Bruce Lee. I idolized the man in my teens. I distinctly remember the first time I saw one of his movies; they were showing Fists of Fury on TV and I couldn’t believe a human being could move that fast, that nimbly. He fought ferociously, gracefully.

I wanted to be Bruce Lee. I read everything I could about him, and even went to practice Wing Chun, the first martial art he was officially taught.

Not Just a Movie Star

What surprised me about Bruce Lee was discovering that the man wasn’t just a gung-fu fighting superstar. Lee had an incredible depth and balanced his physical skills with Eastern and Western philosophy, he kept an extensive library and filled volumes of notebooks with his own writing.

Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human is the sincere and honest development of one’s potential. I have come to discover through earnest personal experience and dedicated learning that ultimately the greatest help is self-help; that there is no other help but self-help — doing one’s best, dedicating one’s self wholeheartedly to a given task, which happens to have no end but is an on-going process. I have done a lot during these years of my process, I have changed from blindly following propaganda, organized truths, etc., to search internally for the cause of my ignorance.

Lee was an avid reader.

He was born in the United States, but raised in Hong Kong. By the time he was in his teens, the rebellious Lee was getting in one too many fights, and his parents feared that he’d end up nowhere. So they packed his bags and sent him off to school in the US, where he eventually entered the University of Washington in 1961.

Fast at 21

As a 21 year-old university student, Lee was already an accomplished martial artist. Early videos from this period show just how fast and precise he was already becoming. He was teaching what he called Jun Fan Gung Fu (‘Jun Fan’ was his Cantonese name), and he dropped out of university to open up a school in Oakland.

In 1964, at the age of 24, Lee appeared at the Long Beach International Karate Championships, where he amazed the crowd by performing feats like two-finger push-ups. But the real crowd-stunner was his demonstration of Wing Chun’s one-inch punch; he sent his partner flying by delivering a punch only an inch away from his partner’s chest. It was this demonstration that attracted Hollywood, and landed him the role of Kato in the TV show The Green Hornet, after an entertaining and impressive screen test.

Dedication, absolute dedication, is what keeps one ahead — a sort of indomitable obsessive dedication and the realization that there is no end or limit to this because life is simply an ever-growing process, an ever-renewing process.

The Beginning of Freedom

Something else happened in 1964 which would change Lee’s life and the course of modern martial arts forever.

Lee’s gung-fu school taught students of all races, something the local Chinese gung-fu community frowned upon as they felt gung-fu should be kept to themselves. They issued an ultimatum to Lee to stop teaching non-Chinese, and when Lee refused, they issued a challenge. If Lee lost the match against their representative Wong Jack Man, he would have to close his school down. If Lee won, he could teach anybody he wanted, Chinese or no.

Lee with student Taky Kimura.

According to Lee’s wife, Linda Lee Cadwell, Lee won the fight in three minutes. But even though he’d won the challenge, Lee found himself unsatisfied with his performance. He felt that his technique hadn’t been as efficient as it should have been, and that the fight had actually dragged on for too long. He was also winded after the fight, which told him he was far from being as fit as he needed to be. Lee began to research his own experience, and came to the conclusion that the classical Wing Chun system he was practicing at the time, as well as all classical martial art systems, had become too stagnant and limited.

Lee began to pursue modern physical training methods and explore other martial art systems, from fencing to boxing, to find what worked. In jest, he placed a miniature tombstone in his school, with the inscription reading “In memory of the once fluid man, crammed and distorted by the classical mess.”

This was the beginning of what would become Jeet Kune Do (the ‘Way of the Intercepting Fist’ in Cantonese), Lee’s personal expression of the martial arts. A system designed to be a non-system, with the words “having no way as the way, having no limits as the limit” encircling its logo.

I do not teach because I do not believe in styles anymore. I mean I do not believe there is such a thing as, like, ‘the Chinese way’ of fighting or the ‘Japanese way’ of fighting…or whatever ‘way’ of fighting, because unless a human being has three arms and four legs, there can be no different form of fighting. But, basically, we only have two hands and two feet. So styles tend to separate man — because they have their own doctrines and the doctrine became the Gospel Truth that you cannot change! But, if you do not have styles, if you just say “here I am as a human being. How can I express myself totally and completely?” — now that way, you won’t create a style because style is a crystallization. That way is a process of continuing growth.

