ABOUT

Trained in combat. Taught through stillness.

I started training as a kid, chasing the same thing every Bruce Lee fan chased. My father practised Tai Chi, and I couldn’t square it — how could something that slow do anything in a fight? I trained Praying Mantis Kung Fu first, looking for an answer, then switched to Tai Chi to find it properly.

That search led me to Dan Docherty — a Hong Kong police inspector trained by Cheng Tin Hung at his legendary rooftop gym, and one of a generation of Cheng’s students who became full-contact fighting champions using nothing but the Tai Chi they’d learned. I trained under Dan for years. At 18, I won the British Open Tai Chi Pushing Hands Championships. At 19, I competed for the British team at the World Championships in Taiwan and won every match.

From there I moved into the UK’s early MMA scene, training with the small, intensive group that would go on to become London Shootfighters. I was selected to fight in the first professional MMA show’s inaugural UK heavyweight title fight. In those same years, I was testing what I knew a different way — working security in some of the West End’s most exclusive bars and clubs.

That same grounding — in principle, not performance — is what I still train, and what I now teach. Twenty-five years on, the questions haven’t changed. The answers just run deeper.