I receive quite a few private messages regarding my research group’s nature, and I want to take some time to clarify a few details.  

When I retired from public teaching in 2005, after over twenty years of serving my community, I closed my school called the Primal Focus Gym, which covered my MMA or Shoot Boxing classes.

My MMA journey began when I was teaching Muay Thai and met some students in the early nineties who wanted to upgrade their stand up for Vale Tudo matches. Slowly I modified my Muay Thai to take on board what my Brazilian friends were showing me; BJJ and some catch wrestling. The areas we trained were stand up, clinch and ground for sport. Interestingly, I managed to get out of MMA in 2005 just as it was going mainstream. 

I began to research some of the arts I had put-on hold previously in retirement, and broadly these were, bare-knuckle boxing, Combatives, Savate with a Basque fighting arts flavour and Pukulan Sera. I had studied bare-knuckle boxing, Combatives since 1977, and Savate and Pukulan Sera since 1986.

I had kept in touch with a few former students, and we used to meet up informally to train whatever art I was investigating. During this period, I feel we covered off my Combatives module and the Savate boot kicking module and this research period naturally came to an end.

In around 2010, I started to look again at Pukulan Sera, of which I have lucky enough to study two separate and distinct branches. The first Sera branch was fascinating and intriguing, with some great people involved.  

The second branch of Sera I have been lucky enough to study, is a small, non-commercial private community, and for me, it’s everything I ever wanted, and I love it. My current instruction is helping me make sense of my former education. I soon realised that I would need some people to train with after I visited my teacher and so I formed a small private non-commercial study group for interested people, which is how my current group came into being.  

We are lucky enough to have a great mixture of experience and teachers in other arts combined with a few beginners. The instruction is in Sera as currently taught to me. In effect, we are exploring a brilliant curriculum together.

The research groups primally interest is Pukulan Sera and the study of my KORA system.  KORA covers my Vale Tudo (MMA) experience, Grappling,  Sword & Dagger, full Contact Stick Fighting and Savate with a Basque flavour.

On a back burner, i.e. not currently taught in my class is my Shoot Boxing for MMA sport module which includes stand up, clinch and ground and my Combatives module.

Over the last few years, I have realised that the group would come to an end if anything happened to me. This year, I have put a structure in place to allow group members to progress to teaching the arts one day and introduce all members of my group to my teacher.

We are a small, private closed-door group, and the first primary rule is we are not allowed to share any of our Sera outside of the group. Every new member gets the same twenty-minute introduction and history talk from me, and part of that is them agreeing to keep everything in house with regards Sera.

We support other instructors in the martial arts world, and if we get any new membership inquiries and are full with regards to members numbers, we pass on people to those we trust in the martial arts world. 

So that’s a little history and an update on the group. It differs from other groups as its primary mission was to investigate a closed-door curriculum rather than produce lots of satellite groups. It’s not commercial as we don’t have anything to sell, and it keeps a relatively a low-profile so no videos or workshops in the Sera side of things etc.

From time to time, I get asked many questions on training and will post a few more replies here in the future.