Should You Show Off Martial Arts? | ART OF ONE DOJO

Can you do a video please about martial arts in social life and showing off? When they say showing off I'm assuming they mean showing off your martial arts skills in a public space. I'm definitely a little bit torn on that so I'm not sure where the lines are drawn here. You talk about just being public about your martial arts or you're talking about doing demonstrations or showing off but my gut reaction is I generally like to keep my martial arts a little bit private. I mean if I'm out with friends we're talking or just talking in the casual conversation that's one thing but when it comes to like performing it in public I think there's some cautions to take there. What do you think about that? Well I mean well you know how it is is like when you first start learning something so you know I have a funny feeling that they're if they're new into the martial arts or new to a certain art you want to show it off you're that's what you're thinking about that's what you're talking about every conversation you're talking to you know your loved ones and you're like oh that reminds me and you got to remember they're they may not be into as much as you are and that gets obnoxious but also too with the showing off it yeah it depends if you're trying to use it to to you know because people are showing interest in you if people are showing interest in martial art or you're trying to advertise and market your school or in a positive and reinforcing way it could be a good thing but very quickly it can be one of those things where it's quite the proper word inappropriate yeah and grading and more of less you know you're the guy pumping their chest and backing up you know. You're reminding me of a story you told me years years back that you said when you were young and you and your friends went out to like the clubs if there was a local karate guy out there and he was doing he was like drunk or high he was doing kata out on the dance floor yes yes he was yeah he was doing yeah he was doing kata on the dance floor and of course you know then everyone's just like what is this guy doing yeah he's sitting there he's doing kata like as a day i i we i i don't know to this day what he was thinking or what he's doing but everyone is just kind of like oh god okay stay away from this guy he's not right in the head so and and i you know i and i say he was drunk or high or something but i i don't know but that's that's the thing he could might have been just having a good time and having fun but you just you know you got to do things appropriately so and and if you're starting new you're starting off probably less is more yeah probably well i i'm when i was in high school um there was a kid in my class it went my journalism class and he had just started taking karate to local school and this kid he had his own his own share of problems he didn't have the greatest home life and not the greatest sense of judgment but he had just started taking class and we had come from a lunch break and we came into the classroom where we're sitting down and he's going up to people saying hey i just started learning karate will you throw a punch at me so i can block it and i had to kind of pull him aside i'm like dude what are you doing you're just asking for trouble he's like well i want to see if this works i'm like you're in a school classroom you're going to ask the wrong person and you're not going to like the answer to that especially just starting but i i think in his case it was a confidence issue he definitely had a major complex and like i said his he came from an abusive family um he had a lot of self-esteem issues and confidence issues so i think he was using that to kind of i don't want to say posture but almost kind of gain a little bit of respect but what it was having the opposite effect on that and i think it was going to put him in a more of a dangerous situation because again he had just started he had like a week under his belt so he wasn't going to like be able to really defend himself if something happened but like this is inviting trouble and i think that's one of the threats too when you when you get to the point of showing off if you're saying oh i'm a martial artist and you're showing off and if you're at in the public setting and you start doing it you don't look as cool as you probably think you do i mean if you're trying to show off for people most people aren't gonna be that impressed and i know some people might do it to show look how good i am you don't want to mess with me but my perspective on that is if you're trying to use it as a deterrent the type of people that you would want to deter are not going to be deterred they're going to actually take that as a challenge so you might actually invite trouble with that yeah actually um one of the stories my my father used to tell me is um and my father is is a pretty big guy you know he's he's six two and he talked about when he used to work back in the day when he was a young kid and you would work at a grocery store uh there was a guy that would tower over him so he so my dad's six two so this guy's got to be pretty big he said he towered over him like another three to five inches so he was a big big guy so he said that every night when they would close up he would ask him could you walk me to my car could you you know you know walk me out when i close you know close the store and finally he's like you know you're so big why do you want me to walk you out and he goes because i'm so big everyone keeps picking on me because they think i'm the challenge so he's like if there's two people they're less like they don't they don't they don't they don't find me threatened because when i walk out by myself i'm the big guy this is all the people all they want to do is start a fight with me to prove this because the newest people want to prove themselves that they can beat up the biggest guy so they have something to prove with it and so yeah the challenge is there so if you're walking around showing off moves and that kind of person's around you they're not going to be impressed yeah exactly so yeah they're they yeah and if you're starting out and you're doing it you know you might not have the skills that you need to uh you know defend yourself yeah you know i hate to say it's not korber kai that you learn to watch a window and and sweep the floor and jack up a car that you can defend yourself off three uh three people at once you know are you telling me i've been doing chores all my life for nothing well i don't know have you been doing it the right way how you've been washing not very well just yeah you you want me to ask tracy she'll probably tell me the truth yeah it should be like hey what she'll say what chores no but this is funny too because like we're talking here about like showing off martial arts in public i don't even like going out anywhere in my uniform like even after class i see i know people who will go to the grocery store or go out to eat and they'll just