How Martial Arts Magazines Rip You Off
Copyright 2006 Pete Kautz

Even before I started taking martial arts classes I started reading martial arts magazines and getting all the martial arts books out of the public library and training from them.  As a kid in the 70’s this was my way of hinting to my folks that I wanted to take lessons, plus I figured that reading these books and magazines would help me learn, too.  I figured I'd have a "head start" when I finally got to attend a real Dojo.

Once I started taking lessons, not that long afterwards, for some reason the middle-school library ended up getting subscriptions to several martial arts magazines (like Kick, Fighting Stars, and Inside Karate) so I would go read these every chance I got, learning more about different personalities and arts.  The library had a rule that you could not sign out magazines to take home like you could with books, so I would swipe them, read them overnight, and sneak them back in the next day.  I really enjoyed these magazines and bought as many others as I could afford every month for many, many years.

Now, while there has always been some level of “junk” in these magazines, somewhere along the line the scales of content and “junk” tipped in favor of “all junk and advertising, all the time”.  What pass for articles today seem like they were written by and for mindless zombies.  Endless dumbed-down features (hardly more than reprinted press kits), pictures of girls in bikinis, and advertisements thinly disguised as “reviews of essential gear” are what now fill the pages of martial arts magazines.

Take the latest issue of Lack B*lt for example (you don’t need to buy it, just go look at it on the newsstand and you will see this is true)

It features a scowling picture of tough guy of the week T*m L*rk*n holding the St*v*n S*g*l folding knife (hmmm…that must be a coincidence, right?  I'm amazed he isn't holding a St*v*n S*g*l energy drink in the other hand while he's at it!) and is 154 pages long at first glance.

At first, you might think that 154 pages for $5 it is “a good deal” and buy it.  But, when you get home a closer look will reveal that out of those 154 big pages, Lack Belt has 84 FULL PAGES OF ADS!

That’s right – you plunked down $5 for a rag that is more than half just ads!

You got TRICKED into paying $2.73 for the ADS ALONE!

AND THEN IT GETS WORSE!!!

Looking at some of the “features” that grace the remaining 70 pages, we find:

* 13 pages wasted on letters and news articles (ads) sent in by readers.

* 18 pages wasted on monthly columns only a few hundred words long each that tell you nothing about self defense.

* 8 pages are a “special feature” on summer camps, featuring a list of people who probably paid big $$$ to have their event listed in this “educational” article.

* 4 pages of “movie reviews” and “essential gear” which are just more ads.  They are not even able to find a good film to review, so they yet again pick a random ninja-kung fu double feature to review then say it is bad.  Gosh, that’s a surprise.  WHY would you do a review like that unless someone was getting something out of it???  Why not review a good film?

* 1 page with a picture of some x-treme-martial-arts girl who looks like a mix between a power ranger with the x-treme "21st century" gi she has on and a tanuki (raccoon) with the thick eyeliner (are these guys desperate?)

* 1 page listing what was in an old (1970’s) issue of Lack B*lt.  Who cares, you can’t buy it!  It would probably be better to read then the current issue, though.  At one point in time the ability to write was deemed important by the editors at Lack B*lt.  At least there would be no full-page-ads for courses on “How To Talk To Women – Secrets of Speed Seduction Revealed” and bikini trash.

(Am I the only person in the world who remembers back in the 80’s when body-builder and martial art Amazon, Spice Williams, was featured on the cover of a major martial arts magazine wearing a one piece bathing suit - very tame by today’s standards - and the magazine received an outpouring of mail COMPLAINING that this was not appropriate in a martial arts magazine!)

Now, in with all the ads you will find SOME articles in the current Lack B*lt - to be fair there are:

* 8 pages on T*m L*rk*n (5 pages of it are photos) trying to sell you on his SCARS derived super program TFT.  He buys several full page ads in this magazine each month, so surprisingly this is the second time they have written about him in recent years.  The article tells you it is important to hit first and strike people in vulnerable areas.  Uhhh, thanks, I wasn't sure about that before.  Quick, somebody better call up every Kenpo school in the country and tell them the news!

* 6 pages on B*nny the J*t (2 ½ pages of photos) training movie stars.  Big deal.  B*nny is a cool guy and has trained film stars for years and years now, but this is not new or anything.

