Dedicated followers are growing in number almost every week.

”I saw his aura straight away at the first session. I closed my eyes and it glowed in front of me”, says one of the men in Vadim’s gym.

”Vadim's system is a way of changing your own psychological make-up and then that of your opponent. It's not so much a fight as a conversation”, adds another student.

Miracle, fraud or plain ridiculous, as it might seem to many, the technique has some scientific basis.

”There are a lot of myths around what this non-contact fighting can do – and its powers are exaggerated. These psychological techniques do exist, but most people cannot use them consciously,” says Sergey Klyuchnikov, director of a center of practical psychology.

Vadim himself stresses that non-contact fighting is not appropriate for every situation, and cannot be perfected without advanced psychological training.

Anyway, his gym seems to be prospering. And while it may be some time before all of the world's conflicts are resolved without so much as a punch being thrown, Vadim Starov is already planning to open new schools all over Russia to cope with the growing demand for learning his methods.