There is a video trend on YouTube of ranking various martial arts for how effective they are for self defense. I too have taken part in this trend, resulting in the most watched video on my YouTube channel. While comparing various content creators' opinions on the subject, a general consensus started to emerge. That consensus being that Combat Sports like Muay Thai, Lethwei, and Boxing were always put in the top tier, while more traditional martial arts like Karate, Kung Fu, Kali, and Kenpo were put in the mid to low tiers. The reasoning often given is the Combat Sports, because they are trying to knock each other out, give the practitioner a better sense of what a real fight feels like when compared to non-Combat Sports that tend to compete with lighter contact and more protective gear. The Idea seems simple enough, if you want to learn to fight then you should fight hard and fight often. When I was in my 20s, I would agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly. I would take any fight I could get when I was in high school and college. Living in Mississippi in the early 2000s, formal Martial Arts competitions were not available to me. So, I took part in weekly fight clubs, did challenge matches, and sparred with local martial artists as often as I could. Now I know this is not the same kind of competition that a Muay Thai fighter or boxer is doing but believe me when I tell you we were fighting for real. In college I took up Boxing, did a little Muay Thai, and I attended a gym that sparred very hard! Why? Because if you were going to learn how to fight you had to do the real thing. Right? According to the Indiana University School of Medicine “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, is a progressive degenerative disease affecting people who have suffered repeated concussions and traumatic brain injuries that may occur in some athletes and others who have been exposed to concussions and repetitive head impacts.” The repeated blows and shocks to the brain associated with Combat Sports put fighters at an unusually high risk of developing CTE. This phenomenon is not exclusive to striking sports. Ronda Rousey, an Olympic bronze medalist in Judo and the first UFC women’s champion, admitted in her latest book “Our Fight” that she had sustained well over 100 concussions in Judo before she ever took part in striking arts. According to the National Institute of Health, “CTE results in a progressive decline of memory and cognition, as well as depression, suicidal behavior, poor impulse control, aggressiveness, and eventually dementia similar to Alzheimer's disease.” These impairments can have a horrible effect on your quality of life as you age. Combat Sports can also have a negative effect on the rest of your body as well. For example, the guy who taught me kickboxing was 60 years old and had cataracts, glaucoma, and was missing an ear from years of competing in the ring (granted he lost the ear in a bar fight). I am in my mid 30s at the time of writing this, and because of my years of doing fight clubs and challenge matches I have shoulder issues, back issues, and I can't straighten my elbows. On the flip side one of my Kung Fu Instructors, Master Daniel Pesina, is in his 60s and in phenomenal shape. I once asked him how he does it, and he gave me a simple answer “Do Kung Fu every day”. Then there is my Sifu in Wing Chun, a man in his 70s who can still do pistol squats, swears by the practice of kung fu as his primary method to stay in shape. Finally, there is Guru Dan Inosanto who still travels around the world teaching Kali and Jeet Kune Do in his 80s. He tells me a combination of a good diet, restorative arts like yoga and physical therapy, and training martial arts is the key to his longevity. I have trained with a lot of old men who can still do martial arts, and I have trained with a lot of middle-aged men whose bodies are falling apart. What is the difference between these two? What styles they study and how they train it. None of the guys who are 60+ prescribe to this “You have to get in the ring to learn to fight” philosophy. Instead, they encourage super light contact sparring and a lot of intense drilling of techniques. In contrast the instructors with broken bodies are all the dudes who tell me to do neck bridges, to always train as hard as I can, and are constantly pushing their students to compete in full contact martial arts tournaments. But the question still remains, can the guys who don't train so hard still defend themselves? The answer is yes. I know of very few instances where a trained martial artist of any kind was unable to protect themselves against an untrained fighter. Because martial artist are always competing with each other we tend to forget that the 90+ percent of people who have never done martial arts can’t take a single punch or handle being thrown to the ground. Infact, they don't even know how to defend such counter attacks. I once had a friend of mine attacked at a gas station. He never sparred hard and just practiced Kenpo twice a week. When the guy swung a punch at him, my friend snap kicked him in the groin, palm struck him in the face, and broke the guy's knee with a side kick. My friend never competed in boxing, he was a middle-aged man who smoked like a chimney and liked doing martial arts in his spare time. I assure you that if a Boxer or an MMA fighter had a fight with my buddy, my friend would lose. But that is fighting, not self-defense. His training had him fully prepared to protect himself