Click here to visit Kyle's personal training website at billericaypersonaltrainer.com

My journey into the world of fitness and martial arts began at the tender age of 8 or 9 years old, when my dad sent me along to my first karate club. I trained in a style of Okinawan karate called Uechi Ryu in South Green, Billericay. He wanted me to learn how to look after myself and re-build my confidence after it taking a knock from being bullied at a young age. Both of my parents worked, so my younger sister I had to go to a child minder’s after school and during the holidays.

It was hell. I hated every second.

The main problem was the child minder’s son, he made life unbearable for us both. I’ll never forget the time my sister was in a toy car, 5 years old and he and his friend flipped and rolled the car with her in it, and the time they chased me down on their bikes trying to run me over in the holidays. As you can imagine, I didn’t enjoy my time there and I used to be frightened to go. Eventually I told my parents what was going on, and naturally they dealt with it and stopped us going there.

So I started learning karate. I trained for about a year or so, until my parents split and got divorced. I can’t remember exactly why I stopped, I think it was mainly down to money, but needless to say, my martial arts training was put on hold.

When I got to secondary school, I again let myself become a victim of bullying. There was another kid in my form group and most of my classes who had it in for me, at least enough to go out of his way to make me miserable. To be fair he never really did me any physical harm, the odd ‘jelly-leg’, ‘dead arm’ or ‘peanut’ with the tie, but I never really got beaten up. It was more the name calling and emotional abuse. This went on for about a year and a half, and I pretty much just took it and would let him get on with it.

Until one day.

A friend of mine had a ‘sleep-over / day out to ‘Peter Pan’s playground’ for his birthday. He could invite three friends. I was one of them, and just, my luck, this kid who picked on me was one of the others. I really wasn’t happy about that as you can probably imagine. A whole weekend with this guy, kind of put a downer on the whole thing. As I predicted, most of the weekend was ‘pick on Kyle’ open season. He went to town with the dead legs, sneaking up on me and punching me, you get the idea.

All of a sudden, I decided enough was enough.

I finally fought back. I got angrier and angrier until I could only think of one thing. ‘I’m gonna kill this kid’. We were alone in one of the rooms. I can’t even remember what he did, but whatever it was, it was the final shove that pushed me over. I went for him, both hands round his throat and pinned him to the wall. I squeezed and I held on, he couldn’t get me off. Fortunately I calmed down and let him go. I realised that hurting him would solve nothing. However, he got the message. From then on he left me alone, in fact most of the time he avoided me.

The incident probably frightened me more than him, I’d never lashed out at anyone before. I didn’t like it and I never wanted to do it again. From that point I became quite reclusive at school. I had friends, but I spent most of my time sitting and drawing then going outside or anything like that. It’s fair to say I wasn’t the most confident teenager, at least not when it came to meeting new people.

I was fourteen and had just started in year 10, when one of my friends told me about his jujitsu club. It had been a few years since I had done any form of martial art, and I was keen to learn again. I wanted to get my confidence back and find some form of exercise I could enjoy, because I hated sports and P.E at school, which I find a little ironic, considering I’m now a Personal Trainer as well as a martial arts and self defence coach. So I decided to tag along for a lesson. It was a junior class and I was a bit older than most of the other students, apart from my friend obviously. I really enjoyed it and I found it so different to what I had learned before. I was shown an escape from a strangle, as well as a straight arm lock and I remember thinking that this was really effective. From that moment on I was hooked and just wanted to learn more and more. I was like a sponge, trying to absorb as much information as possible. I loved it.

I got into it and got my first couple of belts, when unfortunately my friend had tailed off and stopped training. This was a bit of a problem because I was too big to train with the other juniors, so, I got promoted to the senior class. That was an experience. I’ll never forget watching two of the club’s black belts, Brad and Jezz, beating the absolute snot out of each other before the lesson had even started. I was thinking ‘what have I let myself in for?’ Fortunately they were good to me and helped me train at my pace until I found my feet.

At 16, I read Bruce Lee’s ‘Tao of Jeet Kune Do’ and I decided that now I wanted to learn Kung fu and learn more about fighting. I loved jujitsu and I still do, but I always felt that I was only really learning a sequence of techniques, as opposed to learning how to use them. I was very fortunate to stumble across my Kung fu instructor and his class. I was totally amazed by what I was learning, it was so different and a bit unorthodox, but so effective. It was and still is like nothing I have ever seen. The class was always small and all of his students were of a senior grade in comparison to myself, which was great for me because I was always training with senior people and developing very quickly as a martial artist.

