Competitive Edge Mixed Martial Arts

My 10 year old son has been a student at Competitive Edge MMA for over 3 years. Mr. K and the other instructors are wonderful with the kids. My son has learned to focus, and to be self-​confident on the mat and in school. The self defense skills he has developed have proven invaluable in a real life bullying situation. I can’t say enough about this program.

I have never been to this location. However, I am a former student of the owner’s from roughly 20 years ago at his other school, Martial Arts Institute in Canton, CT. The owner and I were very close in age, which I found very odd. I had trained in the art he was teaching at the time to a black belt level from an individual who had a direct lineage to the founder of the art. The owner had portraits of this same founder (Ed Parker) hanging on his walls. I would have categorized my previous training as «porous» as it was informal and probably faster paced than what was good for me so I wasn’t 100% proficient. My original instructor had moved away which was why I was looking for someplace else to train. I also wanted to fill in the gaps of my previous training. He decided to start me at an orange belt level (Third lowest belt) because the style he taught was «different». I didn’t expect to be handed a black belt but to have it implied that I knew only about a third of the Kenpo criteria was a little insulting.
The sales pitch was rather arrogant walking through the door — something of a «why SHOULDN’T you train here?» sort of attitude. I figured his pitch was a function of his age (about 20 at the time.)
I had to sign a year long contract through United Professionals, a company owned and/​or operated conveniently enough by the owner’s old teacher. Among the most disturbing things to me was the training. The «style» he taught held only vague similarities to what I had already learned. It was inefficient, it was contrarian to Parker principles and in the way of self-​defense, it was outright inconsistent, even dangerous — particularly when it came to defense against certain weapons. With all the flashy and showy kicks and wide stances that were taught, I found his «style» to be nothing more than glorified Taekwondo. If I wanted to learn Taekwondo, there was an Olympic certified Taekwondo instructor right across the street. Months went by and I noticed that only certain people got promoted and of those who did, none of them ever made it to black belt. Brown belts would disappear after a while with no apparent explanation. In nine months, I watched one of the owner’s «demo team» members rise from one belt to four belts ahead of me. I sat at orange belt for nine months before I just stopped showing up. I knew that the owner was making things up as he went along. I watched first hand one of his «what if» sessions where he and senior belts would try to figure out what to do in certain attack situations. Mr. Parker was pretty clear on his self defense techniques and I’m fairly sure that some 20 year old wasn’t going to revolutionize anything.
One of the the other things I noticed prior to leaving was the attrition rate. The attrition wasn’t just confined to brown belts who for whatever reason weren’t passing their black belt tests. People of all belt levels eventually stopped showing up, probably for much of the same reason. Student turnaround is fairly normal but not at the rate it was happening at MAI. If their contracts were anything like mine, they were still paying the balance of their contract whether they showed up or not so no skin off the owner’s back.
Now I hear he is running a mixed martial arts school in Colorado. I guess he has taken his show on the road. He either sold the old Martial Arts Institute (hopefully to a more competent instructor who reflagged) or shut it down and moved west. I’m not sure how he runs an MMA school with little to no MMA experience. Yes, he throws hard punches and hard kicks but I question his ability to truly train people in MMA without sufficient first hand experience. In the age of the Internet, I can’t find a single one of his fights on video (not even coverage from a camera phone). I can’t find a single website or message board with a single statistic on him. There is no traceable lineage to his MMA training at all. All there is to see is a bunch of «MMA at home» videos. If this is something you’re comfortable with, then more power to you. I hope he at least compensates by having instructional staff that has some knowledge or experience. Judging by the looks of things, not much has changed in 20 years. He’s still charismatic. He’s still athletic. I don’t question his competitive career in the 80’s and 90’s nor do I question his instruction in Kenpo as that lineage is easy to trace. I saw first hand his departure from the style in which he was taught in an effort to make it his own. If he has done anything like this with MMA (which I suspect he has) then I would caution his students as to how much confidence they should put into what he teaches if you’re relying on his instruction for self defense or competition. Inaccurate training is as dangerous as incomplete training as I learned first hand. My advice is buyer beware.