and he did not have to incur a lifetime of brain trauma to develop the skill. There is a concept in Wing Chun that instead of hitting as hard as we possibly can, which will most likely break our knuckles, we hit hard enough and accurately enough to get the job done. We do this to minimize the risk of injury to our hands. Many of the older martial arts styles, much like the older men who taught me, have developed a softer, more relaxed training method because they have found longevity is more important than speed of skill development. If you want to become the best fighter in the world, it is important to know there will be some major sacrifices you must make to your body and brain. However, if you are just wanting to learn to protect yourself, stay in shape, and get a good workout in, then the arts like Kung Fu, Jeet Kune Do, Kali, and Kenpo will also teach you how to fight and take care of your body as you do them. Much like the Wing Chun punch, it’s not about training as hard as you can. It’s about training hard enough and smart enough to get the job done and reach your goals without taking on long term damage to your brain or body.

There is a phrase that often gets kicked around the self-defense community that goes something like this; “I would rather be tried by twelve than carried by six”. The intent of this mantra means I would prefer to go on trial for killing a man, then to let someone kill me. However, the people who tend to preach this adage are very rarely thinking of a true life or death situation but instead are playing out a power fantasy where they can justify taking another man’s life. As a martial arts instructor who specializes in self-defense, I have the unfortunate task of watching hundreds of videos of people being attacked. I do this so I can more accurately and honestly explain what to expect in the assault situations my students are training to defend against. One such video I saw was profoundly disturbing because the person who was defending themselves made an impulsive decision that very well could have changed their life forever. The video was a security camera footage of a young man being assaulted by another young man. The first man was pulling money from an ATM when a second guy ran across the street and swung a punch at the back of his head. The first man heard the guy coming and turned to face the threat. He put his hands up to protect his face, and his forearms deflected the blow. Then he threw a strike of his own that knocked the second guy out and promptly turned and began to run away. Suddenly, he stopped in his tracks, turned around, and walked up to the unconscious assailant and began to kick him repeatedly in the back of the skull. Claiming your actions were done in self-defense only extends as far as either incapacitating your opponent or getting to a place of safety. Once the assailant had been knocked out, any further injury inflicted on him would only constitute assault. However, most self-defense arts such as Krav Maga or Silat do not seem to fully understand this principle. Similarly, most every martial arts school that does not teach the “Tried by twelve” mentality will still neglect to address the moral and legal ramifications of going overboard when defending yourself. So here it is plainly. Every state has very different self-defense laws, and I am not a lawyer (meaning this is NOT professional legal advice). Having said that, if you kill a man even in self-defense you will be treated like a criminal. You will go to jail and be put on trial for murder almost every time. Rather or not you were defending yourself will come down to a simple question, “Were your actions that of a reasonable person”. In the story above, everything the first man did was self-defense up until the moment his assailant went unconscious. There is no justification legally or morally to kicking an unconscious man in the head repeatedly. A reasonable person would have stopped when the assailant was incapacitated. Anything beyond that would only be viewed as assault. I understand the impulse of the man who was attacked. He was mad and wanted vengeance. However, that is where the morality of the situation should come into play. If you kill a man, you have not punished them at all. They are dead, it is over for them. What you have done has caused great pain to whomever loved them. Even the worst of people have a mother or child who loves them. When you kill someone, you only bring pain into innocent people's lives. They are the people you have punished, not the “bad guy”. If you are ok with that, then you are a bad person. I titled this article “It is never justified to kill” because I believe that with every ounce of my being. Rather you study martial arts for self-defense or carry a weapon, it is imperative that you respect the lives of all people, even those you hate. While there are occasions in which self-defense will require lethal force, those situations are extremely rare and still should never be viewed as a good thing but rather a necessary evil. We must embrace the fact that killing another human being will only bring more pain to those who care about them. Vengeance masquerades as justice, but it is actually a self-indulgent power trip that only serves to increase the suffering in this world. If you don't buy all that, which means you are detrimental to our society, then allow me to plead to your heightened sense of self preservation and remind you: If you kill a man, you will be treated like a criminal and you will go to jail.