It’s hard to encapsulate today what a revolutionary stance Lee was taking in the 1960s. Classical martial art systems, whether Chinese, Japanese or otherwise, were taken as sacred and unquestionable. You did not question the system, nor would you think of trading and mixing systems. But Lee felt that traditional martial arts had become rigid and incomplete, while combat was something that was fluid and transcended fixed techniques.

Some people today call Jeet Kune Do the precursor to today’s Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), and while the link may be tenacious, we can see the similarities in philosophy: Use whatever works, regardless of system.

The Jeet Kune Do logo. The words read “having no way as the way, having no limits as the limit.”

The Long Road to Success

Lee’s success did not come easily. In fact, he had to overcome several obstacles, including racism, setbacks and a debilitating physical injury.

Lee in char­ac­ter as Kato (right) with Britt Reid as the Green Hor­net (left).

But even with the revenue from his private students, the years between 1967 and 1971 were a difficult financial period for the Lees. And it wasn’t going to get any better. In 1970, Lee severely injured his lower back during one of his workouts, so badly that he was confined to bed for three months, and after that, another three months of just moving around the house. The doctors advised him not to work out, and that he would never be able to practice gung-fu again.

Even though he was physically disabled, he refused to accept his doctors’ diagnosis as permanent. In the next six months, he wrote eight volumes on martial arts training and his personal philosophy of Jeet Kune Do. A year after his injury, Lee began to work out again. Cadwell says that Lee’s back remained a constant source of pain throughout his life, but you certainly wouldn’t know it from seeing him move on screen.

Life is an ever-flowing process and somewhere on the path some unpleasant things will pop up — it might leave a scar — but then life is flowing on, and like running water, when it stops, it grows stale. Go bravely on, my friend, because each experience teaches us a lesson.

In early 1969, Lee had came up with the idea for The Silent Flute, a film on the martial arts written by Lee, Stirling Silliphant and James Coburn. But the film deal fell through, and with Lee’s back injury and the family’s increasing financial woes, Cadwell decided to go to work. This was a big blow to Lee’s ego, who felt that it was the job of the man to provide for his family.

In 1971, Lee and Stirling worked on a TV series named Longstreet. The opening story was called ‘The Way of the Intercepting Fist’ (after Jeet Kune Do) and Lee played an antique dealer who teaches gung-fu to the lead blind character. The episode received rave reviews, and Lee began talk with Warner Brothers studio about another TV series. In the end though, Lee was not offered the role, and his ideas were eventually made into the TV series Kung Fu, starring David Carradine.

Unaware that The Green Hornet had been one of the most popular shows in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, Lee returned to Hong Kong for a family visit and received a superstar’s welcome. He was interviewed by the newspapers, radio, and was invited onto Hong Kong TV. Lee signed a film offer from Golden Harvest, and on meeting its founder Raymoond Chow for the first time, Lee told him that “I’m going to be the biggest Chinese star in the world.”

The rest is legend.

When I look around, I always learn something, and that is, to always be yourself and to express yourself. To have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate him. That seems to me to be the prevalent thing happening here in Hong Kong. They always copy a person’s mannerisms, but they never see beyond that. They never start at the very source, the very root of their own being, and ask the question: “How can I be me?”

Letters from Lee

Two years after he made his first movie and became a superstar, Lee passed away at the young age of 32 in 1973. This May 21st, I will be 33 — older than Lee ever had the chance to become.

I’m in awe of how much he accomplished in such a short time, not only as an actor but how he sculpted his body and achieved mastery as a martial artist. As his friend, taekwondo grandmaster Jhoon Rhee said, “Bruce Lee was a man of victory.” I wonder how much I’ve done in comparison, and how much more I can do — it feels like it would be a slight to the inspiration of my childhood hero if I don’t grab the extra years he didn’t have, and live them as best as I can.

