A WORD FROM COACH KING
I began martial arts when I was six years old. Like many children, I had been captivated by what I saw in the films, although my real concern was far less glamorous, it was survival.
I grew up in government housing on the South Side of Johannesburg, where bullying was part of daily life and the gangs in my neighbourhood were never an abstract threat. I did not want to become easy prey for the schoolyard thug or whoever happened to be waiting beyond the school gates. I could not have put it into these words at six years old, of course, but I wanted to become hard to kill.
That wish took up most of the next twenty years. I trained, and then I went looking for places to find out whether any of it was true. The ring, my own academy, and least forgivingly, the doors of some of Johannesburg's roughest nightclubs, where I spent years as a head doorman and ran security across several venues. There is a kind of honesty you only meet when the person in front of you is genuinely trying to hurt you. You learn fast if what you have trained either holds when it matters or it doesn't.
In time my own programme, Crazy Monkey Defence, began to grow. When I wasn't running a full academy of around three hundred students in Blairgowrie, I was on planes teaching seminars and building coaches. I have had to make the same material work for a Tier 1 special forces unit and for a frightened parent who had never once thrown a punch and hoped they never would. That range taught me something the seminars on their own never could, if a method only works for people who are already dangerous, it is not much of a method.
By my early forties I knew something was wrong with me.
I had been unwell for a long time without properly admitting it, and a few years ago it turned into a serious health crisis I am still climbing out of. My doctors were upfront about it, the way I had trained and taught for most of my life was over, at least for the foreseeable future. So I closed the Trainers Programme. I stopped teaching the public. I kept working with a small handful of coaches I already knew and trusted, and I put what energy I had left into the online academy, where I could keep teaching without asking my body to do what it can no longer do.
Then the emails started coming in. People wanting to know whether I would ever certify trainers in my methods again. So in 2026 I decided to reopen the Trainers Programme, quietly, and slowly.
So here is what you would actually be signing up to.
The self-preservation has to be real. I have no patience for a martial art that talks beautifully about confidence and leaves a person helpless the moment it counts. Mine was built the hard way, through military service as a platoon sergeant, hand-to-hand instruction inside a close-protection group, the door work, and something in the order of tens of thousands of rounds of sparring with people all over the world, a few of whom went on to win in the UFC and elsewhere. If you teach under my name, you will develop genuine, pressure-tested skill, in yourself first and then in your students. That part is not negotiable and it never will be.
But fighting was only ever half of what the mat gave me.
Somewhere along the way it also taught me how to stand in front of something frightening and stay in one piece, how to keep breathing and thinking when everything in me wanted to bolt. Those were the exact capacities I had needed as a frightened boy, and the strange thing is that I did not cultivate them on purpose until much later, once I had spent years coaching and paying attention to what was happening underneath the techniques.
In the end I went and studied it properly. A doctorate, a 2nd one on the way and a good part of my life 's research has gone into understanding how people actually learn under pressure, what fear does to the body, and how the steadiness you build on the mat can carry into the rest of a life. So when I tell you the inner side of this work is real, I am not handing you a feeling or a slogan. It is the part I have studied most carefully, and it shapes how we coach as much as the armbars do.
I came to all of this to survive other people.
It took me a long time to see that the mat was also, quietly, teaching me how to live inside my own life. It is what I have come to call the martial arts of everyday life.
So if you want to work under Crazy Monkey or Monkey Jits, you have to be in for both sides of it. Not the fighting with the philosophy bolted on for the website, but both of them held together, in you first and then in the people you are trusted to teach. This is not a line for your coaching biography or a certificate for the wall. You have to practise it, live inside it, and actually care about the people in front of you.
If any of this is landing, start with my free book, Martial Arts: A Way of Life. Read it slowly, sit with it, and if it still rings true afterwards, we will get on a call and talk honestly about whether this is a fit.
On the money.
I have kept the licence deliberately reachable, because most of the coaches I most want on this team do not have deep pockets, and I would rather have the right people in my orbit. If you are genuinely up against it, tell me, and where I can work something out, I will. Veterans get a real discount, not a token one. The rest of the detail, the tiers and how it all runs we will go through it properly on the call.
I will not pretend my health crisis was a gift.
It took a great deal from me and I am still paying it back. What it did do was make me remember why I started and why I stayed. Protecting myself and the people I love still matters to me as much as it ever has. But the mat also turned out to be one of the few places that ever taught me how to stay upright when life came at me hard, and that is the thing I want to pass on. If it is what you want to carry, and then to hand to other people, come and find me.
