strength and conditioning standpoint to make your students better? You know, front kick is my favorite analogy and I've used it quite a bit in this podcast but you know, you bring your leg up and you throw a front kick. Now you need to have that support leg, that left leg or whatever leg that's still on the ground, that determines how great your kick's gonna be- it's not the kicking leg, it's the support leg. So if it's a support leg like a great foundation to a martial artist, that support leg's your foundation to the ground. Shouldn't we understand how to make that better and stronger and more mobile and get what we need whether be it a 30 degree bend on the knee and whether be... oh, you know, I can back squat great. That's two feet though. Now I wanna see you on one foot with that slight bend, now rock your hips forward and you have the hamstring mobility. Do you have the... You know, there's a ten-point system we run through our students to just to make the kick better. So that's the martial athlete that we're gonna shoot for August 1st of 2019. Which I'm making this very public, aren't I?Jeremy Lesniak:You are.Andrew Moores:I'm excited. It combines my martial arts with my strength and conditioning - two passions of mine. If you look at my... one of my two large bookshelves here in my office, half, you know... I got my security work threat assessment but then I got my strength conditioning, and my martial arts side. So it's a passion and something that talking to fellow martial artists that they're hounding me about to get off the ground. So I'm trying to clear way in my life here to make that work.Jeremy Lesniak:I see. And long-time listeners know that, you know, strength conditioning are... it's a passion of mine as well. We've had some folks on under the cross-fit community which is another world that I spend a lot of time playing in. And you said it early on, it's all movement; it all relates. And just 'cause we're martial artists we're not some weird species. But of course ---Andrew Moores:Yeah, it's funny you say cross-fit because I remember I was doing a... I was training a fighter for a fight and I'm not weird. I really couldn't even tell you what we're doing. And someone comes in and like oh, you're doing cross-fit with him. I'm like, what do you mean I'm doing cross-fit with him? I really was curious and I wasn't like, you know, being argumentative. I'm like really want to understand like well, I saw a cross-fit person do that movement. And I'm like... and it was like the most arbitrary --- I couldn't even tell you what it was because a reaching lunge, was it a... I have no idea. I don't even know, you know. And that's the human eye, I believe. In human nature, they want to categorize something and, you know, because the person's doing a sprawl, it might look like a burpee and if you want... Obviously cross-fit doesn't own burpees but yet the people would just say hey, that must be this. The same thing as oh, you must do box. No I don't know how to box. Well that punch look like a... It's a punch. It's a punch off the rear side using, you know, my hips are moving on a transverse plane, I'm extending my right --- what are you talking about? It's just, it's human nature to kind of group folks in there and I go back to we push, we pull, we change levels, we rotate and we have locomotion; that's it. There's no other way to... the body to move. Whether it be cross-fit, whether it be "functional training", whether it be a martial arts, whether it be track and field, whether it be wrestling - that's what we do. Bring a sports psychologists or organizational psychologists onto the show and explain why, as humans, we have to organize things in these cute little boxes.Jeremy Lesniak:I have some theories but I'm pretty sure that would kick us off into another hour of discussion which we didn't schedule for. So I'm not gonna pin you that but hey, we can certainly chat about that again. And of course, folks, you know, the things that we talked about today, we'll link them over on the website whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. If you're new to the show, you can grab the link there.Andrew Moores:And I know during... we are on, I mean I joked about social media 'cause my buddies tell me I need to do a lot more. And we're kicking it off, hopefully technology-wise. In two weeks, we will be producing a lot content - drills. We're gonna call them Martial Art Minutes which is gonna be a nice 60-second of a drill focusing on one very focused thing.Jeremy Lesniak:Awesome.Andrew Moores:One aspect would be nice videos. We’re on Facebook, Instagram. We're all there it's just that, you know, it's a little bit... I like this; I like talking to people. And I get a little leery about the whole, you know, I'm just putting it out there, it's a shiny little package for people to see and... It’s your highlight reel, right? Dave Ramsay said that best: social media is your highlight reel. And you know, here I'm talking like... I'm talking with my students about being authentic to themselves, authentic to their training. And then I'm kinda flirting with this unrealistic world. I remember seeing a picture - we're getting off topic and you can tell me to shut it up but - I saw these photos from a friend of mind, it's like this gala, right. And I'm like wow, they're beautiful people. They're successful people right? And so I click on like their profile, looked at their name I'm like wow, this looks beautiful. So then I happen to just google them. And they were... I think they were on probation for taking money for some kid they'd adopted. They took this, their parent had died. And it was just awful thing. It was awful. And talk about what the shiny you looked on social media and how it looked just nice and like wow, I wanna be those people. But then you peel the onion back 1:06:53 brutal sharp story. You know, there's lots of layers here 1:06:58 peel the onion back and like, okay. That's the real truth. And there's my hesitation with social media world is do I really want to go flirt with it and to what extent?Jeremy Lesniak:Awesome. Yeah, yeah it's an amazing world out there. I think if people applied the principles that we learn in martial arts to the way they consume social media ---Andrew Moores:Yup, absolutely.Jeremy Lesniak:--- dramatically different things.Andrew Moores:Yeah, absolutely. I can't, I can't agree with you more. I'm sitting here smirking 1:07:37Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah. Well, thank you. Let's tie this up. Let's give the folks some words to go out on. I'd like to call it words of wisdom or you know, you can apply any sitting them you want for but just something poignant that we can drop here at the end of our time together for the folks listening.Andrew Moores:You put me on the spot here.Jeremy Lesniak:It's what I do. It's my job.Andrew Moores:Yeah. Yeah, thanks. You're doing a great job at it.Jeremy Lesniak:Thank you.Andrew Moores:I got a lot of things probably, you know... Well we'll just end it with take what you just did on the training floor and imply it to every part of your life and be genuine to that. You know, the bow, the 1:08:24. In Japanese, the 1:08:26 literally means respect. It does not mean bow and you're constantly reminding yourself of who you should be, of respect. When you're bowing and you hear your Sensei saying it. Even the word sensei - I mean we're talking a little bit earlier off the air, Sensei is not a title. Sensei is a role. And anyone that treats it, you know, unfortunately a lot of folks do and wonderfully a lot of folks don't, they treat it as a title. Call me Sensei and they put their thumbs in their belt and they ha-ha-ha. It's a role. So when I hear someone says Sensei or I hear my daughter say daddy, I say to myself oh crap, that's right. I'm a dad. Or that's right, I'm a Sensei. I have a responsibility. When you look at from that focal point, and you might be listening to this 1:09:18 Sensei, well we don't have names like that. Well you're a martial artist, you’re a student. So I hear a student of mine whether it'd be a five-year old or 75-year old say Sensei and I don't sit there and beat my chest. I sit there and say that's right. I have responsibility. Like when Dr. Johnson hears his name - doctor Johnson - or has a role pulled up; it's not a title. And if you look at it from that little paradigm shift, the crap rolls uphill, you've got a responsibility to do whatever it is your role/ if you want to call it a title, it is. Don't sit there, I'm a Hanshi, I'm a Shi--- You go to Japan, Okinawa and they say, Shihan and they're like what are you talking about? No one calls... They don't call each other Shihan they will sit there and laugh at you. But in other parts of the world - America or in Europe - they'll tend to do it. And I’ve never introduced myself as Sensei. I mean... When you asked me what do I... I got a little uncomfortable, didn't I?Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah.Andrew Moores:I just... it doesn't... It's a role. And I think if we, as teachers, treated as such, I think the martial arts world might change. I really think; that's a huge piece. So whether you call yourself Guru or professor or Sensei or, you know, whatever it is, remind yourself... It's a reminder. Well yeah, hey, I'm a Karate student. I'm a Karateka, I'm a BJJ stylist. I'm a Judoka. Remind yourself - you're a Judo student, you're a player. You're a student and what does that mean from your discipline, from your morals, from your respect, from your training. And use that filter, that litmus. Now say use that filter for everything you tackle throughout that day - everything. From a podcast to putting your shoes away perfectly straight on the shoe-rack at the dojo but also at home. You treat your partner with great respect, but when you go home and you treat your wife like crap. I mean it just... You're hypocrite if you don't.Jeremy Lesniak:I think if you would told me how similar Sensei Moores and I would be in our philosophies, I wouldn't have believed you. But here I felt I was talking to someone who really kinda checked all the same boxes, had a lot of the same experiences, a lot of the same realizations. And it's always helpful to talk to people who feels similarly to you but are able to articulate it well. Because I'm constantly looking at my own set of beliefs and seeing should they be refined? Should they be revised? And if you got half of what I got out of today's episode, you're probably smiling. So thank you, Sensei Moores for coming on the show.You can head on over to whistlekickmartialartsradio.com to find out more links, photos, all kinds of other good stuff. Do it. If you haven't been there in a while, check it out. We're constantly making improvements. We've got some new navigation up there to help you hone in on episodes by region or by style, if that's important to you, maybe you'll find an episode you forgot about or didn't even know that was there. If you want to email me, you can do so jeremy@whisltekick.com. And you can follow us on social media. We are @whistlekick. If you're not following us on Instagram and you use Instagram, you are missing out. The stuff that we're putting out - I don't even put it out personally so I get to follow along just like everybody else - it's awesome. I love it. One of my favorite accounts. And of course, you should probably head on over to whistlekick.com at some point, see everything that we've got going on there. If you don't check in with that site monthly, you're probably missing out on the new stuff. That's all I've got for you today. Until next time. Train hard, smile, and have a great day.Jeremy Lesniak:Hey there, thanks for tuning in. This is whistlekick Martial Arts Radio episode 338. Today, my guest is Sensei Andrew Moores. My name's Jeremy Lesniak, I'm your host for the show. I'm the founder at whistlekick and I am dedicating my life to sharing and growing the traditional martial arts through everything that we're doing with this show, with whistlekick, and with the multitude of other projects that we've got fingers and hands, and sometimes even toes, wedged into. If you want to see all of those, head on over whistlekick.com and find out, see everything that we've got going, see all the things that keep me up late at night. If you've been listening for a while, may you could leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts or on Stitcher or wherever you get your podcast from - those positive review help people the show and let's be honest, if you don't like the show, you're probably not listening. But if you don't like the show, let me know why; I want to know why. Doesn't mean we're gonna change it but I would like to know. And of course, I'm always open to feedback - positive, negative - hopefully it's constructive. Just trying to make this better. And the more feedback you give me, the better I can do my job.Let's talk about today's guest. Is it possible to be a die-hard, dedicated, passionate traditional martial artist and still find value, still find importance, in the more modernized concepts that someone call more modern martial arts or self-defense focused arts? I would say yes and so would today's guest. Sensei Andrew Moores is a passionate, if nothing else, immensely passionate traditional martial artist but he also looks at the world through a very broad perspective that goes far beyond what his initial art time. We'll get into that, we'll get into a lot of other good stuff so rather than giving you a synopsis here, I'll just step back and let you listen to my conversation with Sensei Andrew Moores.Sensei Moores, welcome to whistlekick Martial Arts Radio.Andrew Moores:Thank you very much for having me.Jeremy Lesniak:Oh, it's a pleasure to have you, yet another referral from a member of our community; I guess we can say. Somebody that I know fairly well, somebody that you know and kind of put us together and said hey, we gotta get you on the show. And here you are, you're on the show.Andrew Moores:Yeah, it was a very passionate introduction, too. I was flattered by it so I appreciate the introduction and getting to meet you.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah. Well, you know, we start in a pretty obvious way but I can't think of a better way to really start. So let's get this of the way and let's use it as a springboard to the rest of the things we're going to talk about. How did you become a martial artist?Andrew Moores:You know, 1982, I believe, 03:33 7 years olds, 6 years olds, and just always loved the martial arts, and bugged and bugged my parents and I was the youngest of three. And they carved me down to a martial arts school. And I remember they're getting started and it was in a basement - a shady basement of a shady plaza. But I remember before that, I don't know if, you know, my foggy memory, but I remember seeing a - I share this story too often but I'll share it with you - I was in Papa Gino's with my mom and I saw this man slap a woman. And at the age of six or seven, you don't have a reference point for that - you don't get it, you know. And I grew up in a very affluent area in New Hampshire and just the violence, the worst kid scenario is that kid always stole my chocolate milk money. So I remember seeing it and I remember having feeling of helplessness - just confusion but helplessness. Like I wanted to help but not really knowing what or how to do and that really stuck with me for many, many years, and brought me, you know... Even that helps, you know, my competitive career - trying to dissolve that helplessness feeling and I know a lot of martial artists don't... they train, they train, they train but when it comes to the street, reality, it's 05:18 the dojo book 05:19 for something really happen? And so that helpless feeling really drove a lot of my career since Papa Gino's in the Newington Mall, 30 or 27 or 30 something years ago.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah. Take us back a bit to that moment. You know, you're 6 years old - you're young - but clearly, you had enough context for life and what went on that it made an impact on you. You're still remembering it today, I'm hearing some emotion in your voice. What do you remember about how you felt?Andrew Moores:Well, you know, there's a little part I skipped over. It's that helpless feeling and then you fast-forward so if I was 6 years old, fast-forward 12, 13 years, I trained in the martial arts for several years, stopped, you know, ran track at the collegiate level. And I was walking home from a party with a friend who lived in my apartment building. And her boyfriend or ex-boyfriend had come up from Boston. They had broken up, and you know, this is years before the cellphones so there wasn't that phone call or texting argument. He came up to have a conversation and yet two of his buddies with him. And I remember that helpless feeling that I had back when I was at Papa Gino's as a six-year old. And here I am, a collegiate athlete, knowing that if the verbal spit hits the fan, I'll be all out running but I gotta protect her. So I used my mouth and my brains and everything fine, walked her home and that next morning, I called a mutual friend who had a school and I got started less than 48... Started back in the martial arts 48 hours later after a six year hiatus. And that drive to squash that helpless feeling was the hardest fire of my career, so far.Jeremy Lesniak:Now, it sounds like you're maybe being diplomatic or, you know, maybe there's some subtlety in here that you're intentionally leaving as such. And if that's the case, I don't want you to feel pressured to share more than you want to share. You're describing a scenario, you know, this ex-boyfriend and a couple of buddies kind of popping up and it sounds like it could have gone sideways - like really badly.Andrew Moores:Oh, absolutely. I mean the two buddies ---Jeremy Lesniak:But it didn't.Andrew Moores:No, it didn't. I mean the two buddies behind him, you know, here I'm walking a friend of mine, she lived in the apartment across the hall from me. It was a weird night; it was a "riot" had broken out at the university. And there was SWAT teams there calming the students down and... sorry, not SWAT teams but riot teams there. 