I suppose I wrote this article to say “thank you” to Lee for the part he’s played in shaping my life, and to share with others that there was more to the man than just a gung-fu fighting actor. When I was growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, everyone pretty much still knew who Bruce Lee was. I wonder how many kids growing up today still do — if this post inspires someone else like I was inspired, then that is enough for me.

The greatest satisfaction is to hear another unbiased human being whose heart has been touched and honestly says, “Hey, here is someone real!” I’d like that! In my life, what can you ask for but to be real, to fulfill one’s mission and aove all, actualize one’s potential instead of dissipating one’s image, which is not real and expending one’s vital energy.

Recommended Reading

1. The Bruce Lee Story by Linda Lee. Black Belt Communications, 1989. Amazon

2. Words of the Dragon: Interviews, 1958–1973 (Bruce Lee Library) by John Little. Tuttle Publishing, 1997. Amazon

3. Letters of the Dragon (Bruce Lee Library) by Bruce Lee & John Little. Tuttle Publishing, 1998. Amazon

1. 6 Favorite Fight Scenes of All Time

A sign of a good book is how much it changes you. In 2008, when I read Rory Miller’s first book Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence, it evolved the way I looked at martial arts and self-defense training so much that despite having trained in the martial arts for 15 years, I completely changed how I trained and what I trained in.

So I was definitely looking forward to Rory’s new book, Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected, and seeing what more I could learn from the jiujitsu-trained ex-corrections officer. Having read it, my first impressions are how Facing Violence differs from Meditations on Violence; Meditations was focused on showing the differences between martial arts training and real-world violence. Facing Violence explains how to train for that violence.

Note: Quotes in the post are from Facing Violence.

7

The book is laid out into seven main chapters (hence, Rory’s original title ‘7’), addressing the seven elements needed for complete self-defense training:

1. Legal and Ethical
2. Violence Dynamics
3. Avoidance
4. Counter-Ambush
5. The Freeze
6. The Fight
7. After

The seven chapters provide a solid framework for, as the cover subtitle says; “preparing for the unexpected – ethically, emotionally, physically and without going to prison.” Important goals which you think ought to be covered in most martial arts or self-defense training, but which may very well be missing.

Most self-defense training, especially martial arts adapted for self-defense, suffers from the same problem. Most of what is taught is not wrong, but it is incomplete.

There’s lots of good information covered in the seven chapters; including why it’s important to know self-defense law so you don’t train to go to prison, the difference between social and asocial violence, recognizing the pre-cues to a violent encounter, how to increase awareness and avoid violent situations, the elements for successful counter-ambush, the differences between fight training and an actual fight, and how to deal with the aftermath of a violent encounter.

Who Facing Violence is For

The book comes in useful, I think, for two groups of people. The first group are people who want to learn how to defend themselves, but have no clue how they should start and what they should learn. Facing Violence presents a frame for them to build on, with pointers on what these basic building blocks entail. It also helps to act as a shopping guide for self-defense lessons. Does the class you’re looking at cover these seven elements?

The second group is for people who are already practicing self-defense or martial arts. It helps them analyze where the holes in their training are and where they need to fill in the gaps. For example, are you great on the fight (sixth element) but not proficient on local self-defense laws (first element)? Get reading.

If you decided that training scenarios with respect to the law would pollute your pure and ancient art, you might be looking at manslaughter and prison time.

The one caveat is that Facing Violence provides a broad overview with good arching principles, but less on specific details and techniques. Rory explains that writing more than an introduction to each of the seven elements wouldn’t have fit in a single book – and it’s true, each chapter’s subject could have been expanded to a book in themselves. The book provides the overview, the specific homework is your own. Still, there’s so much packed in the book already it’s worth several readings for the material to sink in.

Avoidance, Training & the Aftermath

Like Meditations, Rory opens my eyes and makes me think with Facing Violence. The world of violence isn’t one I’m familiar with, and I aim to keep it that way, which is why the chapter on avoidance; how to scan for danger and de-escalate a situation before it becomes nasty, was especially interesting to me.