I have had the honor of training with many of my childhood heroes. One of those people is Dan Inosanto who is one of the very few people to be certified in Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee. Not to mention he is a living encyclopedia on Filipino martial arts. When he was 28 years old, he received his black belt in Kenpo under Ed Parker and at the age of 75 he received his black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu from Rigan Machado. I bring this up to show that he never stopped training. If you have ever trained with him, one of the first things that will stand out is how healthy he is at his age, as of writing this article he is 87 years old. When he is just moving around in his day-to-day life, his age shows. However, when he starts demonstrating martial arts he moves with speed, explosiveness, and decisiveness. I think everyone who has trained with him at some point has asked, “how the hell does he do all that in his 80s?”. So, I asked him, and what he told me changed the way I trained martial arts from that day forward. He told me every ten years or so you have to change everything about how you train in martial arts. You cannot expect a workout routine that worked for you in your 20s to even be good for you in your 50s. You cannot expect to eat like you did as a teenager when you are in your 30s. Most importantly, what techniques you use when sparring and how you spar will develop over the years. The kick or escape that worked well for you at 25 might not be viable at 45. You do not age out of martial arts; you simply have to let your martial arts age with you. The problem with this strategy is not all martial arts age with you. While there are some outliers in every martial arts style, there definitely seems to be some systems of fighting that are catered to a young body. I will pick on Wrestling first. For all intents and purposes, I consider wrestling to be the single most effective style of grappling. If you have ever rolled with a college wrestler, their explosiveness, strength, and pressure is eye opening. However, it all comes at a cost. I don't believe it is a coincidence that you don't see many men in their 50s practicing wrestling. Study after study have shown that many of the core movements of wrestling such as neck bridging, snap downs, and even how they change elevation do a great deal of long-term damage to your back. In fact, I once showed the neck bridging that is at the core of most wrestling programs to my physical therapist and he said, “That might be one of the single most dangerous exercises I have seen.” In contrast, there is a small but dedicated group of 40+ year old students who still train every week in most Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gyms. So why is that? Why do people seem to age out of Wrestling but not of BJJ? You can surely still find plenty of BJJ gyms teaching neck bridging, snap downs, and wrestling style elevation changing. I think the difference comes down to two major factors: The pace of training and the variety of techniques to pull from. In wrestling there is one pace, and that is full boar pedal to the metal train until you puke. Conversely, most Brazilian Jiu Jitsu schools will make space for a more casual and laid-back approach to training. So, when you are fifty years old with a messed-up shoulder and tight back, you can still go to the gym and train. The variety of techniques also allows for a greater expression of the art so your strategy can adapt and change as time moves on. For comparison, most wrestling schools will run the same gameplan: Take your opponent down by grabbing their legs then pin them with all of your might. While this strategy is perfectly viable in BJJ, you can also win by pulling your opponent into your guard. If your opponent is far stronger than you, in BJJ there is a means by which you can subdue your opponent even if your back is to the mat. I find BJJ is not an “either or” martial art but more of a “yes and”. As a result, as your body changes there is room for your game plan and training method to change along with you. Boxing is another art that people seem to age out of. I trained boxing for five years in my early 20s and in the gym I went to there was one 50-year-old dude who trained with us. Sure, the coaches were in their 40s, but they told us how to train and did not train with us. The culture of training at that gym was rough. What we called “Sparring” I would call “fighting without hard feelings” today. No one pulled their punches. Training was equally intense. Jump rope, wind sprints, truck pulls, and duck walks were an everyday affair. It was crazy hard work and as a 20-year-old I thought it was bad ass. However, at the same school there was a Kenpo class that was filled with 40+ year old men. It seemed like at some point folks would organically age out of the boxing program and graduate to Kenpo. Because I am a glutton for Kung Fu, I was training in the school’s Kenpo program along with boxing and the difference in the training methods were stark. The Kenpo guys worked hard for sure, but not like the boxers. The Kenpo guys put a lot more emphasis on slow and accurate training with 100s of