Why Even Train Martial Arts?

Alright, at long last, my final installment in the little Tengu philosophy series here. I could see this one being fairly controversial, or at least a hard sell to people, but let me start off by answering the title question in a pretty uncontroversial way. In the short term, I don't think your reasons for doing martial arts need to be particularly deep or particularly profound. People come to martial arts for a lot of reasons, ranging from health to self-defense to community, and early on, I don't think there are really any wrong answers here, so long as those answers are healthy. Even some mildly unhealthy reasons, like wanting to feel in control or enjoying the transient meager clout from winning in local competitions, are at least passable, even if they are kind of vain or illusionary. But whatever, in the beginning of a career, what matters is that your reasoning is enough to get you in the door and keep you consistent. I think the more interesting issue here is when you start to have burnout, or you get injured, or whoever you joined up with quits, or you hit a skill plateau, or whatever else. At some point, I guarantee you'll look around and ask yourself why you are doing this. This is right around when people quit, usually. It's at this point I think we start to see folks digging for a bit deeper meaning in their training. I'm not convinced that most people do this consciously, but this is right around when you start to hear people trying to justify their time investment. Because remember, at this point, you've probably been training for a year or two. Here is the problem, though. Most people start trying to say that they are training for something, and I think that this is an error. And yeah, this is the controversial part that I was talking about earlier. I'm training for self-defense. I'm training for competition. I'm training for health, and so on and so forth. These things might be true on a kind of surface level, but if you scrutinize these reasons at all, they kind of break down, or at least degrade a little. I don't want to go into it deeply here, but I really don't think most martial arts are adequately preparing you for self-defense. They certainly will market that they do, but self-defense training is kind of a unicorn in the industry, I think. Can you do it? Sure. Does training whatever you're training have some overlap? Sure. But the category of self-defense is very broad and very deep. Anecdotal as they may be, my two personal self-defense encounters were a world apart from what I was doing on the mats, and frankly, due to the involvement of heavy drugs in one of those instances, a lot of what I thought would be useful just wasn't. Most martial arts are primarily interested in defeating themselves in a heavily curated, controlled environment, and that is fine. That is what sport is. Likewise, yes, there is always some overlap, but I, personally, no longer train for self-defense. I think it's a bit delusional to think that's what I'm up to when I'm not really training with specific real-world problems or situations in mind. If you're constantly talking about competition, if you're constantly assuming that the other person is going to behave a certain way, you're probably not training for self-defense. Likewise, I think there's a lot of overlap between martial arts training and health considerations. How couldn't there be? But once again, martial arts lack specificity in this area. You can train pretty hard, but if you're slamming two McDonald's Whoppers before class and then having a big smoke, well, I think you're just as delusional as the self-defense guy. As with self-defense, there are just better ways to tackle this issue. If your primary goal is indeed health, a personal health coach is probably a better investment of time and money. That is, someone who is going to look at you specifically and program a diet and workout around your health and your needs. And naturally, if health is your main goal, you need to drop the bad eating habits and the recreational drug use if that's something you're up to. Can martial arts help you get healthy or in a self-defense situation? Yes, but these are more like happy accidents. They're byproducts, not the major goals. Most modern martial arts systems aren't designed specifically for these things. And therefore, saying that you're training for them is oftentimes just for your own self-satisfaction. Now, you could say you're just taking the scenic route to these goals, and that's fine, but that implies another motivation that I'll come back to in a second here. As for competition, yes, you could absolutely be training very specifically for competition success. I think this is what most martial arts do best, in fact. It feels sort of obvious to say it so plainly, but if you want to be, say, an amazing judo competitor, you'd better be training in judo. In many ways, that is what the modern incarnation of judo is specifically designed for. Whether that's a good or bad thing is a debate for another time. The point is that competition is often specifically encoded into martial arts training. The problem, though, is that I've seen so many people unwittingly programmed the day they quit into their training schedule this way. Competitive success is pretty fleeting. Even if you do manage to attain it, you likely only have five to ten years of success. That might sound like an eternity to a 20-year-old kid, but it's typically going to amount to less than an eighth of your lifespan. I've seen a lot of competitors go pretty far, sometimes even to national or international level tournaments, but like I said, it was fleeting. Those guys don't practice anymore, at all. They don't even coach, which I feel like should be the natural evolution of that path. I've beaten around the bush enough, though. What I'm getting at here is finding a reason to train that is sustainable, not for a decade of success or based on vague, imprecise notions of self-defense or health, but based in something sincere, concrete, and that will last you a lifetime. Here comes the very hard cells. Prepare yourself. The first reason is because you love it. You do it for the sake of doing it. That's it. Sounds obvious, sounds unbelievably shallow, but I think that's what it takes. I have personally seen all these people come in and say, I train for this or for that. I do judo for the streets or for tournament. I see virtually no one say, I do judo for judo. I'm not sure where martial artists developed this notion that our practice has to have all these added-on utilities or tangential justifications. I have some friends who are musicians, painters, and writers, and I just don't see them ever talking about how they paint for something. That isn't the love of creating. That isn't the painting itself. I have theories, of course. I think a lot more people are trying really hard to make money in martial arts these days, and those same people try really hard to avert their eyes to the