08:43 fall night. And the two buddies were behind the ex-boyfriend. You know, they 'oh, let's go f 'em up. Come on, man, let's just drop this guy. You know why he's with your girl', and you know, egging them on. And I don't know where it was or where it came from, inside I was a little puppy dog like 'oh my gosh, what's going on?', and even a fleeting moment of yeah, you really should have stuck with the martial arts then. What came out of my mouth was very different and I had nothing really to lose. And what I told him, that nullified the situation.Jeremy Lesniak:What did you say?Andrew Moores:I said something along the lines that I, I obviously, you know... Your voice, I was serious but yet I was friendly. I said that, you know, I'm going to be walking her home and no matter what happens, nothing is going to happen to her. And I, you know, there' s some sharp language that I might have used in there that I don't think is necessarily appropriate for your podcast, but it was very firm that she was going home as she wanted to go home. And I basically over my dead body, the same thing going to happen. My words didn't instigate but he knew I was serious but I'd rather that nothing happen. And it worked; he just backed off. His buddies were like, what the hell is going on? What are you doing? But I think he just saw that I was pretty serious. Now inside, I was like oh my god, someone help. There's like 50 police officers on the street right next door; somebody? Anyone? But on the outside, I knew I had to be more of a howler and make sure he knew I was serious.Jeremy Lesniak:You know, I've often heard people say that when crap starts going down, most people will kinda chaotic and riled up and everything. But it's the person who doesn't, the person who stays calm in that chaos that you need to watch out for. And it sounds like that was almost your approach. You didn't rise or lower yourself - however you want to look at it - to what they were putting out there. You just kinda stayed centered, I guess, if I can say, that he didn't know how to react to that.Andrew Moores:Yeah, I think that was my ---Jeremy Lesniak:So they moved on because, again, that is a very intimidating thing to see that level of confidence in a heated situation.Andrew Moores:It is and what's... You know, Tony Blauer, who's been a guest in your show and a mentor, someone I trained with for a number of years and you know, he says very eloquently that you don't fight fire with fire; you fight fire with water. And that, this occasion happen maybe 10 years before I met Tony or 5 years and.... very true. I remember when I heard Tony say that and I go, 'oh, yeah' I mean a flashback to that night. I don't think it was natural skill, I'm not telling like look, you know, I knew this stuff before, no. I think it was either: a) dumb luck or just innate... I gotta calm the situation down and... because, you know, I didn't want anything to go down, she didn't want anything to go down, and I don't think the boyfriend really wanted anything to go down. The only one that really wanted to go down was the two drunk buddies, you know, pacing back and forth. And I don't know if they really wanted to go down. I think they're much more of howlers than I had to be so... But we all got out of it and that night, I remember looking at the phone number on a phone book for my old martial arts school that I kind of moved on. And I couldn't wait to call, but I called the next morning 'cause I thought a 1 a.m. phone call would be a little sketchy. You know that feeling? And I think a lot of martial artists have that feeling, I think a lot of martial artists had the feeling this was my drawn to training with Tony Blauer was you have great punches and kicks and elbows and blocks and your solid guard and your passes, your mounts, and your jokes, da-da-da-da. But yet we saw this little puppy dog inside us that can get a little bit nervous and are not sure what to do and that analysis-paralysis will enter the equation. And so that, even after I've won some large full-contact tournaments and then competed the international level, I still got that itch and that burning desire to handle that uncomfortableness of not knowing exactly what to do or is this really going down? How to deal with the mental and the psychological side of real violence. And that led me to Tony and by far, I think the best in the world when it comes to training men, women, children, professional martial artists, law enforcement, military, on how to deal with the mental and psychological side of violence in addition to the physical skills.Jeremy Lesniak:I would argue that the psychological piece - being able to understand that is far more important. Because if you understand that, the physical skills become, in a sense, less important or at least ---Andrew Moores:Absolutely. Again, not to keep quoting Tony, I promise he's not paid me money but you know, the proverbial grandma who defeated the bad guy with her purse because she got pissed with indignation of how dare you. And she just smothered them. You know, where did she get her black belt from?  And it wasn't... It was her will to survive, his indignation of how dare you and just her mental and psychological skills. And she may have a bad hip and had a cane and she used that cane. She smacked him and the real bad guy ran off and yeah. I mean it's like a little boy at the edge of a diving board, right? He knows how to swim, he knows how to jump but he's sitting there, his legs shaking before his first dive; and that analysis paralysis. And I'm not ashamed to admit it and I think a lot of martial artists, and I think men, are. And I think this is silly but you know, you train your butt off, you train hard but that's dojo stuff. That's your gym There's agreement between you and your training partner. When it's violence in the street, there isn't an agreement. I'm not talking about two guys squirming off and look like boxers outside a bar 'cause that has pseudo agreement to it. I'm talking real life or death violence. And the psychological side and emotional side are just huge, huge. I do lectures are different corporations - I just got email today about going next week to train the entire teaching staff at a local university - sorry, local community college here - on violence. And my talk is nothing physical. It is on the emotional and the psychological side, the PowerPoint presentation. I'm not teaching a palm-heel-strike or eye poke or knee to the groin - it is all psychological and emotional side to dealing with violence and then if you rewind a few steps before that, we're talking about how to avoid the violence all together and understanding, you know, your intuition and how that plays into your awareness and survival skills. And we, we all spend two hours of PowerPoint presentation n a fancy suit and we do not talk about what's the best elbow strike to throw. Because at the end of the day, no one says hey, what did you throw? What did you do? Or no one grazed you hey, you know Jeremy did a nice job with that elbow strike to the bad guy. I'm gonna give you a B rating on that elbow strike; no one does. It's more like did you throw it? And even a poor elbow strike to the face is gonna suck. So you know, did you throw it? And that's not physical - that's a mental and emotional side to dealing with something that's very scary. But it's enlightening, it's a refreshing when you meet seasoned and... what it is, it's not as much to martial artists. My big paradigm shift with all the scheme not from martial artists that train, train, train but from law enforcement and the military guys. The guys that really see the stuff, see the bad stuff. They're honest. I remember sitting in a talk with Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman here at Sig Arms Academy and he was talking about the different things that your body goes through when dealing with violence. And we're talking about the, you know, vascular construction and 18:39 exclusion and one of the last things is, you know, avoiding of the bowels. And I'm like, what? And he 18:46 his PowerPoint presentation. And I'm like what are you talking about? Now I'm in a room full of law enforcement and military, and I'm the only, at least one of us but 18:59 only civilian in this room. In the seminar was Lt. Colonel Grossman and we're all like... I'm looking around and I'm seeing all these heads nod up and down. And I'm like what are you talking about avoiding of the bowels? And one of the gentleman goes like - next to me - he goes well, LA SWAT Team calls it the combat crap. And I'm like, what? And he was... My time with law enforcement and military that really understood that these guys... martial artists, we play warriors. We play it, we put the gi on, we bow - we play warriors. The law enforcement and military, they are warriors - day in, day out. Some of them, yes, might have, you know, a nice BS badge they can wear but most of them... I mean there is... I remember this, I'm in this really bad situation and I was scared out of my mind. And you know what, that's refreshing. Like the fact that these warriors give themselves permission to be scared, to be afraid, and then how do they deal with that? You know, how do you deal with that emotion? You just bury it and say well I was just... I'm a wimp and I'm just not gonna tell my buddies? Or do