A Word from Coach King

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For close on two decades, the School of Crazy Monkey reached across the world. I trained coaches, built academies, developed curricula, travelled constantly, and poured much of my life into helping other people teach martial arts differently.

 

Then I closed it down.

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The most immediate reason was my health. After decades of training, teaching, travelling, fighting and carrying more than my body was prepared to carry, it finally stopped negotiating with me.

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But that was not the only reason.

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I had also become deeply disillusioned with what much of modern martial arts had become. Too many people wanted the appearance of mastery without submitting themselves to the craft required to earn it. They wanted techniques, titles and affiliations, but not the slow, often uncomfortable work of becoming genuinely competent.

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I had also been disappointed by people I trusted. Some of the trainers I had invested in, promoted and supported eventually showed me that technical ability and character do not always grow together. I learned that lesson the hard way.

 

So I stepped away.

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I needed to decide whether there was anything left here worth returning to.

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There is. But I will not rebuild what existed before.

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Why I Am Reopening the Trainers Programme

I am now reopening the Crazy Monkey trainers programme on a limited, case-by-case basis.

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There are two possible training pathways:

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Crazy Monkey Defence, our stand-up, real-world self-preservation system.

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Monkey Jits, our approach to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu developed specifically around the realities of self-preservation.

 

This is not the beginning of another mass organisation. I am not interested in collecting hundreds of affiliates, selling certifications to anyone with a credit card, or building an army of people wearing my logo.

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I have done the international expansion. I have built the large organisation. I know what it costs, and I know what can be lost when growth becomes more important than the work itself.

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This time, I want the right people.

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People who still believe that martial arts is a craft.

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People willing to practise something long enough for it to change how they move, think, teach and live.

 

People who understand that coaching creates a responsibility far greater than delivering a collection of techniques.

 

And people I can trust to carry the work with competence, integrity and care.

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Where This Work Came From

I have trained in martial arts since I was six years old, and teaching has been my full-time work for more than three decades.

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My own education in self-preservation did not begin in comfortable surroundings. I grew up in poverty on the South Side of Johannesburg, in a home shaped by alcoholism and violence. I never knew my father. By seventeen, I was homeless. Violence was not an intellectual subject for me. It was part of the environment in which I learned to survive.

 

Crazy Monkey Defence later took shape during my time as a platoon sergeant in the South African military’s Close Protection Unit and through the harder schooling as the head doorman outside many of  Johannesburg’s nightclub doors during the 1990s.

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The academy I opened in 1998 became the largest of its kind in South Africa. In the years that followed, I travelled internationally, teaching ordinary people alongside law enforcement officers, close-protection personnel, airline cabin crews and tier-one special forces operators.

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I was also South Africa's first Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt, now a fifth-degree under Grandmaster Rigan Machado.

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These systems were not created through theory alone. They emerged from decades spent asking what survives contact with pressure, uncertainty, exhaustion, fear and resistance.

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But experience also taught me that survival is only half the story.

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More Than Learning How to Fight

Martial arts, in its older traditions, was understood as a way of life. You entered the practice to learn how to defend yourself, certainly, but you remained because the practice asked something of you.

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It exposed your impatience.

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It confronted your ego.

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It taught you how you responded when you were overwhelmed, frustrated or afraid.

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It demanded that you become more attentive, more disciplined and more honest about your limitations.

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Somewhere along the way, much of modern martial arts lost this.

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On one side, it became consumed by competition, athleticism and performance. On the other, it descended into reality-based paranoia, where fear was marketed as seriousness and every stranger became a potential attacker.

 

Neither approach was enough for me.

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What I teach brings the two neglected halves back together: pressure-tested self-preservation skills that work against genuine resistance, and a lived practice through which a person becomes calmer, more present, more focused and more resilient.

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The lessons learned on the mat must travel beyond it.

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A student should become more capable of protecting themselves and the people they love. They should also become harder to intimidate, harder to manipulate and harder to overwhelm.

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They should become more comfortable inside uncertainty.

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More able to remain clear when other people panic.

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More willing to stand their ground without needing to dominate everyone around them.

More fully alive.

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Calm, present, focused and resilient.

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And, when circumstances demand it, very hard to kill.

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Who This Programme Is For

This programme may be right for you if you want to coach real-world self-preservation without sacrificing intelligence, humanity or depth.

 

You may already run a martial arts academy, personal training practice or coaching business. You may be an experienced martial artist looking for a more coherent way to teach self-preservation. You may be seeking a system that combines practical skill development, sound coaching methodology, contemporary neuroscience and a philosophy of human flourishing.

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Your existing experience matters.

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Your character matters more.

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I am looking for people who are coachable, curious and prepared to do the work. People who can carry responsibility without turning it into status. People who care about their students as human beings, not merely as customers, followers or bodies on a mat.

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You do not need to pretend to know everything.

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You do need to be willing to learn.

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You do not need to become a copy of me.

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You do need to understand what this work stands for and protect its integrity.

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Who It Is Not For

This programme is not for anyone looking for a quick certification, an additional badge for their website or another collection of techniques to add to an already overcrowded curriculum.

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It is not for people who want the association without the relationship.

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It is not for those more interested in building their personal brand than developing their coaching craft.

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It is not for anyone who treats students as revenue units, feeds their fear to keep them dependent, or mistakes aggression for capability.

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And it is not for people who disappear when contribution, accountability or loyalty are required.

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There are faster and easier certifications available elsewhere.

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This is not one of them.

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How Acceptance Works

There is no automatic enrolment.

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Anyone interested in joining the Crazy Monkey Defence or Monkey Jits trainers programme must first arrange an exploratory call with me.

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That conversation is not a sales call. It is an opportunity for us to talk honestly about your experience, your reasons for wanting to join, the people you hope to serve, and what you are prepared to contribute to the work.

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Following that conversation, I will decide whether the programme is the right fit for you—and whether you are the right fit for the programme. Not everyone who applies will be accepted.

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That is intentional.

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I would rather work closely with a small number of serious, principled coaches than build another large network held together by little more than branding and monthly payments.

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The Promise, Kept

My health crisis forced me to reconsider what I wanted the remaining chapter of my martial arts life to stand for.

I came back to a simple conclusion. I still believe in this work. I believe people need practical skills that allow them to move through an uncertain world with greater capability and confidence.

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I believe they also need places where patience, courage, responsibility and self-command are still practised rather than merely discussed. And I believe the right coach can change far more than the way a person fights.

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This trainers programme is my commitment to continue that work, carefully, honestly and with the right people beside me.

 

If what I have written here speaks to you, the next step is to arrange an exploratory call.

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Come prepared to tell me who you are, why you want to do this, and what kind of coach you are trying to become.

 

We will take it from there.

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