Training While Aging

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 27th Jul 2020

I was asked a few days ago, how I’ve changed my training over the years as I’ve got older, so I thought I’d share my experiences – as to how I’ve adapted and changed what I’ve done over the years, along with how I’ve tried to manage and mitigate injuries etc. At the time of writing this, I’m 48 years old, and have been practicing martial arts since I was eight years old, starting with Judo. I started lifting weights when I was eighteen and continue to do so. Up until the past couple of years, I used to run...Click To Read More

Detecting Deception

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 20th Jul 2020

Detecting deception can be difficult since there are several different strategies a person can employ to hide the truth and/or sell an alternative account of events, etc. Whilst they can overtly/directly falsify details, they can also exaggerate facts, omit and conceal information, and mislead and misdirect, which may also involve deliberately failing to correct a person’s misunderstanding concerning them and/or an incident. In many cases, several – and sometimes all – of these strategies will be combined to tell an untruthful story/account. This makes detecting deception problematic since there cannot be a simple and singular test for determining the truth...Click To Read More

Conflict Negotiation

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 13th Jul 2020

In this week’s article, I want to walk through some Bodycam footage of an incident in Wales (UK), wherein a man threatening self-harm – and eventually the officers that were trying to deal with the incident – was successfully subdued and apprehended. The officer involved in the crisis negotiation did a phenomenal job, in an extremely stressful, and potentially high consequence, situation and demonstrates policing at its best. Policing is both a science and an art, and its science is often downplayed. Hopefully, this analysis of the incident will demonstrate some of the “science” used in crisis negotiation. The footage...Click To Read More

The Art of War

Gershon Ben Keren

Mon 6th Jul 2020

There are few martial arts instructors who have not read Sun Tzu’s Art of War and looked at how the tactics he described for military success, can be translated for self-defense. If you’re an instructor or a student who hasn’t read it, I’d advise you to even if you’re unable to see the applications of the lessons when applied to one-on-one combat; it’s simply a good read, and one of the most densely quotable books I have ever read i.e. it’s worth reading because it forces you to think. In this article, I want to take some of the quotes/lessons...Click To Read More