you start going through fear management training? And you're doing scenario training that will help you inoculate each of that emotion? And that was a big paradigm shift for me to who I want to spend time with and I didn't have time in my life to train with; you know, folks that are just going to BS their way through and tell me these things are... they're full of crap. I want one guys that were just you know what, here's what I was thinking, I was scared out of my mind and then I got home and I trained it till I wasn't afraid anymore. So that was as big part of my... a road I've taken and I visit often.Jeremy Lesniak:Sure. Well we've kind of book-ended in a sense - where you started and a lot of where you are now. I know there are other elements to what you're doing now and I know we're gonna get into them - I'm hoping we're going to get into them at least.Andrew Moores:Sure.Jeremy Lesniak:But there are a couple of big steps there so where we left off, you were ready to get back into martial arts - you made the phone call. So I'm assuming you started training again and I'm assuming that at some point you made the decision I need more around - let's call it reality combatives or whatever term people want to apply to that - and then you also mentioned that you did some full-contact on a pretty high level. So those are quite disparate forks in your path. I mean whether one was a tangent from the other, or maybe there's a loop, you know. How do we navigate that highway to get... catches us up to now?Andrew Moores:Yeah. I think the martial arts world is just a beautiful, passionate world that is very dysfunctional in a sense of... you know, the body moves on a certain number of ways - we can push, we can pull, we can rotate, we can change levels set. That's really it, right? So when you're born and the obstetrician doesn't say to your mom hey, congratulations we have a Taekwondo specialist here; or hey, congratulations your kid's a Judo guy; or congratulations your child's a reality --- We do it. We have got a Karate punch, sure. Is there a boxer's punch? Sure. Is there little fine differences? There are. You know, I have some great friends, some of bests of bestfriends that, you know, if I had an emergency at 4 in the morning, they would be up and help me out as fast as they could. That they like 22:50 such a diverse or you're jumping a lot of different roads and I don't think do. I really feel my strength and conditioning road I take, my martial arts road I take, and we do a traditional Karate style. I've spent a long time with folks like Antonio Blauer that everyone's like well how do  you blend those two? And I don't think there is a big difference from the physical side of things. Because, you know, no one comes out wow you're a BlauerTactical person, you're born. We push, we pull, we change levels, we rotate, and we got our locomotion and that's it. And so to answer your question... So I trained a few years in college, when I get back in doing college, but something was missing and I had nothing to do with the reality or I've you know, fix filling that void of can I take care of myself in a bad situation. It was my teacher. This teacher I hooked up with was kind of the closest guy who has the same style I had done as a kid but I didn't feel as though it had the... It wasn't the teacher I was looking for. And got introduced to a gentleman named Stephen Perry who became my teacher because when I met him, immediately, I go this is the person I want to train with. And it had nothing to do with how hard he hit or punch or tough he was or not or... but just was this is who I want to call Sensei. And so I had left my other school before my black belt test to start a whole brand different style of Karate and it was the best decision I ever made. I start off as a white belt and worked even harder to... 'cause I was chasing that belt at the time, worked even harder to train in there 8 days a week to get the most I could but it was most importantly that I had the teacher that I wanted, that I felt I could train under.Jeremy Lesniak:When you made that decision to step into this school with this other gentleman, the one that you really wanted to call Sensei, I'm assuming there was some fear, some anxiety about making that transition?Andrew Moores:You know, there was. It was a personal fear and nothing to do with belt rank and nothing to do with anything other than I had quit Karate when I was 12 years old and I... took some of my high school and some of my college years off to run in track and field - compete in track field - and then I started off then I get back into it and then I "quit" from that school. And I had this little chip on my shoulders, hey are you quitting? You know, are you a quitter? Is this when things are getting tough, are you a quitter? Are you a quitter? And so that was my biggest obstacle - was to shut that voice up and then prove to myself, first and foremost, that you know, when I was a kid quit because I was about to test for my, I think it was my brown belt as a kid. It was a big test and I quit and you know... Talk about the emotional and psychological side of things here; I'm a grown and competed the highest levels of track and field, and full-contact Karate but I still had, you know, the impression when I was a young boy of you know... in trying to prove that wrong. So you know, that was my biggest thing. Putting that white belt on, I was more proud to put that white belt on than my brow belt at my other school. It meant more to me; it was the right path. I was driving down the right road as opposed to wondering is this really gonna take me to my... the vacation spot I want to get to.Jeremy Lesniak:Now a lot of the folks that we have listening have cross-trained or trained in multiple schools for reasons of choice or reasons of necessityAndrew Moores:Yup.Jeremy Lesniak:And I have no idea what percentage that is. I know we also have a large contingent of folks who have trained faithfully and happily in a single school under a single instructor for many, many years.Andrew Moores:See it's funny you say that is such a... it's a conundrum.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah.Andrew Moores:In the martial arts, we have, you know, people that have 21 year experiences. So they train in this style for one year, this guy for one year, this for one year, but they've been training for 20 years but it's 21 year experiences. On the flip-side, we've got guys that do to do anything else but their one thing for 20 years. And those are two ends of the spectrum and I think you have to find a healthy middle ground - I'm not saying slab-dab in the middle but at something - that you're not a jack-of-all-trades but by god, get yourself out o your comfort zone and your "style" and train, understand. If you're not a grappler well you better bloody understand how to not get taken down to the ground. And if you are a grappler, you better understand what to do on you feet not just... Okay, let's go to our buts not. So it's... You know, I see it n the UFC with guys that are mixed martial artists - I see it, everyone sees it - either they're mixed martial artists, they're not martial artists. THey train in everything, there are guys that have a good foundation of a base in one style will be Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or Judo or boxing or wrestling or Karate and then they need to, and should out of necessity, venture off and understand okay, I'm a stand-up fighter so now I get... my clenching sucks. So I gotta get, you know, eat some humble pie and start getting in with guys that are catch wrestlers or Thai guy or whatever it is. You know, I gotta work my clench game and my ground game stinks so I gotta join a good BJJ school and I get a good teacher who's gonna take care of me and really teach me. But it's that fine line - you gotta constantly, constantly... My biased opinion - be sure that you are training all the avenues because there's, you know. The bad guy doesn't care what style you studied, you know. If that's why you're training for 29:50 self-defense ten-point. Now on the street, your style does not matter. You and I are square off one day, no one's gonna know oh that's guy a Karate guy or that guy's a boxer or that guy's a --- no. It's an ugly bloody, disgusting,  uncomfortable, awful mess that you gotta prepare yourself for. And it's not a style specific but with that being said, you gotta have some commitment and get a good foundation and not just be a squirrel or a squirrel watcher and just... oh, look at that. I'm gonna do that, oh I'm gonna try that, I want to try that, I want to try that. When I see it in strength and conditioning all the time. It's like people are following this great program and they go on YouTube university and they all of a sudden they go, wait I'm not doing this. I have clients - I have athletes, I have professional athletes that will say hey, how about this? I just... Where did you hear about this? Well I saw it on UFC highlight film for upcoming fight and he was using this equipment. I wanna try it, that's really cool. And I'm like great, cool. But let's calm down and let's follow this path and then let's see how we can add that in