repetitions of any given sequence of movements. They would spar fast but would pull their punches and kicks so they would not hit too hard. This training method allowed the Kenpo practitioners to train for longer and greatly minimized injuries. The crazy thing, having sparred both the boxers and the Kenpo guys, their skills at striking were comparable. While the boxer’s footwork was always better, the Kenpo fighters had such an extensive arsenal of punches and kicks that they became equally difficult to deal with. However, because the Kenpo practitioners sparred light, we could get more rounds in during each training session. Once again, the core difference between the art that people aged out of and the art that aged with the practitioner was the pace of training and the variety of techniques to pull from. This article is not made to trash on wrestling or boxing. I would be the first to tell you that both arts are essential elements of a complete self-defense arsenal. Martial arts are hard, no matter what style you study. Your muscles will ache, your skin will bruise, and your joints will be sore. These are all guaranteed in whatever martial art you choose. Therefore, choose a martial art that you can still practice when these kinds of injuries become more permanent. Age will come for us all and I hate the idea of training hard for years to only let age come along and take it all from me. Choose your style carefully and train wisely so you can fight like an old man.

The other night I was closing up my gym while chatting with one of my students. I was talking to them about the fact that people who specialize in only one style of fighting, such as boxing or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ), tend to get better faster at the given discipline when compared to those who study multiple systems of fighting. As we moved the conversation into the parking lot they asked me an interesting question, “Wouldn't it be best to learn only one martial arts style and master it then? So, you can get good faster?” Of course, if you take a look at the schedule of my school it would be clear that I encourage cross training over specializing. At my gym we offer no less than five different martial arts styles to learn. So, the question remains; if specializing gets you good quickly then why do I encourage all my students to cross train? If someone exclusively studies one style of martial arts such as Judo, Karate, or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, then their pathway to mastery of the art will be considerably quicker when compared to someone who cross trains. This is because the total amount of information they have to learn is narrowed and focused into a smaller group of techniques. For example, in the martial arts world the style of Muay Thai is highly respected for producing excellent fighters very quickly. This is due to the fact their arsenal is comparatively very small when examined against other systems of fighting. With the student having less total information to work on, they are able to hyper focus on developing the selected tools of the art and refine them in a very short time. “Hick's Law” states that the time it takes for a person to make a decision increase as the number of possible choices increase. Therefore, the specialist may have an edge in this situation as well. While the cross trained martial artist will have many options to choose from when faced with any threat, the specialist will know their game plan and execute it without hesitation. The obvious problem with this approach is their particular specialty may not be the best tool for every situation. You may have heard the phrase “when all you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” This is the inherent flaw of specializing in only one method of fighting. For example, if all I know is boxing, then I am going to throw punches even if my opponent would be better subdued with grappling. Furthermore, a specialist is often ignorant of the diversity of tools some other system of fighting might present to them. For example, I was having a casual spar in a BJJ gym, and my opponent only knew about my Judo background. They shot in for a double leg takedown, I sprawled and stuffed it. Then they recovered to their feet and tried an arm drag to take my back, and I stuffed that too. After the roll was over, they said “Damn, I am so used to double leg takedowns being free on judo guys, I also can't seem to take your back.” I explained to him I studied Jeet Kune Do which utilizes elements of catch wrestling, so I was ready to defend a wrestling takedown. Additionally, I used the “Sticky Hands” technique I learned in Wing Chun to counter the arm drag. If I had truly only known Judo, then maybe the double leg would have caught me off guard. However, because I was cross trained in multiple fighting styles, I was better prepared to counter his gameplan. There is also a higher risk of burnout for the specialist. Martial arts are something that is best enjoyed over a long period of time. I tell my students “It takes ten years to get ten years of experience every time, you cannot speed up the process.” However, it takes a very special individual to enjoy doing the