I put my jujitsu gradings on hold for a while, in fact I was a green belt for best part of two years, because I wanted to focus more on building my skills then just gaining a belt. I knew that when the day came that I achieved my black belt, I would be truly worthy of wearing it. It was during this time I began to see what other arts were out there under the advice of my kung fu instructor. He wanted me to understand what was being taught by other schools so that I could adapt my fighting style and also appreciate the knowledge and skills that were being passed on. I tried my hand at Shotokan karate, Tae Kwon Do, and Western Kick-boxing, thai and Chinese boxing to name a few, but none of them really offered me what I was learning from my sifu (kung fu instructor). I was still doing jujitsu and still enjoying it, then one day I bumped into another influential character in a local barber’s. It turned out he was a jujitsu black belt under a different instructor, a (then) 4th Dan named Ian Arbon. I went down to the Wednesday club and I was completely blown away by the skill of this instructor. I hadn’t been this impressed since I found my Sifu, and to this day I haven’t met many others. I continued to (and still do regularly) train with Sensei Ian and worked my way up to my 1st dan black belt and beyond. I also achieved my 1st degree black belt in Kung fu.

After leaving 6th Form, I began to work in London in a post room and loading bay for a large publishing company. I was a delivery boy, basically taking parcels to people’s desks all day. It wasn’t the most mentally stimulating job in the world, but it kept me physically active. To be honest I didn’t really like it there at all, but I had no real direction as to what I was going to do with myself in life. All I knew was that my true passion was my Martial Arts, and I hoped to teach one day. Through a combination of unfortunate circumstances, including the ending of my relationship with my college girlfriend after two years, I became really miserable and I lost my way. It was tough. I got to the point where I hated my job because there was constantly conflict between the managers and staff, and there were a couple of individuals I didn’t particularly get on with. I hit my all time low there.

Then I had an idea…

Why don’t I change my situation? Instead of moping, why don’t I pull my finger out and actually do something about it? I love Martial Arts, I love training and going to the gym, so why don’t I combine the two and make a career out of it? My Sensei taught full-time, so why not me? It could be done.

So, I looked into what qualifications I needed to become a Personal trainer. Once I had all the info I needed, I booked the first course. Once the course was booked, I left quit that job and found a part time job as a supervisor in a shop. The job wasn’t great, in fact it was a nightmare. I had to deal constantly with abusive kids, but fortunately I had a lot more confidence and wasn’t intimidated anymore thanks to my years of training. The work was boring and at one point I was arrested for burglary because the store was broken in to one night. Apparently it made sense to nick the staff that had locked up that night, even though the crooks physically broke in and busted the door. I wasn’t overly impressed, but fortunately all charges were dropped when the police saw sense- I even got an apology over the phone from the detective on the case. With that all finally behind me, I finally got my first fitness qualification and got a couple of part-time gym jobs as an instructor. Then, finally, I got a full-time position as a fitness instructor for L.A Fitness. Things were finally starting to go to plan.

About 6 months after achieving my black belts (I took both the gradings for kung fu and jujitsu within a week or so of eachother), I set up my first Kung fu club. That certainly has been an experience for me. Through teaching I actually started to become technically sharper and more sound myself as I was starting to understand more and more about my own technique and trying to relay that to my students. I had a few ups and downs, and a few things didn’t always go to plan, but now I feel privileged to be working with some very loyal, dedicated and hard working students.

After leaving my original club, I continued to train with Sensei Ian (now 5th Dan) and my kung fu instructor and achieved both of my 2nd dan black belts. I am extremely proud of my performance for both gradings and truly feel I earned those grades. I have also since won medals in national and international competitions. Both of these teachers continue to push me to excel.

My real passion for the self defence side of things came in to it early on, as I mentioned before I wasn’t the most confident person in the world. But it really hit home what was missing from most martial arts was how to really prepare you for being attacked, after I found myself in a situation where I was outnumbered two to one walking home one night. Fortunately I was OK, but I still think to this day my handling of the situation could have been better.

I realised that being in a real fight situation was so much different and more dangerous then a controlled martial arts dojo. I felt different both physically and mentally, it was an experience that really opened my eyes.

As a result I started to study and research specific self defence systems and what they taught, the psychological and physiological affects of distress and also had many discussions with ex-military personnel about their experiences of violence and how they are trained to deal with it.

As a result of what I found and implementing it with the knowledge I already had from my martial arts training, I developed my own self defence syllabus. After taking it to Ian, we compared our syllabi and experience to form the S.T.R.I.K.E system which we use and teach today.