but let's not just completely jump off our road here. And the strength and conditioning in the martial arts world purely, for all the greats and all the bad follow such a parallel path. That's when people say wow, you have, you know, these two worlds that you play with on a high level, how do you do it? i go, they really are... they're like brothers. They're you know, maybe half-brothers or maybe, you know, brothers just don't really look alike each other necessarily but they really are. All the egos are there, all the hypocrisy is there; that's the bad stuff. But there's the movements - how the body moves - there's the beauty that you can get from the both sides of the beautiful activities, there's the... Not just the physical, I'm talking about the emotional, on the spirit and the well-being that you can get from both activities is just something. So they really are... cousins, maybe? Brothers, half-brothers, step-brothers, you know? Something like that.Jeremy Lesniak:We've talked about it a lot on the show. I mean you're checking a lot of boxes in and listeners, you're probably hearing some things coming out of Sensei Moores's mouth that, you know, are 95% the words that I've used in the past. For example, there are only so many ways to move the body and --- There really is.Jeremy Lesniak:The way I extended and only so many of them makes sense through the lens of combat. You know, this weekend I was with... I was taking a box and burn seminar with the 20 Jeffries who's an Olympic bronze medalists. And great, great system on how, you know, teach... People have no idea about martial arts or boxing and how, you know, great system of padwork is, let's be honest, a lot of martial artists just suck at padwork and there's no system on how to teach it and train it and hold the pads. And I'm not talking hand position I'm like how do you get the best from your student or best from your athlete? So, you know, training with Tony Jeffries and I'm sitting there, you know, I'm just watching this Olympic caliber boxer that... I'm like yeah but you know, he pushes, he pulls, he rotates, changes levels and we got locomotion, right? So now, you can look at every martial art and you'd find me anybody coming. Watch a football game, watch a baseball, watch even the, they call is sport, golf and the human body just moves certain way. And I don't care what color of gi you wear or what belt you put on; we're all human beings. And we're just move in those ash.Jeremy Lesniak:Let's shift gears a little bit now. Let's talk about some of the stories. I mean we've talked a lot about your mindset, we've talked a lot about psychology and, you know, we've kinda hinted a bit about some of the things that have happened in your time as a martial artist and some of the things that you've done. One of my favorite questions, probably my very favorite question to ask - the listeners know this - is about your favorite story. So when you consider your time as a martial artist, what's your favorite story that came out of that time? What would be the first chapter, maybe, in your autobiography? The one that would hook them in. Oh, that's a tough one. I get, you know... My passionate things that I do in a daily basis. I pinch myself every single time I bow in to tech classes as a... You know, I'm teaching five-year olds up to 75-year olds. And I still pinch myself like really, is this... This is what I wanted to do when I was seven years old - I wanna teach Karate my entire life. This is phenomenal. And so I spend a lot of time with making my analogies is... To get my point across, I'll give a story from my career. So I got a lot of stories and when you put me on the spot, I can't think of any that would be my absolute favorite. One that I tell quite often was when I was competing in the Okinawan Karate Championship and get my head handed to me in the semi-finals. And he was such a much better fighter and actually deserve to win and... Watching the finals, they're competing, he's competing against the gentleman from Argentina. And it was a white belt lesson on the biggest of the Karate stage. And they were two to two, they were pacing back and forth, next person who scores that anything remotely close is gonna win this, you know, the biggest coveted title in Okinawan Karate and there was a noise that the gentleman that beat me, he looked over, took his 36:21 focus off his opponent. And that nanosecond, the gentleman from Argentina threw a beautiful front kick, hit him and send him all the way back to Spain. We opened the doors so we could go flying back out, toss him his passport and bags and, there you go, pal. It was a great lesson that I laughed at in my mid-20's  but then as I'm teaching and I'm hearing myself talk to my students from five years old all the way to 75-year old thinking you know what, it's all about the basics. And that's a white felt lesson: focus. Whether it be focusing your eyes, your mind, your body, and at the biggest of stage, we can talk about the fanciest stuff - how many different ways to throw a reverse punch or blah, blah, blah, no. It comes down to the basics. Whether you're competing at a full contact, boxing, MMA or really it's an ugly situation on the street, it's the basics. It's nothing fancy. So that led me to I don't care about learning for me, personally - Kabudo or some weapons - I'm still trying to get my jab reverse punch solid. I'm.. 37 years later I'm still trying to punch harder and faster and better or more efficient, understand 37:48 I'm getting older and I'm not as fast as I used to be but I'm trying to pick up on the cues and the pre-contact cues sooner. I don't have time to play with the Tonto or Sai or Bo. I have this burning desire to just get better at front kick, a roundhouse, a knee, an elbow, and a punch. And let me get better at those things and I'll be a happy martial artist.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah. When I teach - you know, as I'm travelling around - a lot of what I'm teaching is borrowed from the things that I've learned with Bill Wallace and my time with him and the Superfoot folks. And when he teaches, it's jab, cross, hook,  uppercut, round, side, hook it.Andrew Moores:Yeah.Jeremy Lesniak:That's it.Andrew Moores:Yep.Jeremy Lesniak:But from those 7 techniques, you know, if you consider a three-technique combination, I mean that's seven to the third, what's 49 times 7, you know. It's over 300 different combinations. Nobody'd mastering 300 combinations? In any amount of time.?Andrew Moores:And he absolutely has those techniques mastered. I remember I was in college and he came to do a seminar and pulls me out because I'm part of the youngest of the guys and. you know, we could grab the old guy and he could look like a stud. But Sensei Wallace polls me out of the crowd and he tells me, I;m gonna kick you to the stomach, chest, head, chest - or something like that. And he tells me order - he tells me exactly what he's going to do. And he goes, block them. And I;m like okay, this will be easy. And all of a sudden, he plants those three or four kicks and I didn't even touch one of them. And that was a neat, neat day of okay. That's the... mastering just the basics, getting really go to that. And it kinda goes right back to our guy that does, you know, 21 year experiences - how does he really have a good solid, solid understanding where I'm 30 years later, still trying to get great at my jab reverse punch? And when we have intro lessons with our brand new students, I tell them look guys, I'm still trying to get good at this stuff, that I'm still trying to improve on this stuff that you and I are working on your day one. And we live in a squirrel society of what's next, what's next society that, you know. That's what the traditional martial arts to me is - that we just focus on the basics, basics, basics, basics - in Japanese, it's Kihon. Just focus on the basics, get really good at them and shine from there as opposed to okay guys, today we'll learn something brand new, and the next day today we'll do something brand new, the next day we'll do something brand new. I don't think that flies very well.Jeremy Lesniak:It doesn't and actually, I like your use of that word - fly. Because when I'm teaching basics, I will often switch the word off. It's basics but it's also your fundamentals or your foundation, and so now we visual image. And what do we know, we can only build a structure so big based on a fixed foundation. If we can broaden out that foundation, if we can widen it out, we can go taller. The better your jab, the easier time you're going to have in throwing whatever's following it. And I think people get trapped in this idea that we work on fundamental movements simply for the personal development side, the idea of, you know, I've done this punch a million times and I'm becoming a better person because I've done that punch a million times. And yeah, that's true but there's a whole other side of it. And if you look at the best fighters in the world in any combat discipline, they've all mastered the basics, the foundation.Andrew Moores:I think is Jimmy Pedro and I... In the Olympics, he only competed with three or four throws and I think I want to say it was