The System · Philosophy
Mind, Body, Spirit
The three-part framework the whole system is built on — and the reason a martial arts school spent so much of its time on rock faces and campsites.
Total Warrior organised its curriculum in three parts: Mind, taught as Winjitsu; Body, taught as multi-martial arts and fitness; and Spirit, defined practically as spending quality time with others in the great outdoors.
Mind
Winjitsu
The mental curriculum — focus, confidence, self-control, and the routines that make them stick.
Body
Multi-martial arts
Nine areas of focus across five ranking levels, plus fitness built on bodyweight and stances.
Spirit
Life-spirit
Rock climbing, hiking, camping, travel and multi-terrain training. Defined as time outdoors with other people.
Spirit, defined without mysticism
The definition used here is deliberately concrete: “Spending quality time with others in the great outdoors.” Nothing metaphysical is claimed.
The framing Rick used was Ninja Scouts — as in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Hiking, camping, climbing, travel and multi-terrain training, treated as core curriculum rather than as recreation between real training. It is the reason the camps ran in Thailand, Yosemite and New Zealand rather than in one building.
“As children we spent much of our time exploring and discovering. We want to recapture and maintain that healthy attitude we had when we were young.”
Rock climbing as curriculum
Climbing gets more space in the original material than almost anything else, and for a specific reason: it is the clearest example of competing against yourself rather than another person.
“Rock climbing offers each one of us a challenge and opportunities for working as a team. This challenge is what we believe to be the healthiest form of competition. You are competing within yourself, not other people.”
The second argument is about attention. On a rock face, focus collapses onto exactly what is happening right then — which is what every meditation practice is trying to produce, arrived at from the opposite direction.
Students learned knots, technical gear and mountaineering alongside the martial curriculum, at Yosemite, Joshua Tree and on the tropical rock of Koh Samui. Some went on to work as climbing instructors.
Hiking and camping
The traditional hike-camp-hike-camp structure ran through most programs. Less dramatic than climbing, and doing something similar — putting a group in an environment nobody controls, where the training either works on uneven ground or it doesn’t.
Why it belongs in a martial art
The stated reasoning: to be happy, people need to be challenged. Goals set and worked toward. A martial system that only ever runs indoors, on a flat surface, against a cooperative partner, removes exactly the variables that make training transfer.
Which is the same argument the physical curriculum makes about stances and the mental curriculum makes about routine. Three parts, one position.