What makes a great martial arts dojo is not what the space looks like or their schedule, it is based entirely on the integrity, care, and character of its main instructor. I will train at the park if the instructor was someone I could look up to and respect.

Some people talk about principles, will fight others over them. Those things are easy. Living by your principles and teaching others your principles, now that's hard. That, to me, is Rene Dreifuss. He, not only, wants the best for his students, he will stop at nothing to help them attain their potential. He's also surrounded himself with people just like him, from the striking coach to his assistant coaches.

I've trained martial arts most of my life, from age 6 until now. And believe it or not, I can see right through martial arts platitudes and trite cliches and profound nonsense. I am, in fact, allergic to it. It's typically, completely, incoherent and useless.

Yet with Rene, I see authenticity. Not only can he teach you practical street-defense to MMA skills, he is just as knowledgeable on the scholarly side. He actually has a graduate level background in Asian history and warfare from Columbia. I, too, consider myself as someone who has some amount of academic knowledge of the East, especially of martial history, and one Rene is one of the few guys I can talk to who doesn't sound like a fortune cookie and reads more than just the covers of martial arts books.

This is important because there is long forgotten part of martial arts, which is character. Character beyond quotes taken out of context and being a bad-ass. I mean the character to get through life, because life can be messy and you need an ability to handle it in its totality. And the physical aspect is in total cohesion with the mental aspect. Now, that is rare.

Rene will develop all of those things in you and I know he will sacrifice himself to get you there. That's what you get at Radical MMA. Osu!