In the beginning...

Fads come and go. And Martial Arts Fads are no exception. As a young kid growing up in the 70's and 80's, the first Martial Arts fad I remember was the Bruce Lee fad. Now even though Bruce died the year I was born, he himself was reborn with the advent of the VCR. Ahhh, those were the days... Months of School holidays each year with nothing to do but play 'Silly Buggers'. As an inner city vagabond child I wandered the neighborhood attempting to apply my (not so) lightning fast killer Kung Fu moves on my friends and the other neighbourhood kids.

The next major fad came with the release of Enter the Ninja. Suddenly the neighbourhood was filled with four foot tall, twenty kilo white killer ninjas, jumping out from bushes to accost each other with a variety of home made Shaken (although we all called them Shuriken at the time) and Ninja-To. Ninja magazine came out and became our text book for Suburban mayhem.

I got a job at the local video store, which I was paid for not in cash, but with borrowing rights.

I made my way through numerous martial arts movies with titles such a The power of Silence, Revenge of the Ninja, the Big Boss and They call me Bruce. Who could forget the martial arts spoofs..."A fist full of Yen". As kids we did all sorts of crazy stuff in homage to our righteous if somewhat homicidal role models - drank drinks composed solely of raw eggs, made flour bombs to imitate the amazing Ninja smoke bombs, bought Nunchuku from the local martial arts stores and then knock ourselves out trying to swing them.

Martial Arts fads come and go, but new ones never stop turning up. Remember when Jean Claude came out (his movies I mean), everyone loved Blood Sport, Jean Claude was a legend, back them. Everyone wanted to be a Dim Mak Black Dragon and break "the bottom one". Kick boxer ushered in Muay Thai and kids nation wide began beating banana trees into submission or doing the splits between chairs.

Back in the day the Local Police Youth Club was a bed of martial arts mania. We all enrolled in the only martial arts we could find - Judo, Karate, Jiu-jutsu.

Martial arts schools were rare, but business was booming. Each new book or video that came out was a treasure, even if in retrospect it was over-priced rubbish. No internet then, no MA movie downloads, no trolls whingeing about how crap everybody's martial arts were.

Then was the day of the Aikidoka, with people flocking to learn to Shihonage people through car windshields like Steven Seagal.

Oh yeah and I mustn't forget to mention the deadly internal arts - Tai Chi, Ba Gua Zhang and Xingyi. Effortless power to blow people across the room or kill with the brush of a hand.

Then came the UFC and things changed. Striking was out and BJJ was in. All the Boxers, Kick Boxers, Kung Fu Killers and Karateka who laughed at us rolling around on the floor doing our Jiu-Jutsu were laughing no more.

The UFC was a wake up call and reality check for martial artists and one that we are still feeling the effects of.

The UFC ushered in a new fad, the fad of 'reality based training'. This then led to a split into Sport based systems and Street systems, with people tirelessly arguing the merits of one over the other on Internet Chatrooms and Forums.

Now we have the Krav Maga craze and droves of people wanting to learn how to survive 'on the street'. Ex-bouncers writing manuals, SAS soldiers and Flat Footed Police sharing secret training methods, Ferals and Shredders tearing off faces.

Don't get me wrong, it's not all quite as linear as that. And the time-line may be wrong, I'm just speaking of my own recollections here. And also none of the arts mentioned have disappeared. With the advent of the internet we have access to so much more information than ever before.

But here I am, in this new dawn, writing down a catalog of my thoughts and experiences in martial arts. As I continue my thousand mile journey in martial arts I think to myself "I wonder what the next big craze will be..."