Thank you all for the warm welcome,
to answer the questions, i did kempo karate for a long time back in the 80's but also at the same time i was cross training with one of the other students who was also a high ranking TKD guy. he was a mentor to me. he was fantiastic he would swing the heavy bag and lay into in with a side kick and just tear the seams out of the bag and twist the metal hooks. PKA kickboxing was poupular at the time so i was training for myself with this in mind, also added in some western boxing and muay Thai concepts. i then spent many years in a Zen/ Aikido school. This was a AAA school and trained with my teachers,teacher Fumio Toyota about 5 or 6 times a year both at local seminars and i would travel to his dojo in Chicago. Fumio Toyota was associated with Daihonzen Chozen-JI rinzai zen linage (he was introduced to Tenshin Tanouye Rotashi by my teacher) Toyoda himself spent time in a Japanese temple but i cant remember the name off hand. our dojo was a Butsuin non profit association and in time i was president, learning and teaching Aikido and teaching karate. i used to do something called musha-shugyo. basicly i would travel around and visit random dojo to see what they were up to. by chance i went into a Uechi-ryu dojo and the teacher was the best i had ever seen or met he was/is a modern day Mas Oyama. after trying to do both i made the painfull decision to leave the aikido and do uechi 100% fast forward another 10 years and i have had my own dojos and met and trained with many defensive tactic teachers, many of whom most of you will know. i have always been a mixed martial artist long before the UFC and the term was coined. while maintianing my core training i also did what i could to learn from Goju, Shotokan, BJJ, ninjutsu, daito-ryu aiki as well as many chinese Fukian kung-fu styles to help cross examine my uechi-ryu (uechi is a chinese system called Pangainoon)