Rory already went into the ambush and the freeze in Meditations, and those were two missing pieces in my own self-defense training which inspired me to start training in Tony Blauer’s SPEAR system. I still got a lot out of the chapter on the fight, making me think about points I need to work on in my training. Reading the chapter on the ugly aftermath of a violent encounter was enough to put any fantasies of testing my fighting skills in the real world to rest.

There are a lot of differences between the Threat or Threats that you will face in an assault and the partners you train with. First and foremost, Threats are not your friends. You care about the people you train with and they care about you. A Threat does not care if you make it to class next week or not.

What I missed from reading Facing Violence is that there’s less of Rory than in Meditations. Not that it’s a bad thing, but I enjoyed reading Rory’s, well, meditations in Meditations on Violence, which let me a little into the author’s world. Facing Violence is written more like a textbook, with a emphasis on the teaching material rather than the author’s personal experiences and thoughts.

To sum up, if you’re a practicing martial artist who wants to understand the difference between martial arts training and real-world violence, read Meditations first for the distinction and then read Facing Violence for the specifics of how to prepare for that violence. If you’re someone who wants to learn the general principles of what a complete self-defense course should cover and isn’t a martial artist, read Facing Violence directly.

Of course, both are highly recommended.

1. Martial Arts is Dealing with Self-Defense Failure
2. Self-Defense: Fighting Under Stress
3. A Question about Psychological Self-Defense

In which I do my best to narrate my spotty 15-year martial art journey, inject some humor into a little learning, and explain why I’ve stopped training in the Bujinkan, hopefully without annoying any ninja assassins lurking in the shadows.

The Beginning; or How It All Started with a Bright Red Book

I wanted to be a ninja.

Never mind that it was as impossible to be a ninja today as it was to be a samurai. My 14-year old mind didn’t know and didn’t care. All it knew and was imploding over was the fact that this gnarly book in front of him called Ninja: Spirit of the Shadow Warrior actually existed. Never mind that the cover was a hideous brilliant red, and the hood on its ninja face looked like it had been clumsily filled in with a marker pen. It told the story of how an American had found the legendary ninja in Japan, circa 1970s, and been accepted into the black-clad, shuriken–throwing brotherhood. If he could be a modern-day ninja, then maybe I could too! And thus began my fascination with all things ninja.

Ninja: the cover which started it all.

Now, I don’t think I wanted to be a real modern-day ninja, otherwise I would have joined my country’s equivalent of MI6 or the Navy Seals. No, I wanted to be the ninja of my dreams; a deadly warrior who could disappear and reappear at will, a cunning sage with hypnotic power over people and mystical dominion over the five elements, an alpha male for whom nubile maidens would fall madly in lust with at first sight.

I couldn’t find any ninja in those days, or the Bujinkan as they were calling themselves, so instead I practiced Wing Chun, devoured books on ninjutsu, the martial arts and new-age hokey pokey, trying to cobble together my own Jeet Kune Do of the shinobi arts.

But in the 17th or 18th year of my life, I finally found the ninja through the magical powers of Yahoo! search (this was in the late 1990s, back when Altavista still existed – look it up, kids). They not only existed, they were here in Singapore! And thus, with much anticipation and trepidation, I began my initiation into the Bujinkan arts of Ninpo Taijutsu, very roughly translated as the “Path of Endurance’s body skills, from the Dojo of the Martial Gods.” Not too shabby.

And thus, for the next 10 years or so, I trained as a ninja.

Or so I thought.

The Middle; or My Ninja Training of Sorts, Doubts Begin to Surface, and a Dark Blue Book Ends the Beginning & Begins the Ending

I thought I’d done okay. I’d trained with my Bujinkan sensei for almost 10 years – rather lazily, I must confess. I’d learned about the difference between the ninjutsu and Budo Taijutsu arts, and why the former was no longer taught while the latter is.

