About Dr. Ted
Dr. Ted Gambordella at 58 Years!
Dr. Ted Gambordella is one of
the most Decorated and Awarded Martial Artists
in the World!
- 9th Degree Black Belt
- 41 Years teaching experience
- World Martial Arts Hall of Fame 1998
- Grandmaster Instructor of the Year 2000
- International Weapons Master Instructor of Year 2001
- Martial Arts Weapons Hall of Fame 2001
- World Head of Family Sokeship Council 1999
- Martial Art Legends Hall of Fame 2001
- Martial Arts Masters Hall of Fame 2002
- World Black Belt Hall of Fame 2003
- 3 Times US Karate Sparring Champion
- 2 Times US Karate Weapons Champion
After 41 years in the Martial Arts my goal is still the same.
To share the power of
Martial Arts training with people across the World
During the last 41 years I have personally trained many thousands
of students, but I have trained many more thousands of students across the
World, without ever meeting them in person.How did I do that? With my books and videos, and using the power of
Computers and the Internet to allow access to my training and to deliver my
training books and videos across the street or across
the World.
I have now written 38 books and produced dozens of videos. I was
one of the First Martial Artists to write books showing how techniques from the
Martial Arts can be used in activities outside of the Arts. I wrote my first
book in 1976, The End of Injury. It was
the first book to show athletes how to prevent needless injuries by using
proven Martial Arts techniques. The philosophy was simple and easy to
understand.
There are only 3 major ways you can get hurt in a sport, and the
Martial Arts have proven, effective techniques to prevent or less the possibility
of injury to athletes.The ways
injuries occur and the Martial Arts Techniques that can help prevent them are:
One:Falling and Judo has proven techniques that
will prevent injuries from falls.
Two: over
stretching, and Karate has proven techniques for flexibility.
Three: Contact
and Jiu Jitsu has proven techniques to prevent injuries from getting hit.
The book was very well received and was endorsed by major
Universities and Colleges across
I began to travel across
I had no money and actually paid my way across the South by
charging the teams a small fee. I always
used the same plan of action at each school. I would ask to see the head
football coach or get an appointment. When I meet the coach I would simply s ay “coach my name is Ted
Gambordella and I am a Black Belt in karate and Jiu Jitsu. I have written a
book that can significantly reduce the possibility of injuries to your team,
and I would like to take 5 minutes of your time to do a demonstration to show
you how effective my program is.” The coach would usually respond, he was very
busy and not interested, but I would always counter with the best closing line
in sales history, “coach, I know you are very busy, and I only need a few
minutes, please let me just do this one demonstration. Get your biggest coach
or player to come into your office and hit me as hard as they can in the Ribs
and stomach. If I can do that, will you let me do a demonstration for your
whole team?”Of course football coaches
are in a “contact sport” and love to see hitting, but they have never seen
anyone let someone hit them the ribs and would love to see me get my ribs
broken and so they always call the biggest, meanest player they can find. The
player would take their best shot, and try to break my ribs, but usually wound
up hurting their wrists and being embarrassed. I would finish off the
demonstration by bending a 12 inch razor sharp knife on my throat and I Always
got the job.
The most “interesting” demonstration I
ever did was for Coach Barry Switzer and the National Champion Oklahoma Sooner’s
football team. I used to walk into the coach’s
office, introduce myself and tell them I was here to show them how to prevent
injuries. And to prove my point I would ask for the biggest player or coach
they had to come up and hit me as hard as they could in the ribs. It so
happened at that time the Selman brothers were working for OU. They were all
pro’s in the NFL and both weighed about 300 pounds with about 100 pounds of
that weight being in their arms. Leroy was asked kindly by Coach Switzer to
elbow me in the ribs. Now fortunately for me he was so big and strong that he
wasn’t very fast. And when he hit me with the elbow he actually knocked me
about 3 feet up in the air, and out the door of the coach’s office. Coach Switzer
just about had a heart attack and immediately called his other coaches into the
office to see Leroy hit me again. Unfortunately, the coaches came in 1 at a
time and I wound up getting hit about 15 times and knocked from one side of the
coaching office to the other, without an injury. You see every time a coach
would see Leroy hit me, he would have the same look of unbelief at Coach
Switzer and say, “Coach
Jones has to see this.” And so on and on it went .Anyway, Coach Switzer is a
fine gentleman and kindly offered to give me an endorsement even before I
worked with the team, because he was sure I was going to die any moment.