exact same handful of movements over and over for ten years. While those people surely exist, in fact they make up the upper levels of every martial art style, most people will get bored with the monotony of constantly practicing the same drills and techniques day in and day out. Eventually they will get bored and quit before they reap the benefits of the art at its highest level. In contrast, one of my coaches' trains in BJJ, Wing Chun, Kenpo 360, and Muay Thai. He tells me whenever he starts to get burnt out on one style of martial arts, he puts it on the backburner and focuses on one of the other systems he knows. He told me it works like seasons. Sometimes it's the BJJ season of his life, then the Wing Chun season will take over. Eventually something will reignite his passion for BJJ, and he will be back in. The biggest limitation to specializing in only one method of fighting comes down to self-defense. Specializing in the world of self-defense is gambling plain and simple. Sure, if I knew for a fact that I was going to have a boxing match in six months, I would spend the next six months exclusively training at a boxing gym. However, you do not get to choose the "how, when, and where" of how you may be attacked. If you need boxing skills, let's hope you studied some boxing, if you need BJJ skills, let's hope you at least have a blue belt’s knowledge on the ground. I recall watching this interesting experiment where they took a handful of MMA fighters and had them go through a military training exercise where they would be attacked randomly. They all failed. This was due to the fact that they had never had to defend from off angles, and some of their attackers had weapons like knives and sticks which they also never had to concern themselves with in the cage. Even though they were all awesome fighters in their given sport, their hyper focused skill set left them ill prepared to defend against relatively common self-defense situations. I have many more reasons than just this to encourage the cross training we do at The School of Self Defense, but I will stop here to prevent this article from becoming a short book. The biggest objection to cross training I receive is that most people simply don't have the time to study multiple arts. The great benefit of the training method at my school is that cross training is built into our program. Instead of traveling to five different schools a week in order to study with five different instructors in five different martial arts styles, The School of Self Defense simplifies the whole process by putting it all under one roof and building the curriculum around the idea of cross training. Because multiple arts are taught in one school, we can more carefully and accurately explain the interplay between the different fighting methods and help you understand how they all work together. Our goal is not to make you a Wing Chun fighter or a BJJ fighter, we want to help you find your own personal kung fu that is custom made for your needs and attributes. I think Miyamoto Musashi, the greatest samurai who ever lived, summarized my point perfectly when he wrote in The Book of Five Rings, “It is difficult to understand the universe if you only study one planet.”

I was first introduced to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) in my early teens when I picked up a self-defense book by Royce Gracie. In the back of the book, it told the legend about how Brazilian Jiu Jitsu became “the most effective self-defense art in the world” by making a single change to the goal of fighting. While the vast majority of Americans at the time would fight with the goal of landing a knockout punch, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioners would take their opponent to the ground and choke them unconscious or put them in painful joint locks. They called these fight ending chokes and locks “Submissions”. The promise of this submission-based self-defense was to allow the smaller weaker man to beat the stronger man by using technique and leverage to overcome their strength. In a BJJ match, an opponent can give up at any time via “The Tap Out”, a gesture where the defeated man slaps his hand repeatedly on the ground, himself, or his opponent. This signal of tapping out has made its way into just about every combat sport that allows grappling. The long and short of it is, if you can make your opponent tap out, then you win. However, I have never been much of a combat sports oriented martial artist. My passion has always lied deep in the realm of self-defense. The mistake I think most martial artists make is the assumption that all submissions are created equal. If they tap out then you win, right? In this article I intend to lay out a hierarchy of submissions for self-defense. Because amongst all the submissions such as wrist locks, elbow locks, shoulder locks, knee locks, ankle locks, and chokes, there are some here that would be more likely to end a fight than others. Finally, I would like to challenge the BJJ legend that grappling is the best way to survive a street fight. Let's start with arm and wrist locks. In martial arts such as BJJ and Judo one of the first submissions you will be taught is the