Martial arts

This section brings together BlitzMag’s ongoing coverage of martial arts in New Zealand, alongside a restored selection of profiles and interviews from the magazine’s earlier run as an Australasian title.

New Zealand’s martial arts community spans a wide range of disciplines. Brazilian jiu-jitsu and other grappling arts have grown quickly over the past decade, with clubs now established in most major centres. Traditional striking arts such as karate, taekwondo and kickboxing remain widely practised, often through long-running dojos with roots going back several generations. Self-defence courses, run both independently and through martial arts schools, serve a different audience again: people looking for practical skills rather than competition or grading.

Articles in this category cover that range. Some pieces profile individual instructors and competitors, describing how they came to the sport, what disciplines they trained in, and what they’ve taken from years on the mat or in the ring. Others focus on specific techniques or training approaches, aimed at readers who already train and want a second opinion on how to approach a particular skill. A smaller number look at events: competitions, seminars and the kind of grassroots gatherings that keep a scene like this connected.

For readers new to a discipline, articles here are written to be approachable without assuming prior training: technical terms are explained in context, and pieces aimed at beginners are kept separate from ones written for people already competing or teaching. Photos and video, where included, generally come from the instructors or events being covered rather than stock imagery, since the point of a profile or technique piece is to show the specific person or method being discussed.

Coverage isn’t limited to any one region of New Zealand. Clubs and instructors from around the country appear in this category as their stories come up, rather than the coverage being weighted toward any single city or discipline. That’s partly a reflection of how the martial arts scene here works: a strong dojo or a notable competitor can be based almost anywhere, and a lot of the more interesting stories come from smaller clubs rather than the largest, most visible gyms.

Self-defence content sits alongside the sport-focused material for a reason. Many readers come to martial arts through one door and end up interested in the other: someone who starts BJJ for the grappling often becomes curious about how those skills apply outside a competition setting, and someone who starts with a self-defence course sometimes goes on to train more seriously in a specific discipline. Keeping both under one heading reflects how the audience actually moves between them.

A number of the articles here trace back to Blitz, an Australasian martial arts magazine that this site’s domain once hosted. Blitz covered fighters, instructors and training methods across Australia and New Zealand, and several of its interviews and profiles, particularly of prominent karate, taekwondo and kickboxing figures, are still referenced in other publications and cited on Wikipedia. Rather than let that material disappear when the magazine’s own site went offline, a selection of the most-referenced pieces has been restored here, in most cases at their original web address, with only minor formatting changes. The full set is collected on the archive page, along with a short note on where each piece originally appeared and roughly when it was first published.

New articles are added to this category on an ongoing basis, covering current NZ competitions, technique breakdowns and instructor profiles as they come up, usually drawing on interviews with the people directly involved rather than second-hand reporting. Readers who want the older material specifically can use the archive page linked from this section; everything else here reflects the site’s current coverage of the sport.