Another interesting story occurred when I went to the
In continued to travel promoting the book and the Martial Arts
for about 3 years, and because the book was very successful it prompted me to
continue writing books on the Martial Arts and in the next few years I wrote 9
more books. These books were published in Hard Cover by a National Book
Publisher, Paladin Press, and some of them are still in print today, after 20+
years. These hard cover books have sold over 200,000 copies during the last 20
years and are still selling today. The books that are out of print are selling
for big bucks on the Internet. So books that I wrote almost 25 years ago are
still training people across the World today and still making me money.
In the early 1990’s I got excited about computers and the
Internet and began to write new books not for Print but exclusively for
Computers and Internet delivery. I have since written 38 books and I am one of
the best selling Martial Arts Authors in the World. Literally training people and selling books
all over the World to thousands of students I have never meet and will never
meet. The best thing is that these books and videos are forever, when I am dead
and gone they will still be out there being read and used for training by Martial
Artists and still producing revenue for my children.
And here is the good news….Any
teacher can write a book on Martial Arts and produce a video. Yet I am always amazed that 99% of
Martial Arts teachers have never written a book or done a video, and this is
literally costing them thousands of dollars in potential profits a year as well
as depriving thousands of potential students from the knowledge that these
teachers have.Why is this?Why don’t 99% of all teachers have their own
books and videos?The answer may not
surprise you, but the answer is WRONG.
So what is the reason you will get if you ask a Martial Arts
teacher why they haven’t written a book or done a video?It is too hard, costs
too much, and too complicated. It would take me months, years to write a single
book. And they are wrong.
Most teachers think it is very complicated, difficult and
expensive to write a book or do a video. And this is wrong, and it is my new
goal in Martial Arts to share the ability to write your own books and publish
your own videos with All Martial Arts Teachers across
Please let me begin by tell you when I got started writing books
and producing videos and how 25 years ago, they were right about it being very
complicated, hard and expensive. I was
one of the first Martial Arts Masters to use the
Computer as a “self publishing” tool and to sell and promote my
Martial Arts Books on the Internet.
Before the advent of powerful computers and the Internet if you
wanted to write a Martial Arts book or produce a Martial Arts Video you only
had 2 rather difficult choices.
One: find a
national publisher to print 1,000’s of copies of your books, or produce your
video. For which you would get a few
hundred dollars up front and they would promote it and you would get 10% of the
sales, after they took out expenses.
Two: Self
Publish, spend $1,000’s of dollars of your own money on a book, double that on
a video and promote them book yourself.
Both of these reasons were too daunting to most Martial Arts
teachers and so few wrote books and certainly did not even consider
doing video production.
Too actually write a book, before the computers became powerful
enough to assist you, was a very difficult task. Here is a synopsis of the steps.
First: You had
to take your own photos, get the photos printed and lay them out onto typed
pages in place, so they could be shot with a camera at a print shop and made
into “plates” that could be used for printing. To get the photos for you book
you had to hire a photographer who had an expensive camera and lights. You also
had to know upfront what photos you wanted and how you wanted them to look,
because you couldn’t see what they were going to look like until they were
printed. Every 24 shots you had to change film in the camera and to get the
film developed took 3 days and cost a lot of money.So you tried to be frugal with your photos,
being careful not to waste film.
Next: you had
to type your book. Typing the actual book was very hard. When I did my first
book I did it on a standard typewriter, and used “white out” for corrections.
When I wanted to make a change to a sentence or a paragraph after proof
reading, I had to retype the entire page, correcting errors as I went. If I
wanted a copy of the typed pages, I had to go to a local printer to use their
copy machine and get the copies.It
wasn’t until 1982 that I actually spent $1,500 on a typewriter with a Memory
that could retype the pages after I was through, and that allowed me to change the
pages or correct errors without retyping the entire page.My first computer didn’t even have a Hard
Drive, so I couldn’t save the actual book, and couldn’t drop in any photos with
the book writing.
Next: I had to
design the cover and lay it out, with Color photographs and then lay out the
entire book. My Complete Book of Karate Weapons
took me over 1 month to write and I had to take thousands of photos to get the 900
photos I used in the book. I also had to do the entire layout by hand, using
scotch tape, rulers and ink, carefully numbering each photo and putting it in
the exact location on the page I wanted it to match the text.Whatever I put on the page, was what was
going to be printed. If it looked bad on the floor of my living room, it would
look the same way in the book.
Finally: you would send the photos to your publisher
who would make them into a book. A book you wouldn’t see for 3 months or more
and of which you generally had no control over and certainly no ability to
change anything after you sent in your final copy for the publisher. Oh yes, I
did say send the book to your publisher, but don’t forget the Catch 22. To get a book published, you had to have a
publisher, and to get a publisher you had to have a book published.So if you had never had a book published,
like any first time author, you couldn’t get a publisher, because publishers
only worked with “published authors”….The Catch 22.