* 5 pages on martial arts in the Marine Corps (3 pages are photos) showing them learning from K*n Sh*mr*ck.  K*n is a machine in the cage, but putting a Nazi in a leg-locks is questionable at best in a combat situation.  The piece reads as rah-rah for the Marine Corps in looking to recruit young guy who read the magazine with the hook that they could earn a Black Belt in the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program (MCMAP) as an enlisted Marine.  It is a smart place for them to advertise, really.  If they were real savvy, they would take out ads in all the martial arts publications pushing this idea of “get in shape, get your belt, learn to kick ass young man!” – bet it would work!

* 5 pages on a Shotokan master (3 ½ pages of photos) that is basically an ad for his organization with pictures of the sweet training hall his students have bought for him.  It is a nice place for sure!

* 8 pages on “safe training” (4 pages of photos) by a well-meaning instructor who claims using the ball of the foot to throw a roundhouse kick rather than using the instep is “his new unique method”.  Um, well maybe his teacher never learned to kick right, so he couldn’t teach him right and so this fellow had to go “invent” kicking with the ball of the foot, but so many traditional Karate styles use the ball of the foot as to make the claim that this is "new" simply ludicrous.  His similar "new idea" on how to throw the backfist with the knuckles rather than the back-of-the-hand is again "old hat".  Why do you think this blow is still called a "back KNUCKLE" by so many old timers?  Because you were trained to snap the wrist for greater speed and to use the top of the same two big knuckles you had developed with your thrust punch to back-knuckle with!  Amazingly, this is his "new safer method"...gaaahhhh!  Look at almost ANY old book (50's-60's) on Karate and you will see the ball of the foot kick and the back-knuckle!

* 6 pages on a lady Karateka (4 pages photos) talking about her training for tournaments.  Possibly the most informative article of the lot, but still shows nothing new, just pictures of a nice traditional karate girl in a gi for the apparently “girl starved” audience.

So, as you can see, even the “articles” with information are mainly just eye-candy with lots of color photos.  Take out the photos and YOU ARE LUCKY TO GET 16 PAGES (if that) left with any kind of written information on them!

Yep, roughly 16 PAGES of questionable info out of the 154 pages in that $5 magazine!!!

That is not what you call an outstanding value, is it?

Now, I could hardly believe it when I first realized it either.  I used to always buy these magazines but this was the cold fact that I came face-to-face with several years ago when I was on a very tight budget.  (Maybe you’ve been there too?)

The fact was at the time I just didn’t have that extra $25 a month to buy all the magazines I had just been picking up mainly out of habit!  And you know how martial arts, knife, and gun magazines are as well – expensive!  It is not uncommon for them to be from $5 to $8 an issue.

Once I sat down and counted out WHAT was on the pages, what I was paying for, I got downright steamed!  You might too!  At "only" $25 a month, I was wasting $300 a year (or more) on this junk!

Try this for yourself with different magazines and you will find that some are even worse offenders than ol’ Lack B*lt, too, in the lack of fizzle department!  Try this little experiment with the various martial arts, knife, and gun magazines on the newsstand and FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF.

Ask yourself:

* How many of the articles really TEACH you anything?

* How many of the articles could you have written much better yourself?

* Does the magazine represent outstanding investment in your personal learning and development?

* What will you really gain at the end of the day from it?  Will you get “even one trick” that will help you develop?  Will you get two?  More?

So, is there a better way to learn?  I think so.  Personally I feel that DVDs are about 10,000% more effective for learning than paper magazines, and the costs are very comparable.  For what you would effectively “throw away” on buying a couple of magazines each month you can instead build a solid library of instructional DVDs teaching you what you REALLY want to know!

By way of comparison, our quarterly DVD publication Modern Knives offers outstanding value in that you can enjoy TWO FULL YEARs plus two bonus free DVDs (10 DVDs total) and be learning advanced martial arts skills from respected experts in exotic knife and weapon arts for what figures out to be only about $12.46 a month!

Wow, that’s about the same as buying two magazines every month!  BUT, which one do YOU think you will learn more from?

Each issue of Modern Knives has months and months of training drills to keep you busy learning, from top experts!  Plus MK covers rare arts and topics you will find nowhere else.

Check out all the details at http://modernknives.com and get in on Modern Knives today.

Until next time – all the very best, 

Pete Kautz

PS – Remember, “Friends don’t let friends buy junk magazines”.  Try this experiment on different popular magazines (T*me, N*wsw**k, etc.) and see what you learn as well.  Fascinating!

PPS – A big THANKS to my High School "Media Study" teacher who had us do this by literally cutting apart several copies of the same magazine so we could have a pile of ads, a pile of articles, and so on to allow us to really get to the heart of "What are we paying for, and what is the message?"