(The ninja arts consist of the espionage aspects of a ninja’s job, like poisons, stealthy movement and disguise. Those aren’t skills anyone wants to publicly hollar they teach around the world to thousands of people. And why would any right-thinking citizen want to learn them anyway? The Budo Taijutsu arts consist of the physical, martial aspects of the ninja’s job, like unarmed combat and weaponry. Those are openly taught today as a martial art.)

And the ninja arts had been changed from being called Ninpo Taijutsu to Budo Taijutsu, so instead of the “Path of Endurance” with the word nin tied to the word nin–ja, it was now the “Path of the Martial Arts’ body skills.” According to the Bujinkan’s grandmaster Masaaki Hatsumi, he changed the name because “everybody thought that Ninjutsu was something mysterious – something bad. And I have gradually corrected this. Ninjutsu is really a genuine martial art. That’s the one reason why I changed the name from Ninpo Taijutsu to Budo Taijutsu (source).”

So I wasn’t learning how to have hypnotic power over people, mystical dominion over the five elements, how to scale castle walls, disappear in a puff of smoke or how to channel other-worldly powers through contorting my fingers and chanting in dead languages. And I most certainly, most disappointingly, did not have any nubile maidens falling madly in lust with me, at first sight or many sights. But it was alright; I was learning how to defend myself. I knew how to fall without hurting myself, how to roll out of wrist-locks, how to perform said wrist-locks, how to fight with a short staff, and how to block a sword cut with another sword (with the flat of the blade, not the edge, so you don’t chip or lock swords).

I’d even gotten myself a nifty second dan, or second-degree black belt, and I’d traveled to the Mecca of the Bujinkan, the hombu (home) dojo in Noda, Japan, where I met some of the most amazing martial artists I’d ever seen.

Me on the right, circa 2008, training for a brief week in Japan.

But I began to have my doubts. If our martial art was truly as effective as we claimed, then why did our practice not look like how the other martial artists and fighters of the world moved? And disturbingly, why did what we practice not look like the video records of real-world violence which could now be watched on websites like YouTube?

It kept bugging me, and not one person I asked in the Bujinkan gave me a specific answer I could be satisfied with. Usually the answers were vague, or simply dismissive of what other people were doing. Could so many other people be wrong, I wondered?

And I also began to wonder if I was really learning the skills I would need to defend myself, if my life was ever in danger.

That’s when another book, this time a dark blue one, penetrated my ninja life like a searing katanna through soft butter.

The End; or How Certain Mysteries Become Resolved, New Understandings Come to Light, and a Ninja Dream Dissolves in Smoke

This story ends, like how it began – in a bookstore. I hadn’t bought a book in ages, but Rory Miller’s Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence looked compelling enough to pick up. Little did I suspect the life-changing repercussions it would have on my life thereafter.

This time, it’s dark blue.

Both a classical Jujitsu practitioner and a prison officer who’s had plenty of violent encounters, Miller dissects the differences between martial arts training and real-world violence in his book, which isn’t easy to read. For one, it opens on a full-page photo of blood splattered on a toilet floor – not your average book on the martial path to enlightenment. And it’s especially difficult for a traditional martial artist to read, one who’s lead his whole life believing that his martial art practice would help him defend himself (i.e. me). I learned a lot from Miller’s book, but I had to confront more than a decade’s worth of comfortably entrenched beliefs as well, some of which shattered on the page, some of which took a little more time to change.

But he had me at the first chapter, with a deceptively simple table of ways that a fight can arise paired with different levels of force. When I realized how mismatched my martial art skills were in most of the scenarios, I understood how insufficient my training had been. Even after more than 10 years of martial arts training, I had to face the sobering realization that I was still ill-prepared to defend myself against violence.

So I began searching, all over again, for someone to help me. My goal this time wasn’t to learn a fancy new martial art, to get caught up in perfection of forms and patterns within self-defined rules, boundaries and rewards, and certainly not to learn what I thought I wanted to learn, versus what I needed to learn to defend myself, as realistically as possible.

And I found what I was looking for, but that’s another tale for another time.

I didn’t leave the Bujinkan all at once, I loved it too much to do that. But the more I continued training, the more I felt it wasn’t contributing to my goals anymore. Then one day I stopped attending classes, my ninja dreams riding away on smoke – if they had ever been more.