Americana (Ude Garami for my Judo buffs out there) a submission made to dislocate the shoulder. While playfully training in the gym with other BJJ fanatics, the Americana will become one of your go-to submissions. You can hit it from damn near any position, it's simple, and in the gym, you will get a tap every time. However, take a look at actual martial arts tournaments and a very different story will unfold. In competition it is not uncommon for some meathead athletes to simply not tap out to an arm lock of any kind, rather it be an Americana or an Armbar. Some foolish athletes are so desperate to win, they would rather let their body break than suffer defeat. While I trust this is not the case with more experienced levelheaded practitioners of the sport, I have seen crazier things happen. In fact, I recall in high school, one of the players on our football team broke his rib during one of the first plays of the game. He did not want to get pulled out of the game, so he simply did not tell anyone. He only spoke up about his injury once the game had finished (we lost by the way, we always lost). The point I am trying to make is that there is no tapping out in self-defense. There are monsters out there like that football player that would not roll into a ball and cry just because you broke their wrist. While I am not saying we should neglect arm and wrist locks in our self-defense training, what I am saying is this: If you want to develop a self-defense focused style of grappling, consider arm and wrist locks as a means to an end and not the end itself. Because at the end of the day, they can still be used as a painful hold to simply control someone. So, let's talk about the second-best submission group, leg locks. When I say leg locks, I am referring to any submission that would break the knee or ankle. There are some leg locks that simply cause pain and would not break your opponent, those are out for self-defense as far as I am concerned. Let's think about that tough football player again, but this time let's imagine that instead of having a broken rib he broke his ankle. Now, no matter how tough he is, there would be no way for him to keep running on the field. He would be forced to back out of the game. Same would go for self-defense. Even if our opponent is “bath salts crazy”, if we break his ankle or knee, he simply can't chase us. However, there is something to keep in mind. Most of the positions we would use to achieve such a submission leave us extremely entangled with our opponent and often in a prone position. We still have to get away to reap the benefits of that submission. As long as we are still on the ground with them, there is still a chance for them to draw a knife or pin us and knock us out. So, while an attack to the legs is an excellent submission for self-defense, I would study how to disengage from that position safely. Finally, the king of submissions, the Choke. Simply put, there are no tough guys with chokes. If someone refuses to tap out to a choke, they simply go to sleep. Furthermore, even in combat sports the various chokes such as Rear Naked Choke or Guillotine are always amongst the highest percentage submissions. Lucky for us, chokes are available from almost every position in grappling. When it comes to self-defense there is no better path to victory than rendering your opponent unconscious. If only there was a way to do the same thing without having to take the time of grappling my opponent to the ground and pinning them first. If only there was a faster way. . . All self-defense practitioners should learn striking. While BJJ and other grappling arts are must have skills for self-defense, the core of self-defense will always be striking. A well-placed elbow strike or knee can knock out your opponent before the fight even gets going. When we are seeking the quickest path to victory, striking arts such as Muay Thai and boxing will always have the edge over grappling arts. While the grappling arts can end a fight in a matter of seconds, striking arts are the only ones who can end a fight in under a second. Of course, the best option would be to focus on a martial art that incorporates both striking and grappling aspects. While you could study separate arts by attending a Muay Thai class and a BJJ class every week, there are already martial arts such as Kenpo and Jeet Kune Do who have been studying the interplay between striking and grappling for well over 60 years. As grapplers we get too used to the idea that when we get to a certain checkpoint (the submission) that the fight will just magically stop. Because in the gym, it does. There is no effective submission that is not worth knowing, because grappling is about so much more than self-defense. Many people pick up BJJ for the sport, to get into MMA, or simply as a weekly workout. And in those cases, all submissions are created equal. However, if you are a self-defense focused martial artist, do not be distracted by the siren’s song of the "Tap Out". Know what submissions will finish fights and what ones may not. Then focus your attention on using them all appropriately. In conclusion, armlocks are good, leg locks are better, chokes are best, learn to hit hard.

