Depend on Your Training not Past Experience
Every martial artist knows, or should know, that he must continue to train in order to keep his martial arts skills sharp. No matter what skill level you achieve, if you rest on your laurels, your skills will regress.
Although this should be common knowledge for martial artists, I continue to see people who have reached a certain level, and then stop training. These people think that once they have achieved enough skills to defend themselves, that their training is finished. This is wrong thinking!
It doesn’t take long to start to lose your flexibility. It also doesn’t take long for your martial arts skills to get rusty. But apparently, a lot of martial artists believe they will always retain their skills, even if they stop training.
Any athlete will tell you that it doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t take long for their skills to start to regress once they stop training. Nevertheless, martial artists are in a different category. Martial artists who train for self-defense believe that once they have that knowledge, they will always able to defend themselves. After all, self-defense is not a sport; it’s a potential life-or-death situation. That is wrong thinking!
Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, stated, “There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent.” While that is true, it is also true that overestimating your own skills can be just as dangerous.
There is an older Italian proverb which speaks to this point. It states, “He who is an ass and takes himself to be a stag, finds his mistake when he comes to leap the ditch.” Think about that.
If you go around thinking you have the skills of Chuck Norris or Bruce Lee, when you have let your skills regress, a life-or-death situation is a bad time to discover your mistake. Yet, many martial artists who no longer train, live with this dangerous deception.
There is a quote from the 19th century British pastor, Charles Spurgeon, which will drive this point home. Spurgeon wrote, “It is foolish to try and live on past experiences. It is a very dangerous, if not a fatal habit, to judge ourselves to be safe because of something that we felt or did twenty years ago.” Wow, that will really hit some martial artists in the gut!
Think about that piece of wisdom. Many martial artists try to live on past experiences. They judge themselves safe because they were once in great shape and could defend themselves against almost any threat. This is a dangerous delusion of the mind!
Consider this analogy. I used to be into bodybuilding, as well as martial arts. At my peak, I was benching around 265 pounds and curling 55 pounds on each arm. I have not lifted heavy weights like that in several years, as age and injuries have caught up to me. But in my mind, I still see myself being able to lift some heavy weights.
What do you think would happen if I went into my weight room and tried to bench press 250 pounds today? I can tell you one thing—if I were to try that, there had better be two strong spotters there to get that bar off my chest! I am not in the same shape I was back then, and I can’t do everything that I could earlier in life.
Your mind has a tendency to think that you are what you once were. We have to be rational enough to not consider ourselves safe because of something we could do years ago! This especially applies to older martial artists or martial artists who have stopped training hard.
Sun Tzu stated, “Know the enemy and know yourself, and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.”
You cannot know your enemy when you are attacked in the streets. Oh, you may know how predators think, etc., but in actuality, you know very little about some guy who attacks you out of nowhere. He may be just a drugged up punk. Then again, he may be an extremely skilled fighter or an experienced killer. You just don’t know.
If you are ignorant of yourself (your abilities and martial arts skills), you are in a dangerous position. As Sun Tzu states, you will be in peril every time, because you are ignorant of both yourself and your enemy.
You can’t simply think you can defend yourself against any attack; you must know you can defend yourself. There is no room for doubt! If you doubt that you can defend yourself, then you most likely can’t.
I like to use the following analogy to teach this point. Let’s say that you are paddling a kayak up a river with a strong current to a specific place. You have to paddle hard to get to where you want to be because of the strong current. After a lot of hard work, you reach your desired destination.
Once you are there, if you stop paddling and just rest on your laurels, you won’t stay there very long. It takes much less time for the current to take you back to where you started than it did for you to work hard to get to your destination to begin with.
Even after you get where you want to be, you still must put in the work to stay there. And if you want to go further up the river, you must continue to paddle hard. You can’t just get to your desired destination and then stop working!
This same principle applies to martial arts. Even if you achieve a high skill level, you are not guaranteed to stay at that level for life. You still have to train in order to maintain your skills. If you stop training hard, it won’t take very long for you to lose the skills that you worked so hard to achieve.
You may still have the martial arts knowledge that you have gained over the years, but your ability to use that knowledge will be diminished. That is how your mind deceives you. Mentally, you know what to do, but physically, you have lost ground and can’t do what you used to do.
To make this even more dangerous, you may not comprehend that you have lost those skills until you either start training again or need those skills in a self-defense situation. And that is the wrong time to discover that you can no longer jump across that ditch. You don’t want to be an ass who thinks he’s a stag!
Miyamoto Musashi stated, “The purpose of today’s training is to defeat yesterday’s understanding.” You have to constantly continue to train in order to know yourself and your abilities. As Sun Tzu taught, you must know yourself to have any chance to win against a skilled enemy. If you don’t know yourself and what you can do, you’re playing Russian roulette. You may still be able to defeat your attacker, but you aren’t really sure about it because you don’t really know where your self-defense skills are anymore.
Life is continuously evolving, and you must evolve with it. Age catches up with all of us sooner or later. If you can’t fight like you once could, it may be time to learn different techniques or different weapons. Either way, it is never time to simply quit and live on the glories of the old days. Memories of what you used to be able to do won’t keep you safe today!
Don’t take this chance with your life or the life of your loved ones. Continue to train as much as you can. If you are dealing with injuries or age issues, then you must figure out what you can do and what you cannot do. Know yourself and stay safe!