just three but maybe I'm wrong and it was a very small number and how many throws that or techniques that there are in Judo, and that's it. It's the basics, basics, basics. And for the strength and conditioning or the main... It's a human trait - we want more complex. We want bigger and, how do I say, shinier or it's too simple. It's not simple. It's do this consistently and that's why everyone misses. My biggest holes and things that I feel like I actually should have done this better, it comes down to consistency, you know. Being a... consistently lifting or consistently doing this or consistently doing that, and you have consistency to your training. There's a thousand ways to do what you're trying to do. I mean the people say, hey how do I get stronger? And they're trying to make a... this awful like okay I'm gonna do this percent and then on this day and this lift you're doing this percent of blah, blah, blah, blah --- there really isn't You know, you'll consistently lift the main lifts, whatever be the three, four main lifts, get stronger. Let's grow your general strength, let's grow your relative strength, improve that and let's get to your functional specific strength but you need that good foundation. It's just not this squirrel mentality will strike. Oh, let's go do this, let's go do this. And the squirrels don't have that consistency. I love this quote, I heard this quote years ago. I was at a business meeting and I wrote it down, you know --- ordinary things done on a consistent basis produce extraordinary results. Nothing fancy - ordinary done on a daily basis over and over and over again will produce that extra results that everyone's looking for and that is not just martial arts, that's not just training. That's business, that's relationships with your kids, you know, coming in and sitting down and listening when your kids say dad, dad I wanna show you this, getting down on your knee, what do you got? You don't need to go and now the flip side to this, you ignored your kid, you didn't do what you're supposed to do as a mom or a dad and you just drop a ton of money on them, and to make up for the crap you should have done or crap you did do, however you want to look at it. It's that consistency. Another feel, there's a period in my life that I did threat assessment and protection work and it was the exact same thing. It was the basics, we didn't have to get very fancy when we're dealing with whether be a domestic violence situation or a stocking situation or a workplace violence situation where we're looking at and from assessment standpoint, what's it likely that this could result to something violent happening to the client. It wasn't fancy. It was super simple. You know, we have strength and conditioning martial arts, and risk and threat assessment. I mean all is the exact same stuff. Let's pull a top chef in here, a mechanic, and a carpenter, and I'm sure they're gonna say the exact same thing. And it's something I'm very passionate about because of my nature... is I am that squirrel, you know? From my attention issues as a kid or my anxiety issue as a kid, I'm ready to move on to the next thing. And another great quote is the goal is to keep the goal the goal - Dan John who is a well-known strength coach. I remember him saying that years ago: the goal is to keep the goal the goal. And I have to remind myself that in daily basis even though I'm on my little soapbox here preaching that crap. That you have to just get... What's your goal? What's goal to get done today? What's goal? I'm want to get stronger. What's my goal? I need to teach better. What's my goal and just keeping your goal. Just keep that - your consistent goal; the sky is the limit. Whether be martial arts fitness strength conditioning, competing, you name it. It is just those basics done consistently over and over and over again. And yes it's boring, yes there's a discipline that will form from it but my 46:52 that uncomfortable because you just want to move on to a different movement or different technique or different philosophy or different idea and scratch that itch. But the best thing is don't scratch that itch. And stay at the path.Jeremy Lesniak:You know, I will challenge that statement a little bit - that it's boring - 'cause it doesn't have to be. You can train that same jab ---Andrew Moores:Oh, absolutely.Jeremy Lesniak:--- an infinite number of ways.Andrew Moores:No, I agree. And I'm...Jeremy Lesniak:We get bogged down in down, right?  A lot of times, martial arts is taught by people who are not terribly imaginative and the only things in their toolbox are the things that they're, unfortunately in most of the cases from what I've seen, the single instructor that they had had. And so they're kind of... they're not innovating martial arts. They're passing martial arts on. And so if they only know three ways to train that jab or back fist or whatever you want to call it, straight punch, yeah. It's gonna get boring.Andrew Moores:They're just regurgitating. And so as a teacher, the beauty --- This is what I sink my teeth into and what keeps me up at night is coming up with new ways to make their front kick better, their reverse punch better, whatever may be, better. I'm talking from a technical standpoint. So I came from a world where you did your 10,000 front kicks and you become good at it. So how do I get better at --- well keep doing front kicks and you sit there just slamming your head against the wall. And I met some wonderful teachers, my original teacher, Stephen Perry, one of my teachers now, Sensei Ron Fagan, who really lets... Okay, let's break the front kick down, let's break the roundhouse kick down. What are we doing? Okay, let's break this kick down in four different movements. Might be the knee driving, might be a hip rocking action, might be the extensions of foot, whatever. And now let's come over drills to make the knee drive of the roundhouse, the knee drive of the front kick, the knee drive of the side kick or the hip rocking - is a hip rocking on a snap or were you locking out on the thrust? How do we make the individual components of that one kick better? And now, let's come up with drills to build the skills to do that. And that stuff gets me out. I'm sitting here almost drooling on my computer talking about it because that's fun. You know, how do you get someone... Anyone can build a, you know lovely... You see people like oh look at my great students. And like the kid would... He's a phenomenal athlete. He would be graded anything he did. Find me the teacher who has uncoordinated students and made them into great martial artists and that's the guy that I want to sit down with and say he, what did you do? How do you get that 72-year old who's got more fake parts in his body than 49:58 How do you get them to develop a good front kick? What did you do? Your single leg strength work you did so he brings up his leg, cool. And how do you deal with this, this, and this? What are the drills? That's the stuff that keeps me up at night. And so going right back to your point, it doesn't get boring. I mean 37 years late, I'm still trying to make a jab, a reverse punch and a front kick and a side kick - maybe a side kick - a roundhouse kick better. And how do I, more importantly, my biggest passion is how do I make my students better, better than me, have them stand on my shoulders? I'd become insignificant and they just find me a small village move me there. So that's fun; that's exciting. I can't imagine in the martial arts ever getting boring with that being your drive.Jeremy Lesniak:Fully agree. If you couldAndrew Moores:I mean we have...Jeremy Lesniak:Go aheadAndrew Moores:Sorry. No, I was just saying, you know, when it comes to our front-kick standpoint, our five to seven-year olds, we have 10 major front kick drills that these kids do and then not even throwing a front kick. They are trained the different components of the front kick. The next older group, because we divided the curriculum, you know, obviously by age and ability but there's a little science behind it when it comes to the biomotor skills set that the kids have, students have. So now, we've got another 5-8 drills that we consistently use just for the front kick that will add on to those 10 and they're still not necessarily doing a full fledged front kick. And then we get to our teen and adults which is a totally different motor skills set and they are now drilling X, Y, Z; we're working on the ball of foot. We're making sure the knee is driving correctly and the foot position, the knee position, the hip position. And it's fun and exciting, they've got a great sweat going on, it's not like we're just sitting there pontificating on how to do a front kick is they are drilling from an athletic standpoint. How to make the kick better as opposed to the school of we'll just throw your 10,00 front kicks. And yeah, you have to throw 10,000 front kicks. But imagine if you can get better and you'r doing a pretty darn great at 1,000 front kicks because you trained by design and not by accident. And then once you get to that 1,000, put your 9,000 more in because now, obviously, you'll be even better. But it's by design. And I think just, you