The Epilogue; or Caveat Emptor

And now you either go “gnash gnash he’s knocking the Bujinkan, blasphemy! gnash gnash” or “blah blah blah he’s knocking the Bujinkan, hoorah! blah blah blah.” But let me be clear: I’m not knocking the Bujinkan. For what it’s worth, I still love the Bujinkan, as well as traditional martial arts, and my 10-year study in Budo Taijutsu has yielded some practical benefits in the training I do now. I’m still friends with my Bujinkan mates, and I go back to class from time to time to train and have some fun.

What I am knocking is training for all the wrong reasons without knowing it.

Everybody trains in the martial arts for their own personal goals. Danger occurs when the martial art’s goals, the teacher’s goals and the student’s goals misalign. The martial art may have been designed for killing on the battlefield, not urban self-defense when murdering someone in a bar brawl is a fatal choice. The teacher might be in it for the physical discipline. The student may want to learn how to defend herself against violent predators. All of them have different goals, and thus will produce and require different foci of training, and one focus may not be compatible with the other.

But when you walk into a dojo today, none of that is talked through. A teacher may sell a mix of self-defense, spirituality, physical fitness and martial skills, offering what the student thinks she wants and what he might genuinely think works. Everyone has good intentions, and I’d wager most teachers aren’t intentionally pulling the wool over their students’ eyes to make a quick buck. But like I wrote in Self-Defense & Dry-Land Scuba Diving , people don’t know what they don’t know, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I don’t know what I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers, but I know now what I didn’t, and more importantly; I know that I don’t know. I’m lucky enough to never have been in a violent encounter, I don’t know for sure that the skills I’m learning now will help. I’ve never reached the upper ranks of the Bujinkan, I don’t know how much more practical I could have found it had I continued. I don’t know everyone in the Bujinkan, and I can’t possibly speak for them, against them or about them. I could be wrong about everything I’ve written here and not know it.

But I know that if you want to learn how to defend yourself, then you should train against the attacks you’re more likely to face; like ambushes and not sword cuts. Under a competent coach, you should be able to defend yourself as soon as possible, not have to spend years perfecting complex motor skills. Your coach should be able to give you specific ways to keep yourself safe, not sprout cryptic messages about the Tao that you have to spend years trying to decode. I know that if you want to gain the most out of your training, you have to know what you’re training for and what you are being trained for. I know a sign of a good coach, like my Bujinkan sensei, is that he’ll admit that he doesn’t have all the answers, encourage you to research your own experience and do what you think is best for you, even if it means leaving him.

And I know most of all that I can only speak for myself, because at the end of the day, only you are responsible for you, and whichever training you choose. Caveat emptor.

This is the opening and closing phrase used in every Bujinkan class, and I dedicate it to any reader who’s had either the tenacity or madness to endure this rambling essay to the end. Shikin haramitsu daikomyo, or may your next step bring you enlightenment.

Recommended Reading

1. MacYoung, Marc. Are Martial Arts Self-Defense? Link

2. Miller, Rory. Training In Versus Training For. Link

3. Miller, Rory. Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence. Ymaa Publication Center, 2008. Amazon

1. Facing Violence by Rory Miller
2. Recovering from Imperfections
3. Self-Defense: Fighting Under Stress

This originally started out as a response to a comment by Christa Herzog regarding my previous post Self-Defense & Dry-Land Scuba Diving, but it become so long it’d be better served as a post in itself. Christa said:

How right you are. I took Pencak Silat classes and as I have had fights with men, I aksed what to do if: a man comes from behind, if a man is much stronger – I got the answer to continue exercising. In some way the teacher was right, because if you exercise enough you will just react if you get into a fight.

I wouldn’t say that exercising more and becoming stronger is a wrong answer, but it is an incomplete answer. Yes, you want to react, but how effectively can you react, and how specifically do you want to react?

