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To all of our NinjaSelfDefense.com subscribers, The response to NinjaSelfDefense.com has been overwhelmingly positive! People like you have helped make a little experiment more popular than we planned for at the present time. We are happy to announce that we’re upgrading our platform to be better prepared to accommodate this enormous growth. Some key improvements […]

A difficult question to answer. Difficult because I know the answer will be misused by people not sympathetic to our training methods. Fast answer is there was very little “sparring” in the dojo back in the 1970s. The classics, when done the way they were practiced in the 1970s, were applied as a flow of […]

Why do we train with such dedication? Well, for one thing, it’s fun; got to have fun! Beyond that, for very serious To-Shin Do students and teachers this is a life style. It’s a healthy life style for mind, body and spirit. To my mind there is a component to this life style choice that […]

Spend any time at all in a To-Shin Do dojo, or watch any of our NinjaSelfDefense.com courses, and you’ll hear us talk about kamae all the time. Without the proper structure to our body, techniques don’t work the way they should and we open ourselves up to more dangers. Without good kamae, we create more […]

We had a question about striking in class recently from a newer student who had trained in boxing and karate. We were doing some pad work with jabs and cross punches. He made note of how different it was from what he had done before. It seemed to him that the difference between the styles […]

Here is a New Year’s Extra from An-shu Hayes and NinjaSelfDefense.com. A short excerpt from Wisdom from the Ninja Village of The Cold Moon Despite the love you feel and the joy you radiate there are those misguided persons in the world who would see you harmed.   They will confront you with fists or […]

I remember a conversation I had with my ninja martial arts teacher way back in the 1970s. I was in my twenties and had just moved to Japan to become a student in the grandmaster’s home dojo. I asked my teacher what was the most important thing to remember about martial arts training. “Why do […]

One of the twelve keys already discussed was about gathering as much knowledge as possible. In this concept we are looking at how and where we can gather that needed information in a conflict so that we can make the right decisions. Learning new ways to take in information, and being able to direct our […]

For many years just like most people I would make resolutions for the new year. Things like try to eat better, lose weight or get more sleep. All of which are excellent ideas but they usually fell by the wayside as the year progressed. In recent years I have given up resolutions and instead made […]

(With thanks to Mark Morgan Ford) Many of us got into martial arts training with the goal of becoming successful, powerful, and free ( as opposed to living at-risk, being weak, and feeling dominated by others). Would you agree? The first step towards the goal of success, power, and freedom is learning how to think […]

In the early 1980’s when I began training with An-shu the world was very, very different. No cell phones, no internet, no skype, no training videos. Back then it was: get on an airplane figure out how to get to where the training was happening try to take it all in take notes (lots of […]

One of the signature skills of To-Shin Do is our ability to use our whole body to generate power, enabling even a smaller person to create amazing results with what seems like little effort. It is a difficult skill to gain, because it can go against conventional thinking, because it doesn’t always look the way […]

I once saw a cartoon in a magazine that depicted a scene of hell. In it the devil was showing one hell’s new occupants a room with all of the devil’s greatest weapons. All around the room were terrible weapons of torture and destruction. The caption under the cartoon was a quote from the devil […]

Hello Friends of To-Shin Do. If you are receiving this email you are either a To-Shin Do Member or subscriber to NinjaSelfDefense.com and have access to a wide range of training material and information. We wanted to make sure you knew how to access some of your benefits. The To-Shin Do Members Page can keep you […]

Hosting our first Ninja Festival back in 1981 was one of the biggest gambles of my life. My ninja taijutsu was a totally new phenomenon on the martial arts scene 35 years ago. Yes, a few folks claimed to be “ninjas”, but only I could present evidence of actually living in Japan as a disciple […]