making room to grow
Hi! I’m Kaja Sadowski, a martial artist, writer, and consultant in Vancouver, Canada.
I can teach you how to fight with blades and empty hands, to connect with your body, and to find joy in your strength. I can help you build a training community that brings out the best in you, your peers, and your students.
Join me to discover just how much you can grow when you’ve got the right tools.
One-on-one support for martial arts, self defense, and fitness professionals. Learn the soft skills of community management and get help writing effective policies. Build a new curriculum or revise your current one. Get a second opinion on thorny culture issues or weird problems. I’m here to help!
Bring my skills and knowledge right into your community. You can throw me in the mix at an event, or get an afternoon or weekend workshop tailored to your students. Discover a new martial art, dig into a favourite topic, or build important everyday skills. I can make it all happen in person or online!
Dig deeper into my teaching approach and steal the bits that work for you. My first book, Fear is the Mind Killer: How to Build a Training Culture That Fosters Strength and Resilience, has helped instructors and students around the world re-evaluate how they train. It’s a practical guide to building strong, sustainable, and inclusive training communities. Get it now in paperback, hardcover, or e-book!
Kaja’s excellent blog posts, videos, book, and random social media thoughts on martial arts have been a go-to for me for years now. They have a wonderful way of pushing my thinking past the overwhelming wall of ‘stuff’ when thinking through martial arts and instead breaking down my views on instruction and personal training into small, USEFUL, chunks.
Every teaching or school culture change of theirs that I have implemented has been a resounding success for both myself and my students.
Kaja is an amazing instructor! They have an excellent understanding of body mechanics and the ability to convey their knowledge coherently and in a wide variety of ways, so students with all different communication styles can understand their training as they develop their physical and martial skills.
As a student of theirs who is also a registered massage therapist with over eight years of experience, I often pick up new exercises and demonstration techniques from Kaja’s classes to incorporate into my professional practice.
For example, their “Sad Hand Puppets” and “Floop/Unfloop” exercises have real therapeutic value for the wrists and hips respectively, and are catchy and easy to remember. I’ve been told by multiple patients suffering from repetitive stress injuries to the wrist that Sad Hand Puppets allowed them to do their work pain-free, and been told that the Floop/Unfloop that I demonstrated was “the best stretching demo [the patient] has ever seen.”
If you’re looking for a martial arts class taught by someone who can make it truly accessible and work with your personal physical limitations while at the same time helping you push those limits just a little further, I cannot recommend anyone more highly than Kaja. Their classes are fantastic for bodies and brains.