Are you a fighter? Could you win a fight if you had too? Do you have what it takes to win a fight? While there are thousands of schools that teach martial arts, very few of them are truly preparing their students for a real fight. There are martial arts that focus on preserving a tradition, looking cool on camera, or competing in solo routines for a high score. There are even schools that teach self-defense techniques but are not producing people who can actually fight! So, what makes a fighter? What is required to take martial arts from a form of self-discipline to a usable skill of self-defense? In my school I teach a fighter must possess three critical attributes to be effective. Those are aggression, athleticism, and technique in that order. In nature, the lion has no natural predator. This is because the lion is so damn aggressive it would not be worth any other predator’s time to try and eat them. A predator will always seek the easiest prey it can. As a result, we can see aggression is by far the most important aspect of surviving an assault or winning a fight. There is this odd phenomenon in self-defense that when someone is afraid of being hurt, they tend to get hurt more. This is due to the fact that a fear of pain and harm tends to make people move in an unnecessarily cautious way, hesitate, and miss time their attacks and defense. Aggression is not the same as being reckless. Aggression is being hell bent on incapacitating your opponent by any means necessary. You may get hit, scratch, and otherwise busted up as you attack back, but that is sometimes the cost of victory. With the added weight that comes with defeat in a self-defense situation, victory must be sought out at all costs. We should seek to create asymmetrical violence where you are not the victim, they are. You should have no interest in finding out how skilled your opponent is or giving them a fair fight. You are not fighting back to save your life; you are fighting because you are offended by the fact that they thought you were a target. As Bruce Lee once said, “The worst opponent you can come across is one whose aim has become an obsession. For instance, if a man has decided that he is going to bite off your nose no matter what happens to him in the process, the chances are he will succeed in doing it. Athleticism often gets ignored in self-defense practice because we teach that martial arts allow the weak to overcome the strong. While this is true, imagine how much more effective these same tools would be in the hands of the strong! While age will come for us all, it is imperative as self-defense practitioners we do our best to stay as healthy and athletic as possible. There are many athletic traits that people tend to grow out of such as explosiveness and healing quickly. However, other traits such as flexibility and cardiovascular endurance can be maintained well into your old age. For example, I have one student who at the age of 63 can bend down and kiss his knees. One of my instructors, Daniel Pesina, is in his mid 60s and can still do the splits. This kind of flexibility greatly reduces the risk of injury while simultaneously increasing the amount of offensive and defensive tools at your disposal. However, cardiovascular endurance is by far the most important aspect of athleticism we must strive to maintain. Fighting is hard, and unimaginably exhausting. The average person would run out of steam within 30 seconds of fighting at full intensity. It's one thing to lose a fight because your opponent is a better fighter than you, but it’s a real shame to lose to someone who is less skilled than you simply because they had better cardio. Technique is the fun part. However, it is often the most misunderstood of these three attributes. Technique is not simply knowing a special trick to get out of a bad situation, it’s understanding the mechanics, accuracy, timing, and finesse of the movements. For example, if you punch someone in the forehead it would hardly affect them. However, the same punch landed on the outer edge of the eye socket could cause an orbital blow out and rob your opponent of their sight. Personally, I have knocked out fighters bigger than me solely because I timed my strike to land just as they were moving quickly towards me. This timing causes a car crash effect, where the impact of my strike is amplified by their forward momentum resulting in a much harder strike then I could usually throw. One of my favorite examples can be seen with one of my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu coaches. I outweigh him by nearly 90 pounds, and for all intents and purposes I am a great deal stronger than him. However, when we roll, I can't pin or submit him. This is because his technique is good enough to nullify the natural advantages I have over him. The benefits to the study of martial arts extend far beyond that of simply learning to fight. There is nothing wrong with studying martial arts for personal growth, health, to find a community, or simply because it’s fun to do. However, if your goal is to become a fighter and be capable of using these skills in real life you will need to focus on so much more than simply the curriculum of your school. A fighter needs aggression, athleticism, and good technique in order to make the movements of martial arts effective in real life. The greatest benefit to being a fighter is you will then have the ability to choose to lead a peaceful life. As Ed Parker once said “The man who is secure within himself has no need to prove anything with force, so he can walk away from a fight with dignity and pride. He is the true martial artist--a man so strong inside that he has no need to demonstrate his power.”

