Instructor: Mr John Will

John Will began his martial arts training in 1972. With a basic grounding in amateur wrestling, Goju Kai Karate and Taekwondo. He first left Australian shores in 1975 to study the indigenous martial arts systems of South East Asia; with many of those years spent in Indonesia learning Pentjak Silat. 

In the late 80’s, he founded the Australian Martial Arts Magazine (Blitz) which gave him the means to travel and research the martial arts in many an exotic location.
The next few decades saw him take more than 70 overseas training trips; including stints in Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, India, the U.S.A and Brazil. 

In ’82, he entered and won gold in the first World Silat Championships held in Jakarta, the first and at that time, the only non-Indonesian to accomplish that. His friendship with long-time training partner Richard Norton, opened many doors to him in the Unites States, that perhaps would have been closed to most people. So in the late 80’s, he began training with such notables as Benny Urquidez, Gene LeBell, Shuki Ron, Pete Cunningham, Rorion and Rickson Gracie and the Machado brothers. 

In the late 80’s, a friendship with Rigan Machado allowed John to travel to and train in Brazil. There, he was exposed to a wide cross-section of Brazil’s best BJJ coaches, and so began his serious study of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He was finally awarded the rank of black belt by Rigan and Jean Jacques Machado in 1998; making him one of the ‘BJJ Dirty Dozen’, the first twelve non-Brazilian BJJ Black Belts in the world and the very first Australian to do so. Since, he has pioneered BJJ in this country; paving the way for many others. He has written a series of books on the subject which can be viewed at: Brazilian Jiu Jitsu BJJ Australia

Along with an American- based BJJ Black Belt, David Meyer, John founded Masterclass Curriculums – an organization that has successfully provided a professional curriculums to over 300 schools throughout the USA and Europe. ( www.grappling.us )
The Masterclass Grappling curriculum, as an example, provides a complete and detailed BJJ-based grappling program, and has been adopted by Mr Chuck Norris’s UFAF (United fighting Arts Federation) as their official grappling syllabus as of 2006.

John’s schedule is a demanding one, even by international standards. He now conducts in excess of eighty seminars throughout Australia and overseas, each calendar year. The last ten years have seen him take a proactive role in the development of cutting edge law enforcement defensive tactics programs. He now works with various groups within the Australian and New Zealand Police Forces, Special Operations and Military personnel both here at the ADF in Canberra and at Quantico in Virginia (USA) to improve their defensive tactics, arrest and control procedures. 

The RADIX Training program is the end result and the culmination of more than thirty years of highly diverse and proactive martial arts and defensive tactics training. 

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John Will + 61 3 524433084

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