After the book was published the publisher usually was nice
enough to send you up 6 copies, and then they would sell you all the copies you
wanted of your own book for 50% off the
cover price. So you had to buy your own book at a very high price, so that
meant you seldom gave away books for promotion or even to family, as they cost
you too much. My Complete Book of Karate
Weapons had a list price of $29, so I had to pay $15 to get a single copy
for myself, and that was $15 of 1980’s money which is like $50 of today’s
money.
2 times a year the publisher would send you details of sales and
your commission checks. In their accounting they would take out expenses, which
included all promotional activities, give away, returns, samples and any and all other items they could think of or make up to make
certain you only got the smallest amount of money they could legally give you.
It is the same in the record and movie industry, and I always remember the
story of Batman the movie, where the screen writer foolishly agreed to take a
percentage of net profits. The movie made over $500 million dollars and the
writer did not get one penny, because the studio explained that the more the
movie made in revenue the more they lost. It’s called
It was much harder and more expensive to make a video. You would have to spend thousands of
dollars and it is 10 times harder.
You had to find a professional TV production studio to shoot the
video, hire professional cameramen and sound people, lighting people and
production people. In the 1980’s it cost an average of $600 a day to simply
hire the cameraman.The film cost $50 a
roll and the camera man had no “direction ability”. It was up to you to set up
all scenes and backgrounds, etc.
After you got back your raw film, the real expenses started. You
had to use a production studio to edit your film at the rate of $150 an hour. On
average it took 1 hour to lay down 10 minutes of final product, and you had to
be the editing director, or hire one at an additional $100 an hour. I spent
over $10,000 editing one video I producing, and made
the mistake of using a professional director who actually only finished 5
minutes of film before I fired him, because that 5 minutes of finished product
cost me $10,000 and my entire budget for the production was only $25,000 for a
one hour production. I was going to be $100,000 short if I continued at this
rate, and so I shut down the entire project and lost $10,000.
After you got the film edited you had to make copies in the
production studio at $3 to $5 a copy. So if you wanted 100 copies, you spent
$500 and had to have a big box to carry the film around in. Plus you had to
spend a lot of money doing color printing for the film box, or it would be just
a black box with white words on it.
So in the 1980’s, and 1990’s it was very complicated, difficult and expensive to write a book or
produce a video. That is why so very few Martial Artists ever produced any
videos or wrote any books. But all that has radically changed. Now that is no
longer the case and anyone who can type and can afford a $300 desktop computer,
and a $300 digital camera, can write and self publish their own books with ease.
The computer will allow
you to type the book, lay it out, add your photos, and instantly make
corrections and changes as you go. You can add new material at will. If you
want to completely change the layout, you can do it with the touch of a button,
and you can add new pages, and new photos at will.
You can take your own photos with a inexpensive high quality digital
camera, and you can take as many as you want, hundreds, even thousands if you
want, and only use the ones you want with no additional expense. You can
transfer these photos to you computer, with the click of a button and drop them
right into the book as you type, changing layout at will, and using color
photographs.
You can design your book and cover using state of the art
graphic editors and even pre made templates. You can print your book on your
home printer. You can take the book to an
Office Depot and for $1 have them spiral bind it, or
even put a hard cover on it. And if you want to use color photos you can do
that at .30 cents a page, or black and white at 5 cents a page.
The greatest change is that
you don’t have to print hard copies of your finished book to share it with your
students and the World.You
can simply transform your book into a Digital book and share it instantly with
anyone who has a computer.You can make
it available online for instant download or viewing, or you can burn it to a CD
and sell it that way to anyone with a computer in the World. If you learn more
or want to add more to your “digital book” later, all you have to do is drop in
the new pages and the book is instantly larger and better, with NO additional
expenses on your part.It is an amazing
and wonderful thing to share your knowledge with others and writing books and
producing videos is the ultimate way to share your knowledge, as it lets you
train people all over the World without having to be there in person.
So things have definitely changed. In a future article I will
begin to show readers step by step how easy it is to write your first book and
produce you first video. It is not
difficult, complex or expensive and Everyone, Every teacher should do it. Think
of the great books and videos we never got from some of the greatest Martial
Artists in the history of the World. Just look at the “legends” and “masters”
pages of World Black Belt and see these great people. How many have written
dozens of books and produced dozens of videos sharing their vast knowledge with
the World …Forever.When they die if
they don’t have it in book form or video it is gone with them. Their students
deserve this knowledge to be passed on from generation to generation and it is
my new goal to train the old Masters and young teachers to do just that.
I have put 38 of my books onto a CD and 5 hours of my videos
onto a
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