know, I'm frustrated with the number of years that I trained that it wasn't by design. It was just well, just do the front kick. We would just kick harder. How do I get harder kick since, I just kicked harder. And yeah, I'm trying to become a harder kicker and take martial arts, now compare it to baseball. If I ask my coach say hey, how do I get a better swing in baseball? Or my bobsled coach, how do I get a better start? How do I get into the sled better? And he said, well just get into the sled better. Like, what? What are you talking about?Jeremy Lesniak:Why do you think that happens? Why is martial arts soAndrew Moores:53:12Jeremy Lesniak:Okay, yeah. We'll use that word.Andrew Moores:I think tradition, I think loyalty to our teacher, I think... I'll go to a strength and conditioning conference or train with folks or be with a collegiate sports team and I'll how these guys move and explode. And then I go to a martial arts thing the next weekend and people are like oh, lifting weights is ridiculous; it's gonna slow you down. And you're sitting there, really? Let's go over to the Patriots weight room and tell those guys they're slow and they're not 53:50 and they have no idea how to just develop speed because we're all just humans. We move all the same. When you become a martial artist, you don't all suddenly mutant into a different species. We're still human. And martial arts has had this idea of...and don't get me wrong; I love the martial arts. I love traditional martial arts. I am a 54:15 and you don't get much more from a Karate standpoint of traditional martial art. I've never put a black gi on in my life 54:24 determines non-traditional versus non-traditional but to give you an idea, you know, I love that I train a traditional martial art. But my glasses that I choose to look at things for my students first, for me and for my martial art 54:39 is how do we make it better? How do we move the body better? Not because my... One of the biggest things and blessing is my teacher, Sensei Perry, and one of my current teachers, Sensei Ron Fagan, it wasn't about us, it's not about them. It is about how we make the next generation better stand on our shoulders. Because that's how it has to happen. In a hundred years, martial arts better be, should be better by design. Not because of better athletes, not because of technology. They should be better because of the blood, sweat and tears that the teachers put in, sitting down there with their notebook and trying to come up with better ideas of how to make the students improve on X, Y, Z; stand on their shoulders. Make them better. I'm excited for the day that my students have had it; when my student does something better than me. My ego, sure takes a ding, but a big smile comes on my face because it's like, goo. Good, stand on my shoulders. Ee better than me. And you know, why martial artists... Maybe his ego, maybe it's the romantic side of you know, the Sensei and the student or the Senpai and the Kohai, the senior , the junior and... You always want to keep your... You put your Sensei on a pedestal and you shoot from respect and sacrifice standpoint but understanding my responsibility despite of the, you know... If you can sum up my teaching, Jeremy, is my responsibility isn't to my teachers. My responsibility... Or nor is it to my style. My responsibility is to my students. And then it gets even heavier from there - my responsibility is to my students' students and then my students' students's students. And that keeps me up at night and makes me think about my legacy and am I following the right path as far as my concern for making students better, you know?Jeremy Lesniak:Let's face it, if you're not making your students better than you, then martial arts is getting worse.Andrew Moores:Absolutely. I mean it doesn't... grab a scrap piece of paper and you put today's martial arts at level 10 and then well, my student's not as good as me and then become level 8 or they're not 57:07 But you know, the broken clock is right twice a day and a really bad teacher can produce great students because... but wasn't by design. It's because 57:25 The students are phenomenal athlete. They would be a great chess player. They'd be great at croquet, right? But are they, you know... That's why I have some older students. I mean I got professional fighters fun to train with, don't get me wrong. But my gosh, what pushes my buns is a student who's got fake left and I see... I'm afraid I'm trying not to you know, doubles too much privacy here but... Yeah, hip replacement, knee replacement, shoulder replacement, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, they get up and they say Sensei, you know, I want to train. You're like, okay. Well you got someone with the two left feet and you gotta make them into a decent martial artists and you know... That stuff. That's just... sink your teeth into and... But I think there's a lot of folks out there, unfortunately, that don't see it that way. They just say what can my student do for me as opposed to what can I do for my student?Jeremy Lesniak:So well put. So tell the audience now what do you have going on and how they might reach you. You know, you've said some pretty poignant stuff today, some stuff that I'm pretty sure is gonna connect with a lot of the folks that we have listening. And they may want to follow you on social media if that's a thing for you or find your website or email you or whatever communication methods you want to put out. So you know, let's step into commercial time now and you can stand on a soapbox and tell people all that stuff.Andrew Moores:I don't have a great black belt in social media. I'm probably a mid-range green belt but atlantickarate.com is our school website. One thing we're launching, hopefully in 12 months from -  I won't say hopefully, I'm taking that out. You and I were talking prior to this. In 12 months from nowJeremy Lesniak:Right. It's gonna happen.Andrew Moores:It's happening. I'm telling everybody and to hold myself accountable like Muhammad Ali held himself accountable for his training. Martial Athlete is going to be a huge project for, I'd say, us - my staff here, myself. Developing the martial artist as an athlete and I'm not taking the combatives or the self-defense side out of it but look at it from an athletic standpoint. So, you know, what fuels my fire is... 10,000 front kicks or how can we get that support leg to be stronger? The left leg when he brings his right to throw a right front kick or a roundhouse kick, how we get that stronger, how we work on his mobility? and from his knee, hep and feet or her knee, hip and feet, how do we make that so at 1,000 reps, they are 10 times better than I was at that stage? And how can we look from a strength and conditioning standpoint to make your students better? You know, front kick is my favorite analogy and I've used it quote a bit in this podcast but you  know, you bring your leg up and you throw a front kick. Now you need to have that support leg, that left leg or whatever leg that's still on the ground, that determines how great your kick's gonna be- it's not the kicking leg, it's the support leg. So if it's a support leg like a great foundation to a martial artist, that support leg's your foundation to the ground. Shouldn't we understand how to make that better and stronger and more mobile and get what we need whether be it a 30 degree bend on the knee and whether be... oh, you know, I can back squat great. That's two feet though. Now I wanna see you on one foot with that slight bend, now rock your hips forward and you have the hamstring mobility. Do you have the... You  know, there's a ten-point system we run through our students to just to make the kick better. So that's the martial athlete that we're gonna shoot for for August 1st of 2019. Which I'm making this very public, aren't I?Jeremy Lesniak:You are.Andrew Moores:I'm excited. It combines my martial arts with my strength and conditioning - two passions of mine. If you look at my... one of my two large bookshelves here in my office, half, you know... I got my security work threat assessment but then I got my strength conditioning, and my martial arts side. So it's a passion and something that talking to fellow martial artists that they're hounding me about to get off the ground. So I'm trying to clear way in my life here to make that work.Jeremy Lesniak:I see. And long time listeners know that, you know, strength conditioning are... it's a passion of mine as well. We've had some folks on under the cross-fit community which is another world that I spend a lot of time playing in. And you said it early on, it's all movement; it all relates. And just 'cause we're martial artists we're not some weird species. But of course ---Andrew Moores:Yeah, it's funny you say cross-fit because I remember I was doing a... I was training a fighter for a fight and I'm not weird. I really couldn't even tell you what we're doing. And someone comes in and like oh, you're doing cross-fit with him. I'm like, what do you mean I'm doing cross-fit with him? I really was curious and I wasn't like, you know, being argumentative. I'm like really want to understand like well, I saw a cross-fit person