reality that what we do doesn't really have a whole lot of daily application. Yes, in a very infinitesimally small percentage of cases, maybe you save your life or someone else's life as a result of training, but we martial artists, we don't make anything. We don't fix anything. We don't heal brain tumors or teach law. I think a lot of people marketing martial arts feel pressured to make it seem extremely practical, and then almost unconsciously, a lot of students follow suit. People start looking for reasons to justify their love for something that needs no justification. You can do something simply because you're in love with it. I think that is a healthier way to go about things anyway. When I said that some people say they are taking the scenic route to health or self-defense or whatever, I think these people are really just saying that they are in love with the art, perhaps without realizing it, because to them, it's not the goal, it's the process. So that is the first reason. This second reason does try to frame martial arts practice as having utility in day-to-day life, though. For what it's worth, I train for both of these reasons I'm listing. I think they complement each other well. There's very little conflict between the two. Whether we are talking about Kano or Ueshiba or Funakoshi, a lot of Japanese martial arts these days have an underlying philosophy about improving society by improving individuals. Now, I've read these philosophies pretty extensively, and I think they are right, but also could be fine-tuned even farther. Kano, for example, talks about moral education through Judo, but he specifically is thinking about Japanese values. There isn't anything wrong with that, necessarily, but blanket Japanese values might not always be useful to every practitioner, especially in an art that is a century removed from Kano's frame of reference and exported to many a foreign nation. What I do agree with is that martial arts can make people better. We live in a time of high tribalism, high polarization, and very low curiosity. It's time where dopamine hits and instant gratification lured over doing things slowly or being alone with yourself. If you don't believe me, ask yourself when the last time you took a dump without your phone was. And we definitely see this leaking into martial arts culture, by the way. Everybody wants fast results. High percentage, no risk. Make me a high-level competitor as soon as possible. I believe that this is the opposite of what martial arts should be for. Training is a microcosm for day-to-day life. You learn what it's like to lose, even when you do your very best, even when you ostensibly do everything right. You learn how to be physically uncomfortable, which is a stand-in for being emotionally and psychologically uncomfortable in day-to-day life. If you listened to me about my last reason for training, you'll eventually come to appreciate processes over ephemeral, ambiguous goals. Train to be strong not for yourself, but for the sake of others. Really, I think martial arts could be a piece of the antidote to a lot of the social challenges facing our time. I don't mean in some kind of activist sense, but in the sense that it's a fun way to teach people to slow down, get creative, think critically about things, and go experience things outside of your standard environment. Admittedly, I'm coming from a very American perspective here. I know way too many people that think America is like the whole world. I have a lot of BJJ friends, for example, that think BJJ is the most popular grappling sport, period. I know people who believe they can solve all the world's problems if only everyone just thinks exactly the same way as them. I know some kids who want to get strong, but in lieu of putting in the effort to program a lifestyle, a workout, and a diet, they just go looking for steroids. We live in an age that glorifies riches and shortcuts while almost denouncing compromise and appreciation of things on their own terms. We live in an age where people have a very low discomfort tolerance but fail to realize that almost all achievements are on the other side of discomfort. Everything you want is on the other side of discomfort. The girl or man you want to talk to, you're going to be embarrassed when you ask them out. That promotion is going to take a lot of work. Being wealthy? Even more work. And all of that is going to be uncomfortable. Now, I'm not trying to pin every social woe on this cultural shift. Things like politics absolutely play a role in it. I'm just saying that people now want other people to find the efficient, highly optimized road to success and then drive them to their destination with as little input as possible. Martial arts are kind of the antithesis to that, and I think we might be missing a golden opportunity by not marketing them that way. So many martial arts are literally foreign, and basically all of them take a very long time to get any good at. At least personally, I train because it's an escape from all the trash in American discourse and culture. I'm not saying all American discourse and culture is bad, but certainly a lot of it is. Training grounds me. It helps me appreciate the infinite game of self-development, of not constantly chasing optimized pathways to success. This is why I'm kind of opposed to the whole Americanization of martial arts in the same way I'd be opposed to say the Asianification of western boxing. While I acknowledge adaptation will always happen, I think it's healthy for people to be exposed to ideas, thought processes, vocabularies, and methods well outside their narrow little comfort zone. Beyond that, I don't think gyms should be trying to market high-speed programs to equally rapid competition success and things like this. There aren't really any life hacks, no weird one trick that makes the professionals hate you. Just a lot of hard work over a very long period of time. And just to clarify, I'm not saying that competitive metagames can't be shifted and innovated on, but Newsflash, almost all those innovations come from people who have very deliberately gone off the beaten path. It's very difficult to optimize yourself into something creatively fresh and new. But I've gone on now for a bit. What are the two reasons that I've come to believe are the most sustainable to train? First, train for the sake of training, because you love it. No extra fat or justifications required. Second, do it to be a more balanced, socially beneficial person. Do it to push back against the high-octane, dopamine-chasing, clout-worshipping, insulated rat race that modern culture seems to have devolved into. Let martial arts be a mirror, and use it to fix what you see and you dislike. Lean on these two reasons, and training will always benefit you, whether you're starting class today or you're 82 and can hardly recall how you got onto the mat. That's all from me for today. Thank you so much for listening and watching, and I'll catch you in the next one. Peace.