Principle-Driven Skill Development: for Traditional Martial arts

by Russ Smith

Principle-Driven Skill Development dives deep to describe how to ensure traditional martial artists can avoid the limitations of memory-focused training by utilizing traditional principles, coupled with purpose-driven teaching methods. Readdressing common ideas in martial arts, the author helps outline a method for understanding, codifying, and error-correcting one's own training and teaching methods and focusing on developing progressive understanding in students, and then enlisting traditional application principles to help guide and enhance the effectiveness of clinch-range maneuvers. Principle-Driven Skill Development lays a groundwork of fundamental, strategic principles that constitute a universal set of truths for self-defense based martial arts. Principles focused on control, timing, and positioning are then enhanced by principles that assist the practitioner in utilizing their anatomical tools to stack the odds in their favor.  These advanced application methods are then supported by a series of structure and power-related principles, ensuring the practitioner has access to the engine(s) necessary to drive powerful and effective techniques. Over 500 photos provide examples of over 30 application principles from arts like Okinawan Karate and Chinese Five Ancestor Boxing, White Crane Boxing, Grand Ancestor Boxing, White Eyebrow Boxing and others.

271 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 7, 2019

About the author

I've have been lucky to have lived and worked in many different countries in Europe and Asia. The characters in my books are often inspired by people I have met on these adventures.

I have always been intrigued by ocean liners and cruise ships, their history, and in the people who work and travel on them. I have done readings while traveling on cruise ships to obtain input from fellow passengers on my books. My latest two book are different. Murder at Beulah Crest takes place in a small resort town in rural Michigan and explores how the Internet can influence a criminal and the investigation of crimes. My latest book, The Pointe System take place in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. The murderer uses the pointe system that was once used to keep the community restricted to select victims.

I studied at Michigan State University, where I received a B.A in Hotel & Restaurant Management. I also attended Arizona State University, where I earned an MBA in Finance and Labor Relations and later a Master of Education, focusing on Educational Media and Psychology.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/russellts...

Reviews

[Raymond Goss · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this on book on my kindle Fire and was disappointed with the text formatting - I couldn't enlarge the font and the book wasn't available for my computer or for my paper white kindle due to the formatting. The photos and content however are good. The author has a Goju-ryu base with years of training in other southern Chinese arts from which he shows (mostly) Goju applications based on the principles in those systems including "bridging", "guns to the front", breaking the opponent's posture, involving the elbow, shoulder, etc. In my opinion, the sections on Methods (Fa) and Tools (Xing) were better than the section on Power (Gong), but the book was well organized. For those familiar with the various arts, the book will be easy to follow and make for a quick read, others might require more time to digest.