When I teach martial arts to the general public, or when I post a self-defense video online, inevitably someone will comment “This is stupid, just run away.” Seems like sound advice, right? It seems like common sense. I trust most people’s gameplan if faced with a life-or-death situation would be to run away. Honestly, even I have given out the same sage wisdom of “just run away” a time or two. However, is this advice as sound as it seems? In this article I would like to take a look at how most people grossly misjudge their own abilities, the commonly misunderstood reality of the scenarios that would call for self-defense training, and how situational awareness and violence avoidance is the greatest self-defense. Do me a favor and indulge me in a mental experiment. If you had to compete in a 100-meter dash right now, how would you do? Would you come in first place, or be dead last? Now ask yourself another simple question: How often do you practice running or how long could you sprint without running out of breath or tripping? While I am sure there are a few athletic phenoms reading this post, I am even more sure that the majority of you (and I count myself amongst you) would not fare well if you answered the above questions honestly. “Just running away” requires every bit as much skill, athleticism, and training as fighting back. At the time of writing this I am in my mid 30s. I train martial arts literally every day, often a few hours every day (albeit many of them are fairly lazy hours). I say this simply to emphasize that I am no couch potato. And still, if I had to get in a foot race with the average 19-year-old football player or basketball player, I am very confident I would lose. Now let's take this knowledge and apply it to a self-defense situation. Imagine you are in a parking lot; your car is 100 meters away and some shady fellow starts charging at you. You should just run away, right? Your car is only 100 meters away. However, you are not simply running. You are racing the person attacking you in a 100-meter dash. I personally would not win that race. Furthermore, if they managed to catch up to me, I would have depleted all of my energy trying to run away and have none to fight back. Keep in mind, I am not advocating running towards violence. I am simply pointing out that the vast majority of people would be incapable of running away. The above “self-defense scenario” is actually ideal. It’s so ideal in fact that it effectively never happens. Bad guys don't announce their presence when they are on the other side of the room from you. If you look up any videos of people being attacked with knives or mugged, you will see the moment of engagement is incredibly close. Furthermore, most studies on violent attacks show that somewhere between 70% to 90% of assaults are done by someone the victim knows well in a place they are comfortable. We hear news stories about women being attacked in a parking lot because they are newsworthy, meaning it does not happen every day. The headline you will never read is “Husband beats his wife,” or “Drunk guy punches his best friend” because these things are unfortunately everyday occurrences. Statistically, the vast majority of situations where you would need to choose between fighting back and running are situations in which running would not be an option. If you were attacked in your house or in a dorm room only effective martial arts training would have taught you how to attack back and save your own life. This understanding of violence and how it actually occurs, as opposed to the fear mongering scenarios highlighted on the nightly news, will lead to the development of the most important self-defense skill: Situational Awareness and Violence Avoidance. In order for an attack to happen three things need to be present: an attacker, a victim, and an opportunity. Of these three, the only one we have any control over is the opportunity. Educate yourself on how to identify a potentially abusive partner so that you can better avoid those relationships. Learn the environments preferred by predators and common tricks they use to get close to their victims. Most importantly, leave without shame as soon as you feel something might not be right. The whole problem with the thought that you don't need martial arts because you can just run away is that you are assuming running away is a possibility. Self-defense training is like a fire extinguisher. We should be doing everything we can to prevent a fire from happening in the first place. We never want to use our fire extinguisher, but if we need one and don't have one, we would be very upset.