December 20, 2025

Judo Sandan: Reflections on 3rd degree

Yesterday I was promoted to Sandan. It required appearing in front of a committee; my previous Dan ranks in...

read more...

November 01, 2024

Featured BJJ Globetrotter | November 2024

I was featured in the BJJ Globetrotters newsletter this month, for the second time. Here’s the interview as it was shown in the email: === Featured Globetrotter: Kyle Baker Age:34 Belt:Black (as...

October 05, 2019

Breakfalls: Misunderstood & Mistaught

I started off Judo pretty skeptical of breakfalls. They looked like something very ‘traditional martial arts’-y, people doing some unnecessary movement that no one could explain the theory for in...

May 26, 2019

3 Months to Win: The Whitebelt Tournament

Around February 2019, I started teaching across town twice a week at a small fitness gym, Oakley Fitness Center. They wanted beginner’s no-gi BJJ. Right from the start we had a core group of three...

May 07, 2019

The Weight of the Belt

What does a blue belt mean? Actually, what do any of these belts mean? The first answer to pop into your head is probably that it indicates a certain level of competence–say, a basic grap of...

February 22, 2019

Judo Shodan to Nidan: What's the difference?

To the uninitiated, hearing someone with a black belt say that they “have so much to learn” and are “just at the beginning of their journey” can sound… disingenuous, to say the least. Is this...

October 22, 2017

Getting a Surprise Globetrotter Brown Belt in Poland

In the middle of nowhere in Poland, at a little Japanese training facility in the mountains, I was surprise promoted by a group of respected black belts. It’s a pretty special memory for me. It...

September 17, 2017

Featured BJJ Globetrotter | September 2017

I was featured in the BJJ Globetrotters newsletter this month. Here’s the interview as it was shown in the email: === Travelling from Texas: Kyle Baker“You will regret the trips you didn’t take,...

January 22, 2017

Sankyu to Shodan in Judo: A Long Story

This is a post I wrote many years ago. I’m including it here as an archival part of my history. It’s pretty long, so probably not of interest to many people, but it’s here for the sake of...

July 16, 2015

Pedagogy: One More Battlefield of Ideology

This is an old post from 2015, that I’m saving here as a kind of historical note on my own thoughts on teaching and how it has evolved over the years. There is a never ending conflict between...