do that movement. And I'm like... and it was like the most arbitrary --- I couldn't even tell you what it was because a reaching lunge, was it a... I have no idea. I don't even know, you know. And that's the human eye, I believe. In human nature, they want to categorize something and, you know, because the person's doing a sprawl, it might look like a burpee and if you want... Obviously cross-fit doesn't own burpees but yet the people would just say hey, that must be this. The same thing as oh, you must do box. No I don't know how to box. Well that punch look like a... It's a punch. It's a punch off the rear side using, you know, my hips are moving on a transverse plane, I'm extending my right --- what are you talking about? It's just, it's human nature to kind of group folks in there and I go back to we push, we pull, we change levels, we rotate and we have locomotion; that's it. There's no other way to... the body to move. Whether it be cross-fit, whether it be "functional training", whether it be a martial arts, whether it be track and field, whether it be wrestling - that's what we do. Bring a sports psychologists or organizational psychologists onto the show and explain why, as humans, we have to organize things in these cute little boxes.Jeremy Lesniak:I have some theories but I'm pretty sure that would kick us off into another hour of discussion which we didn't schedule for. So I'm not gonna pin you that but hey, we can certainly chat about that again. And of course, folks, you know, the things that we talked about today, we'll link them over on the website whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. If you're new to the show, you can grab the link there.Andrew Moores:And I know during... we are on, I mean I joked about social media 'cause my buddies tell me I need to do a lot more. And we're kicking it off, hopefully technology-wise. In two weeks, we will be producing a lot content - drills. We're gonna call them Martial Art Minutes which is gonna be a nice 60-second of a drill focusing on one very focused thing.Jeremy Lesniak:Awesome.Andrew Moores:One aspect would be nice videos. We'e on Facebook, Instagram. We're all there it's just that, you know, it's a little bit... I like this; I like talking to people. And I get a little leery about the whole, you know, I'm just putting it out there, it's a shiny little package for people to see and... it's your highlight reel, right? Dave Ramsay said that best: social media is your highlight reel. And you know, here I'm talking like... I'm talking with my students about being authentic to themselves, authentic to their training. And then I'm kinda flirting with this unrealistic world. I remember seeing a picture - we're getting off topic and you can tell me to shut it up but - I saw these photos from a friend of mind, it's like this gala, right. And I'm like wow, they're beautiful people. They're successful people right? And so I click on like their profile, looked at their name I'm like wow, this looks beautiful. So then I happen to just google them. And they were... I think they were on probation for taking money for some kid they'd adopted. They took this, their parent had died. And it was just awful thing. It was awful. And talk about what the shiny you looked on social media and how it looked just nice and like wow, I wanna be those people. But then you peel the onion back 1:06:53 brutal sharp story. You know, there's lots of layers here 1:06:58 peel the onion back and like, okay. That's the real truth. And there's my hesitation with social media world is do I really want to go flirt with it and to what extent?Jeremy Lesniak:Awesome. Yeah, yeah it's an amazing world  out there. I think if people applied the principles that we learn in martial arts to the way they consume social media ---Andrew Moores:Yup, absolutely.Jeremy Lesniak:--- dramatically different things.Andrew Moores:Yeah, absolutely. I can't, I can't agree with you more. I'm sitting here smirking 1:07:37Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah. Well, thank you. Let's tie this up. Let's give the folks some words to go out on. I'd like to call it words of wisdom or you know, you can apply any sitting them you want for but just something poignant that we can drop here at the end of our time together for the folks listening.Andrew Moores:You put me on the spot here.Jeremy Lesniak:It's what I do. It's my job.Andrew Moores:Yeah. Yeah, thanks. You're doing a great job at it.Jeremy Lesniak:Thank you.Andrew Moores:I got a lot of things probably, you know... Well we'll just end it with take what you just did on the training floor and imply it to every part of your life and be genuine to that. You know, the bow, the 1:08:24 . In Japanese, the 1:08:26 literally means respect. It does not mean bow and you're constantly reminding yourself of who you should be, of respect. When you're bowing and you hear your Sensei saying it. Even the word sensei - I mean we're talking a little bit earlier off the air, Sensei is not a title. Sensei is a role. And anyone that treats it, you know, unfortunately a lot of folks do and wonderfully a lot of folks don't, they treat it as a title. Call me Sensei and they put their thumbs in their belt and they ha-ha-ha. It's a role. So when I hear someone says Sensei or I hear my daughter say daddy, I say to myself oh crap, that's right. I'm a dad. Or that's right, I'm a Sensei. I have a responsibility. When you look at from that focal point, and you might be listening to this 1:09:18 Sensei, well we don't have names like that. Well you're a martial artist, you;re a student. So I hear a student of mine whether it'd be a five-year old or 75-year old say Sensei and I don't sit there and beat my chest. I sit there and say that's right. i have responsibility. Like when Dr. Johnson hears his name - doctor Johnson - or has a role pulled up; it's not a title. And if you look at it from that little paradigm shift, the crap rolls uphill, you've got a responsibility to do whatever it is your role/ if you want to call it a title, it is. Don't sit there, I'm a Hanshi, I'm a Shi--- You go to Japan, Okinawa and they say, Shihan and they're like what are you talking about? No one calls... They don't call each other Shihan they will sit there and laugh at you. But in other parts of the world - America or in Europe - they'll tend to do it. And I'e never introduced myself as Sensei. I mean... When you asked me what do I... I got a little uncomfortable, didn't I?Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah.Andrew Moores:I just... it doesn't... It's a role. And I think if we, as teachers, treated as such, I think the martial arts world might change. I really think; that's a huge piece. So whether you call yourself Guru or professor or Sensei or, you know, whatever it is, remind yourself... It's a reminder. Well yeah, hey, I'm a Karate student. I'm a Karateka, I'm a BJJ stylist. I'm a Judoka. Remind yourself - you're a Judo student, you're a player. You're a student and what does that mean from your discipline, from your morals, from your respect, from your training. And use that filter, that litmus. Now say use that filter for everything you tackle throughout that day - everything. From a podcast to putting your shoes away perfectly straight on the shoe-rack at the dojo but also at home. You treat your partner with great respect, but when you go home and you treat your wife like crap. I mean it just... You're hypocrite if you don't.Jeremy Lesniak:I think if you would told me how similar Sensei Moores and I would be in our philosophies, I wouldn't have believed you. But here I felt I was talking to someone who really kinda checked all the same boxes, had a lot of the same experiences, a lot of the same realizations. And it's always helpful to talk to people who feels similarly to you but are able to articulate it well. Because I'm constantly looking at my own set of beliefs and seeing should they be refined? Should they be revised? And if you got half of what I got out of today's episode, you're probably smiling. So thank you, Sensei Moores for coming on the show.You can head on over to whistlekickmartialartsradio.com to find out more links, photos, all kinds of other good stuff. Do it. If you haven't been there in a while, check it out. We're constantly making improvements. We've got some new navigation up there to help you hone in on episodes by region or by style, if that's important to you, maybe you'll find an episode you forgot about or didn't even know that was there. If you want to email me, you can do so jeremy@whisltekick.com. And you can follow us on social media. We are @whistlekick. If you're not following us on Instagram and you use Instagram, you are missing out. The stuff that we're putting out - I don't even put it out personally so I get to follow along just like everybody else - it's awesome. I love it. One of my favorite accounts. And of course, you should probably head on over to whistlekick.com at some point, see everything that we've got going on there. If you don't check in with that site monthly, you're probably missing out on the new stuff. That's all I've got for you today. Until next time. Train hard, smile, and have a great day.