Why I Teach Fire Manipulation Online
I know that the idea of teaching fire manipulation online makes some people uncomfortable. I understand that reaction, and I had the same concerns myself before I made the decision to build the Fire In Your Face Academy. This page exists to explain why I did it, why I believe it was the right call, and why the world is genuinely safer with the Academy in it than without it.
The Problem the Academy Was Built to Solve
Every single day, people message me asking how to eat fire, how to do body burns, how to get started with fire manipulation. I constantly get messages from people asking me to come to their area and teach them in person. The reality is that I can’t do that. Visa restrictions, legal barriers, time constraints, and the sheer volume of specialist gear I need to carry (far too much to fly with) make it physically impossible for me to reach everyone who wants to learn.
In an ideal world, I would be able to get to everyone, or everyone would be able to get to me. But that is not the world we live in. The Academy was born out of that gap: a genuine, demonstrated demand from people all over the world that I had no other way to meet.
And when people do ask me for help, I can’t just answer their question with a quick message. If someone asks me how to do a fire eat, I have to explain all of the safety principles first, before even getting to the technique. You cannot responsibly give someone part of the information. They need the full picture, and the full picture is the course. The Academy is the only format that lets me give a responsible, complete answer at scale.
People Will Learn Regardless
There is a reality here that is worth thinking through: people are going to learn fire manipulation whether the Academy exists or not. The question is not whether people will try it. The question is how they will learn.
Without the Academy, their options are: a random YouTube video with no safety context, an outdated book, a bad instructor, or just figuring it out on their own. Every single one of those paths carries more risk than learning through a structured, professionally produced course that starts with safety and builds from there.
The Academy does not increase the number of people doing dangerous things. It increases the number of people doing them properly. Everyone is safer with it around than without it.
Good In-Person Instructors Are Extremely Rare
I will always recommend training with a good in-person instructor. The key word is good. Competent fire manipulation instructors are extremely rare, and in most countries they simply don’t exist. If someone lives in a country with no access to a decent instructor, the Academy is the best option available to them, and it is a dramatically better option than the alternatives.
The Academy also doesn’t have to replace in-person training. It can supplement it. If someone is training with a local instructor and also enrolled in the Academy, they now have a second reference point. They can compare what they are being taught in person with what the Academy teaches. If the Academy covers things their instructor doesn’t, or covers them to a higher standard, then the Academy raises the bar. It eliminates the information deficit that has allowed inconsistent or poor instruction to go unchallenged.
By putting this information out there, the standard goes up for everyone, instructors included.
Online Education for Dangerous Activities Is Normal
People teach welding, horse riding, aerial skills, paragliding, scuba diving, and even chainsaw operation online. All of these carry inherent physical risk, and all of them have established, widely accepted online education. This is the way the world is going, and it has been for years. Fire manipulation is not an outlier here.
The Free Safety Course Proves the Intent
Before anyone spends a single penny on the Academy, they can take the Fire In Your Face Safety Course, completely free, and it will always be free. I made that decision deliberately. I want people to be able to make an educated decision about whether fire manipulation is something they want to pursue before they part with any money.
The most critical information, the safety information, sits behind no paywall. That was a deliberate choice, because I believe everyone deserves access to the knowledge that keeps them safe, regardless of whether they go on to enrol in the paid courses.
The Business Made This Possible
Some people take issue with the fact that the Academy is a business. I would ask those people to consider what it actually took to build it.
The Academy took the best part of three years to plan and produce. We spent around £15,000 on studio equipment alone to record the content professionally. On top of that, there were consultation fees for health and safety experts, physics and chemistry consultants to verify the accuracy of the information, proofreading platforms, hosting, and all of the other costs involved in doing this properly.
No one in their right mind would have done this for free. Unless someone independently wealthy decided to fund it out of the kindness of their own heart, an academy of this quality would never have existed without a business model behind it. The business model is the reason the resource exists at all. The alternative to a paid academy is not a free academy. It is no academy.
And I still need to earn a living. Doing it properly costs a lot of money, and the investment has to be recouped. That is not greed. That is how the world works.
My Credentials
There are no formal qualifications in fire manipulation teaching. They simply do not exist. There is no governing body, no accreditation scheme, no universally recognised certification. This is perhaps the most difficult thing about choosing an instructor, because there is no shortcut to assessing whether someone is the right person to learn from.
What people should be looking for is, first, the instructor’s ability as a fire manipulator, and second, their ability to communicate that knowledge clearly and concisely. Those two things matter more than any certificate on a wall.
I have trained over a thousand students. The Academy content was also externally validated: I brought in outside consultants for health and safety, physics, and chemistry to check that the information I teach is accurate. Most online instructors in niche disciplines teach purely from personal experience. I went further than that.
The Course Design Accounts for Not Being There in Person
One valid concern with online education in a physical discipline is that an instructor can’t be there to correct mistakes in real time. I thought about this extensively when designing the course.
Every lesson covers the common problems we have observed across over a thousand students. Rather than simply showing the correct technique and leaving students to figure out what they are doing wrong, the course walks through the specific issues people encounter and how to identify and fix them. This was only possible because of the volume of in-person teaching experience that informed the course design.
For those who want direct feedback, the Professional tier provides exactly that.
A Final Thought
I understand why some people feel uneasy about fire manipulation being taught online. I had the same reaction myself before I started building the Academy. But when I sat with the problem and thought it through, the conclusion was clear: people are safer with the Academy than without it. The demand is real, the alternatives are worse, and the information deserves to be accessible to anyone who wants to learn properly.