wear the uniforms i'm like i can't no like to me i'm like that one it doesn't feel appropriate because i don't know like it's you're kind of walking around in pajamas but doesn't feel like appropriate dress but two is like i don't want to walk around in my belt on my gi for the same kind of reasons you're not showing off it's not really going to impress anybody and if anything it might just invite trouble yeah that's just that's just me yeah i can kind of see it one thing a little bit because it is really comfortable it is it's like wearing pajamas so yeah i can see it i can see that in some sense just because you know just just wear pajamas around all day all day bring a pillow and sleep they are mighty comfortable but yeah no and the yeah now if you're trying to do it where like if he was talking about like doing like showing off as in like public like you you were part of when you're in uh high school what was it called uh oh the demo team the demo team yeah yes so that might be you know that's a different thing that's kind of a marketing thing yeah but there's also a time and place for that too it's not like we just went out and just did i mean we actually set up we were at festivals we were at like martial arts festivals there or was that like even certain shopping days like shopping centers would center off like an area for performances so it was always like a pre-planned setup thing it wasn't like we just sit up in the middle of the bar and just started doing kata on each other you know yeah well and also too is is it it never looks as good as you think it looks to the other person that's the other problem too it's one of those things when you're doing you're like this looks awesome and the other and then you watch it back like someone shot foot you're like oh yeah that's do you guys okay for those watching you have no idea how many clips i have filmed for b-roll for our episode when i played it back i'm like i look like that nope the leads so it's like yeah it's the perception of what there's there's what you feel like what you think you look like and then what you actually look like so yeah showing off in public it doesn't come across probably as cool as you think it does yeah yeah because those are two is marsh i don't know i mean besides some of the high kicks and stuff like that most martial arts not as thrilling as you think it is you know it's yeah armistice 23 says in a lot of cases the bigger the talk the less the fight that's true and that comes with posture a lot of people who posture are just trying to cause a deterrent so this could be you know showing off martial arts could be a form of somebody's doing that just trying to their way of talking big but they can't always back it up true but also yeah but also too is if you also put the other way too if you can if you can prevent um or just escalate situations by showing off your martial art skills you know yeah yeah you know that that's always that that is definitely something there you know if you know if you if you um do something where you know i can't think of anything i thought my head that you know and you know the people then are no longer like oh okay let's let's get get into a fight you know that's a that's a win yeah that's a win that's it that's that's definitely a win especially if you can you know do something and where you get them where they're more interested into learning about the martial arts than actually you know fighting that's definitely a win so oh absolutely the guys that worry me are the ones who are quiet and you you can kind of you can kind of see them take a stance that's passive that they'll turn their center line away you'll see that their foots their feet are balanced and pointed and their hands might be like hey man they're up whatever like that's a person that and then they're quiet that's a person that might know something or at the very most at the very least you shouldn't assume they don't those concern me more than people who are so boisterous and just showing off look what i could do because i don't know a little bit about the unknown it's like not knowing what that person knows is a little bit scarier than showing up because when you're showing off and there's someone there who might actually want to fight you you're basically showing them your technique you're kind of giving them some tells true yeah so there's definitely a risk with that i know that is definitely true is yeah they gotta be careful but there's always less is more i always say all right i have to read this comment michael says i took a photo once for kempo and i was a white belt throwing a high kick and i didn't have my cup on so you can see the full x print of my dangly bits yeah the whole photo package is gone now yeah we all have photos where we play back like yeah whoops yeah not not and not as cool as i thought it was no the image that's up here is never translate it comes out the same way no no and and the moments when you're like oh that that was awesome that's the cool moment and you look back like oh but then on the same point too though is is um i had a friend in and uh high school and uh it was one of those things where she she had a picture taken of her and i don't know what exactly dance you're doing but she was doing just one stance she didn't think of it she may have this angry face on but it's still one of the coolest little pictures she ever took of martial arts she just looked like such a like like such like a badass and and she's like wow i look awesome but you know at the time she just thought it was you know she just did one of those stupid little kata move and it wasn't anything spectacular but it looked awesome just happened to be honestly so it works the other way too it does work the other way well there was actually when we were at sparring one day and i was going to say alex and um we were actually talking about a kick and alex stood there and he let me throw a high kick just for a demonstration well somebody snapped the picture right at the same point in time and it looks like i'm nailing him like it's a beautiful photo it looked like i totally caught him off guard and he was he was going to post go hey look what i did i'm like alex was standing he was letting me demonstrate something like i didn't catch him off guard it looked cooler than what actually was going on yeah but and there's the other side too there's a few times too where something cool did happen i was really excited to pull something off and i go back to watch with you later and i was off camera oh yeah i know in here i know in here it happened so this clip is an excerpt from one of our recent art of one dojo live episodes in which we talked about the martial arts and whether or not they should be allowed or taught in the prison system now i'm going to challenge you on this topic right here on your beliefs do you believe that the martial arts should be taught or should not be taught we look at it from both angles so you tell me what you think should the martial arts be allowed in prison