Not all martial arts consulting companies are bad, but some are damaging to the arts and schools all over the country. Using psychological sales and manipulation techniques, they have fooled some, but not all.
The subject I want to discuss in this blog is the weekend certifications. Now let me be clear...getting certified over a weekend in something you have been training in for some time is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about certifying people in something they may have not ever even trained in before.
I'll give you one example. Over the past decade or so, some consulting companies saw that the rise of popularity in UFC and MMA was something they could cash in on. So, they invented MMA certification programs. These programs allowed you to take a trip for a weekend getaway, pay a few hundred dollars, and leave with a piece of paper stating you were a certified MMA instructor.
Imagine if you had been studying karate for most of your life, and decided to go on a trip for the weekend and come back with your TKD black belt. Not many of us would consider that legit. But somehow, people think that a weekend certification in MMA is somehow okay.
I've personally seen a school claim to offer MMA classes, and after seeing a few of their black belt students demonstrate what they had tested on, I easily saw they had been trained in a variation of kenpo. Yet, they were told it was MMA. Why? Easy...MONEY.
Schools are trying to capitalize on the term MMA when in actuality they are just teaching Americanized versions of karate, tkd, and kenpo. In most cases, their instructors had never been in a cage fight, trained someone for a fight, or even studied authentic kickboxing or ground fighting.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with just teaching a specific style like kenpo, karate, tkd, or whatever. What I find wrong is re-labeling it as something that it is not to try and fool people into thinking they are getting something different.
Here's another way of looking at it; would you let your physical therapist perform brain surgery on you if they took a weekend course to get certified? Of course not!
There are a couple of signs that you may or may not be getting a legitimate training program in a specific style or styles:
- If a school has several separate styles and programs being taught, but there is only one instructor teaching all of them, chances are you have a weekend warrior.
- If a school had a specific style or the words "martial arts" in their name a few weeks ago, but now has MMA in their name, you might have a weekend warrior.
- If no one in the school, including the instructors/owners, have ever competed in any way but call themselves MMA, you might have a weekend warrior.
- If they offer licensed work-out programs made to imitate styles that they learn at weekend retreats or DVD's, you might have a weekend warrior.
- If the owner/instructor claims to be able to teach x,y,z and is in bad physical shape, you might have a weekend warrior.
My closing point is that there is positive things in every art. If you want to train in karate, kenpo, TKD, BJJ, MMA or whatever...then do so. Just make sure that the person you are training under is legitimately experienced in that art(s).