Another way of putting it: Exercising and becoming stronger will help some if you get thrown into the deep end of a pool. But it won’t help much if you don’t know how to swim. And even when you do know how to swim, getting thrown into ice-cold, stormy waters when you’re least expecting it is another situation altogether from a cool, calm pool.

There are a couple of points to make about training against an ambush by a stronger predator. One is adrenal stress, which will affect your effectiveness, the other is how training to solve one problem doesn’t automatically translate to solving other problems, which is your specific effectiveness.

Reacting Under Adrenal Stress

When you’re shocked, you’re not really you as you usually are. Your body is flooded with a cocktail of chemicals, which explains the faster reaction speeds and higher than usual pain tolerance. But it also includes loss of fine motor skill, which means precise, complex martial art moves go out the window. Higher mental functions may switch off. The adrenal dump can also trigger a freeze, it’s why animals freeze when startled by a vehicle, and get mowed down instead of moving away.

Chances are, everyone reading this has felt this in some form or another. If you’ve been in a real life threatening incident then you know what I mean (or not, as memory loss can be an after effect of the adrenal dump). The adrenal response can also be triggered by non-life threatening high stress incidents, because the mind doesn’t differentiate between real and imagined danger.

If you’re training to defend yourself, i.e. when you’re unprepared against an opponent(s) with the advantage, then you need to train under what you’re most likely to be feeling in that moment: stress. Physical self-defense is for training when you’ve failed to detect, defuse, and the shit hits the fan. If your self-defense training doesn’t include training under adrenal stress, then you need to re-examine what you’re really being trained for.

Solving Specific Self-Defense Problems

The other point is that if you want to train to overcome a problem, in this case a stronger male surprising you with an ambush, then you have to train specifically to overcome that problem. Training a hundred repetitions of a front lapel grab with a co-operative male receiver in a calm, cool situation with no resistance doesn’t come as close as training once against a resistive partner who ambushes you under adrenal stress. Yes, it’s still a fake ambush. But it’s less fake than the first scenario, and is closer to the actual problem you want to solve.

A more extreme example would be training in a classical kenjutsu system with samurai swords. Although I haven’t trained in such a system, I’m sure it brings with it several benefits; focus, fitness and discipline. At the same time though, it doesn’t help you learn how to defend yourself against a stronger opponent who ambushes you from behind – unless you have a samurai sword with you at the time. So unless you have that one prerequisite fulfilled, this solution doesn’t solve your specific problem at all.

Conclusion

So two points. First, most martial art systems today (most, not all) don’t train you how to defend yourself under adrenal stress and when disadvantaged. Instead, they teach you how to duel in pre-determined conditions and rules against a sparring partner. It’s the wrong problem to train solving if you want to learn how to defend yourself against predators.

If you want to learn how to defend yourself against predators, not how to duel martial artists, then you have to train against how predators attack. No predator will announce themselves to you straight on, take a few step backs, then start bouncing up and down, weaving left and right for a fair fight.

Secondly, if you want to train against a specific problem; how to defend yourself against an ambush from a stronger male, then you have to train to solve that problem specifically, and not hope that training another solution translates into skill for another problem. In other words, just because you know how to defend yourself against a punch you know is coming from the front, it doesn’t mean you know how to defend yourself against a sudden ambush from the back.

Recommended Reading

1. MacYoung, Marc. Adrenal Stress Response To Crisis. Link

2. MacYoung, Marc. Adrenal Decay. Link

3. MacYoung, Marc. Fear, Holes In Training and Bridge Out. Link

4. Miller, Rory. Depth and Breadth. Link

5. Miller, Rory. Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence. Ymaa Publication Center, 2008. Amazon

6. Soon, Alvin. Martial Arts is Dealing with Self-Defense Failure. Link

Recommended Watching

1. Blauer, Tony. Why Startle Flinch? Link

1. Facing Violence by Rory Miller
2. A Question about Psychological Self-Defense
3. Martial Arts is Dealing with Self-Defense Failure

You wouldn’t take scuba lessons from an instructor who’d never been in the water. It wouldn’t matter how many hours of instructions he’s logged, how many certificates he has framed, and how good he is demonstrating on land. If he’s never been in the water, you wouldn’t bet your life on him.

