After launching a new innovation in women’s safety and empowerment at the beginning of June (2024) we catch up with the course creator Stuart Kirby and find out why this course is a game-changer.

What inspired you to create the WarriorUp course?

A combination of factors inspired me to create the WarriorUp course. The tragic murders of two young women, Sarah Everard in 2021 and Zara Aleena in 2022, deeply affected me. Zara lived just around the corner from me, bringing the reality of such violence painfully close to home. Around the same time, I had just welcomed a daughter into the world, which heightened my sense of urgency to do something to prevent such tragedies from occurring again. Zara’s killer had 28 previous convictions, highlighting the inadequacies of the current system in protecting us, particularly women.

Additionally, a conversation with my wife’s best friend was pivotal. She shared an experience of being attacked while at university. Fortunately, her physical strength and height—she is 5ft 10—deterred her attacker, but it struck me that despite having trained in martial arts for over four years and recently completing a self-defence course, her training didn’t come into play during the attack. This realisation underscored the need for a self-defence system that includes mental training to ensure individuals can effectively respond in moments of extreme fear.

How did personal experiences or observations influence the development of this course?

In the UK, less than 0.5% of the population engage in martial arts or self-defence training, which means most people are walking around with little or no skills to protect themselves if the worst were to happen. Having trained in martial arts for over 40 years, I deeply appreciate the benefits it brings to my life. However, I recognize that this kind of training is not practical for the vast majority of people, especially in our time-poor society. Committing 2-3 hours a week to attend a dojo or combat gym is a significant ask for someone who doesn’t have a passion for it.

My daughter is only five now, but as she grows older, there’s no guarantee she will share my enthusiasm for martial arts. This realisation motivated me to create a course that is accessible to all girls and women, without requiring a huge time commitment. Most importantly, I wanted to develop a course that instils a set of instinctive skills and cultivates the right mindset to use them effectively. This way, participants can be prepared to defend themselves confidently and competently in any situation.

Would you prefer your daughter to train karate or do WarriorUp?

Haha… You know my passion is karate, but let me be brutally honest about it. Before I went to Japan, I had trained for over 20 years in a dojo in Essex, progressing through the grading system alongside two girls in my dojo. By the time we were 18, we all had black belts. While we had excellent technique and could kick very high and fast, I often questioned whether these skills would be effective in a real-world, nasty encounter, especially for the girls.

My own doubts about the practical applicability of my skills led me to add ju-jitsu to my weekly training. This experience highlighted a common issue in martial arts: the tendency to over-complicate one’s response by trying to learn too much and defend against unrealistic situations with set moves that wouldn’t work in real life.

Given this perspective, I would prefer my daughter to do WarriorUp. It focuses on developing instinctive skills and the right mindset to respond effectively in real-world situations, without requiring years of training or the risk of over-complicating responses. It’s about practical, effective self-defence that can be learned and applied quickly.

In answer to your original question, I hope to motivate or even bribe my daughter to do both… haha.

Are you saying that martial arts training doesn’t prepare you?

No, I’m not saying that martial arts training doesn’t prepare you, but for martial arts to be effective in real-world self-defence, instructors need to prioritise realistic attack drills. This is challenging because classes often focus on preparing students for competitions or their next grading. With such broad syllabuses, quantity often takes precedence over quality, raising questions about whether earning a black belt truly guarantees higher proficiency in street situations.

When I trained in Japan, the Japanese addressed this issue by training 4-5 times a week, which led to exceptional proficiency, especially with the basics. Aikido training highlighted this even more. In Japan, I trained with incredibly powerful instructors and students who practised almost every day. In the UK, with training typically only twice a week, I didn’t experience that same level of ability.

This is why WarriorUp is based on a simplified system. It doesn’t require extensive training to make the techniques effective. The focus is on developing instinctive, practical skills that can be applied quickly and confidently in real-world situations.

The first lesson in WarriorUp is filmed in my kitchen to demonstrate that the key to making these skills effective and instinctive is incorporating quick drills into your daily routine, even in confined spaces. This is based on the principle of habit anchoring. For example, when you pop into the kitchen to put the kettle on, you have a minute or so of waiting time. By practising some of the sequences you learn during WarriorUp, you not only stretch and activate your body but also continue to embed these life-saving skills into your muscle memory. This approach ensures that the skills become a natural part of your daily life.

What are the key skills that participants can expect to learn from this course?

The key skill has to be instinctive reaction. We all remember those physical education lessons, just catching balls. This skill is ingrained in us, so if someone throws something towards us, most of the time we will catch it because it’s part of our muscle memory.

You never know when or if you’ll ever be attacked, so learning something useful and then forgetting it, is pointless. This course has been designed using the latest understanding in muscle memory, so everything is geared towards teaching you something simplistic and effective, but also the tools you need to keep that skill ready. However, even if your skills are instinctive, your reaction speed can be heavily influenced by fear, best understood by the ‘rabbit in the headlights’ situation; the rabbit being run over because the lights paralyse momentarily. This course teaches a lot about mindset, not to be in denial, and to back up as a matter of habit where possible. The visualisation tools mentally drill you to react without hesitation.

Most importantly, they teach you how to maximise your body weight and power into your technique and to direct those strikes to vulnerable targets, with the mindset to not stop until the attack is incapacitated. Hesitation is the enemy. I was reminded by this after watching the heart wrenching documentary ‘Sarah Everard – The Search for Justice.’ I say again here, if a man approaches you late at night and stops you and attempts to engage you, that man is a serious threat, even if he says he isn’t and is a police officer. Even if he seems infirm and is asking for help. I’m not saying ignore him, but be firm with him and tell him to keep back whilst you call for an ambulance. Ted Bundy often pretended to be disabled to get close to his victims!

Apologies for the dark turn here, but I’m passionate about educating and training people to avoid and survive random and unexpected situations.

It’s been a couple of weeks since you launched WarriorUp, how is it going?

On one hand, we’ve received excellent reviews and maintain a 5-star rating. However, I still encounter the same challenge: many people do not prioritize self-defence as the essential life skill it is.

A friend recently asked me, “Is our area dangerous to live in?” concerning his daughter’s safety. It’s impossible to answer that question definitively because the types of attacks we fear for our daughters are often random. For example, a few years ago, two teenage girls were attacked in a nearby park on a Sunday afternoon. Thankfully, the attacker was caught, but he had traveled from the other side of London, hoping to avoid capture.

As the old saying goes, “It’s better to be safe than sorry.” Use the link below to get the full 20-day transformational course at the low price of £14.99. Most importantly, dedicate just 10-15 minutes each day for 20 days to equip yourself with these vital skills.