Your Mentality and Martial Arts

Disclaimer: The opinions written in this article are the views of the author, and not the views of all the Gentle Tempest writers.

When I started training Krav Maga, I just wanted something new to fill my time. A therapist had recommended Martial Arts to help my anxiety a few years previous, and I was finally able to pay for it. I wanted to feel powerful and strong and safe.

When I started training Judo, it was more out of necessity than desire. I loved doing Martial Arts, and Judo was the only option I had. But I started learning so much and fell in love with Judo for what it had to teach me. I fell in with the feeling of a well-done technique, and then how I was understanding other parts of my life on a new level by relating it to what I learned in Judo.

My experiences in Martial Arts have been dramatically different from when I trained Krav Maga to Judo, and not just because of the different arts. My mindset changed, my goals changed, and how I processed my experiences changed. It has impacted my writing as well.

It impacts all of our writing and experiences. What your mindset about training is also impacts what art you should pursue if you’re just starting out, or looking to expand your Martial Arts repertoire.

For our readers, I hope this is will help clarify the perspectives that we as writers are writing from. If you’re just thinking about starting a Martial Arts journey, but don’t know where to begin, I hope this post can help you choose a Martial Art.

Today I’d like to go over what some of those perspectives are, and how they impact both training, and our Gentle Tempest writers.

1. Self-Defense

A. For women, self-defense seems to be the most popular reason for starting Martial Arts. It offers a sense of empowerment and safety in day-to-day life, and makes doing normal things easier, especially for those with anxiety. The downside I’ve heard from some, specifically people who’ve trained with and carry knives, is that it creates a sense of paranoia, always thinking about who can hurt you, how, how you can get away. This sense of paranoia can be stressful, especially if you’re not used to it.

B. How does this impact training? People who train for self-defense purposes actually tend to train more carefully than others in my experience. You can’t defend yourself if you have a sprained ankle! They also tend to be utilitarian in their training; if it doesn’t have a practical use, they don’t want to spend time on it. The danger of this is they seem to be at risk of cutting corners in their training. I’ll write more on this later, but the trend of “self-defense seminars” is a good example of this. While they can be helpful if focused correctly, the amount of training needed to be prepared for an actual fight cannot be gained in a single seminar. I’ll go more in-depth on this topic in a later post.

C. And for Gentle Tempest? Most our writers and readers, especially the women, come from a self-defense perspective of Martial Arts. The interest areas of our self-defense writers tend to be more geared towards empowerment, how the female mind works in stress situations, things of that nature. This is not, of course, always the matter. However the perspective of being empowered to keep themselves safe is what they tend to focus on.

2. Health/Exercise

A. Another common reason I hear for women to start Martial Arts is for exercise. Martial Arts of any kind are a good all-around exercise, that often involves both weight bearing activities and cardio. BJJ and boxing are common exercise focused Martial Arts, and the combination of exercise and hitting things can be a quality stress relief in a way that a lot of other exercise classes aren’t. Whether it’s a pro or a con, people who do Martial Arts for exercise and health often do not get the depth of knowledge that comes with more technique focused arts, like Judo. Drilling techniques doesn’t always make for the best workout the way an intense boxing session does!

B. For training, exercise focused Martial Artists tend not to take big risks in their training that could lead to injury. They like to maximize the workout potential of any given class, so heavy technique learning isn’t generally important to them. The self-defense benefit of exercise focused Martial Arts is very dependent on the art in question. Any sort of combat training is useful for self-defense. Some arts, like boxing, can involve fairly intense rounds of sparring that is closer to real life fighting than, say, Karate point sparring. But for those that are exercise focused, sparring can be too dangerous, so the self-defense benefits may be limited.

C. For our writers that have health and exercise as another primary reason for their training, their posts will again be focused on empowerment, goal setting, improving your physical body, things of that nature. While they can seem shallow to those who train for Way of Life reasons, they are not shallow at all. The physical body and the mental body are closely intertwined, and by understanding how our bodies move, work, live, we better understand how our brains work. Training the physical body is also important to bettering oneself.

3. Passion/Way of Life

A. I have found the “Way of Life” perception to be more common in older, more tradition-entrenched arts, such as Judo and Kempo or more spiritually focused arts, such as Tai Chi. People who have a deep passion for the art and incorporate it into their lifestyle often attempt to be well-versed in techniques, history, philosophical theories within the art, the overall benefits of the art, among many other things. In my experience, if you want to be trained by anyone, it’s probably one of these people. They know the ins and outs, the good and bad, they can adjust any technique to suit you, can adjust most training to meet your goals. That said, in my experience, people who are so focused on Martial Arts as a philosophical idea can overlook the benefits of other training perspectives. They can be dismissive of sports-based changes to techniques. They can also be a little “my way or the high way”, though they are very knowledgeable.

B. From a training perspective, I have gotten the most out of Judo when I started viewing it as a way to make me a better person. The concepts I learned in Judo about body movement and interaction with another person taught me about abstract concepts I had never considered before. In the physical sense, I understood horseback riding better because of what I learned in Judo. But it generalized beyond sports. I understand parts of my Christian faith better because of the concepts I learned in Judo. I am more in love with my Martial Arts training than I ever have been, and it is making me a better person.

C. How does this effect my writing? I believe there’s more to Judo than just a set of techniques that can be used in competition or self-defense. So I approach Judo with that mindset, searching for more in each movement I make. Consequently, when I write about Judo, I want to write from a deeper level than just explaining the basics of the technique, or my experiences as a female Judoka. I want to explore on a more esoteric level, if I can, what the broader repercussions of what all these things are, for myself and for Judo as a whole.

4. Sport

A. Ah, yes. Sport. Probably the most common motivator I’ve seen for being in Martial Arts such as Judo, this mentality is especially common in arts that are present in the Olympics. Judo is not the only Olympic Martial Art; the others are boxing, fencing, freestyle wrestling, Greco-Roman wrestling, and Taekwondo. People that focused on sports, as would be expected, are a little more cut-throat on the mat than other Martial Artists. This includes themselves and others. There is no “easy” sparring, there is only winning. Of course, this isn’t always true, but it is far more prevalent in sports-based artists than the others.

B. What does this mean for training? Those with a sports focus are, as mentioned above, less likely to be willing to go light in training. They are less concerned with fundamentals and techniques, and more concerned with being able to win, even that means foregoing concepts and good technique for strength.

C. And for writing? From my experience, those with a sports background will write more about the rules, how the rules impact the sport, but without the focus on tradition. As someone Way of Life focused, I might write about how the sports rule undermine the progression of traditional Judo. Someone sports minded, however, would write about how the rules make the sport more or less marketable, for instance. Sports focused writers will be, like self-defense writers, more pragmatic and less idealistic.

All of these impact the places that we write from. But it can also impact what Martial Arts you choose to pursue when you start your journey. At the end of this article, I’ve included my Martial Arts picks for each category, although please note that while I know about the different schools of Judo, I do not know all the different schools of other arts. For instance, not all Kung Fu schools are the same. So always do ample research before choosing a dojo!

Self-Defense: Krav Maga, Boxing with Regular Sparring, Wing Chun, FMA (Filipino

Martial Arts that includes Arnis de Mano, Sayoc, etc.)

Health/Exercise: Kickboxing, Tai Chi, BJJ

Passion/Way of Life: Traditional Judo, Tai Chi, Kung Fu

Sport: Karate, Tae Kwon Do, Competition Judo, BJJ, Wrestling