Let me start this off by saying I (Blake Artel) do not claim to be a war savant or tactical genius. What I have is a deep appreciation for the intersection of those two, war and tactics, and how I believe they directly apply to martial arts. In my mind I do not see a distinction from the lessons learned in battle, strategy and tactical considerations that must be made to successfully win battles and wars, and how we should apply martial arts. In my mind a fight is a war on a smaller scale that requires all the same considerations if one wants to succeed.

I decided to create this website after sitting on the idea for years…

At the age of 17, I went to my first eye-opening experience of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in 2006 after spending years dabbling in other arts. As a kid I received a blue belt in Shaolin Kempo after one year of training, a brown belt in Olympic Tae Kwon Do in under two years of training, and spent a minor bit of time being instructed in Muay Thai. To say I thought highly of my ability to fight was an understatement. 

A buddy and I went to a class in a warehouse where I personally witnessed the most out-of-shape looking individuals with physical limitations manhandle younger, stronger, faster opponents. White belts with limited experience were completely dismantling people like me with years of experience – there was obviously something in this I had to learn. So I then spent the next 18 years working on gaining proficiency to earn a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt.

There has always been a lot of things I never cared for in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I never liked IBJJF tournaments, or really any of the grappling ones. To me, all of them focused on the wrong things. I never cared about advantages and points, or what was ‘legal’ in tournaments. I hated seeing people being praised for laying on their backs and winning matches on those conditions despite the obvious flaw in applicability outside the sport itself. I hated seeing people spending so much time doing sport guard training and competing at the highest levels with no sense of self-defense understanding. I hated the way classes were often taught in a Frankenstein model, where you would receive a bunch of parts (techniques), work on them for a small amount of time, then go roll hard and attempt to put them together and often get injured. I hated that no one seemed to agree or know what ‘fundamental’ meant and would slap that term on a class to teach inverted guards and swinging triangles. To me, the entire art, despite all its goodness, lacked any true philosophy or doctrine that unifies what they do and why.

As a purple belt I found I no longer wanted to attend class anymore. I grew more and more upset with going to a class to learn moves that wouldn’t seem to work with my body type. I hated learning moves that I found near-completely devoid of real-world application. I hated working on things that didn’t fit with how I viewed grappling, yet I still wasn’t exactly sure ‘how I viewed it’. I knew what I didn’t like and could articulate why, but had nothing to point to and say, ‘this is the way’. 

I taught often as a purple and brown belt, often six days a week. I taught my view of things and articulated why, adding a strategy/fundamental understanding to why I would say what I did. The issue I had was that what I taught was often fragmented… there again was nothing unifying my viewpoints to allow the student to find the solutions themselves. Even more troublesome, I was neglecting training in some submissions or overtraining in others, yet never applied doctrinal reasoning as to why I favor X over Y. To me, I couldn’t continue teaching like this and expect the students to grow to their potential or I am doing exactly what I complained about – teaching moves that I like for me without true regard for the student and what they need.

In effort to make better students, I jumped on the bandwagon of the time and began teaching one class a week in an ‘ecological’ fashion to round out skills that I think were missed in-between static drills and live applications. I found lots of success in filling in some initiative holes I would see (eco does have its place), but also found the limitations the training alone presented, as well as the dogma that surrounded it. To me, it largely became a tool for clowns that don’t understand the purpose of ecological methods to have a class, not actually teach, take the students money, then stand back and wonder why the student progressed in ways absent of fundamentals.

When I was told I would be receiving my black belt, I felt it was time to really unify my thoughts, narrow the scope, apply methodology, and attempt to present a doctrine to what appeared to be a doctrine-less art. I wanted to make something I could hand to any student and tell them to read it, learn it, live it to become better. I wanted them to learn strategy and tactics from the start, not just the mechanical moves, and help them understand the art as I have come to appreciate it. From that, this website and the contents were born.

(BTW, Im the bald guy in the center with a brown belt around his neck.)