And yet, all across the world, hundreds of thousands of people take self-defense classes from instructors who have never been in a violent encounter. People tend to forget that, maybe because these self-defense skills aren’t as easily, regularly and vividly tested as going on a scuba dive.

You wouldn’t trust a scuba instructor who’s never been in the water — why would you trust a self-defense instructor who’s never been in combat?

We also tend to forget that for those of us lucky enough never to have been in combat, we also don’t have the experience to recognize what would work and what wouldn’t work among the skills taught in a self-defense class. You don’t know what you don’t know. It may look good and even sound right, but do you have the filters to determine what really works? We can make best guesses, but with an equally inexperienced instructor, the best case scenario is still taking a guess based on someone else’s guess about what to do in a high-risk, high-stakes situation.

The takeaway? Never take any instructor’s word for the unassailable truth, especially one who’s never been in the water. Including mine.

1. Self-Defense: Fighting Under Stress
2. Martial Arts is Dealing with Self-Defense Failure
3. A Question about Psychological Self-Defense

As a martial arts nerd, I’ve got a soft spot for movie fight scenes done well. So – inspired by a friend’s post – here are my favorite 1 on 1 fight scenes of all time.

Enter the Dragon: Bruce Lee vs. Bob Wall

The rest of the fight is pretty meh, but those first three impossibly fast strikes easily make this one of the best fight scenes of all time.

Rapid Fire: Brandon Lee vs. Ai Leong

The son of Bruce is no slouch either, and he shows off some cool Jeet Kune Do moves as taught to him by Guru Dan Inosanto, one of Bruce Lee’s top students.

The Bourne Identity: Matt Damon vs. Nicky Naude

Choreographed by one of Inosanto’s top students, Jeff Imada, The Bourne Identity was one of the first movies to really showcase the deadly beauty of the Filipino martial arts.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Michelle Yeoh vs. Zhang Ziyi

While it was too much wire-work for some, this first fight scene from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon totally blew my mind in the cinema. While there were many excellent fight scenes as metaphors in the movie, this remains one of my favorites.

Ip Man 2: Donnie Yen vs. Sammo Hung

Who says they don’t make them like they used to? Yen shows off his impressive mastery of Wing Chun while he battles another old-school great; Sammo Hung.

The Matrix: Keanu Reeves vs. Lawrence Fishburne

An eclectic blend of martial arts mixed in with Zen Buddhism and a kick-ass soundtrack – it doesn’t get much more awesome than this. No embedding allowed unfortunately, so you’ll just have to check out the link.

1. Bruce Lee: A Man of Victory
2. Facing Violence by Rory Miller
3. Martial Arts is Dealing with Self-Defense Failure

Caveat: If I sound like an experienced authority on self-defense, you should know I’m not. I’ve only been attacked once in my life and then managed to talk my way out of it. The other parts of my personal experience come from books, teachers and simulations. I actually consider it a blessing not to be an experienced authority on self-defense, as I like living a peaceful, happy life where people don’t try to change my lifestyle for me without my permission.

Where a lot of martial arts fail is in not addressing the mental and emotional aspects of self-defense before, during and after the fight. Nobody gets attacked in a vacuum, everybody gets attacked in a context. Nobody goes through a violent attack with the same mental and emotional response they go through a kata drill. And nobody goes from normal life, to violence, then back to normal life the same way again.

I trained for years without even once addressing the mental and emotional response to being attacked, then I donned a High Gear suit and had a partner go at me high speed, strength and intent and experienced the “oh fuck!” freeze for myself. It wasn’t as pretty as the kung-fu movies. Even though they were real fake training simulations, I went through the whole gamut of surprise, shock, fear, lock-up, despair, anger, aggression, indignation, all the while trying to defend myself physically. Conclusion? It wasn’t as easy as I thought it’d be.

And yet.

Real-world physical violence will be rare for most of the people I know, including myself. Yet I suspect we experience real-world mental and emotional violence more frequently in our daily lives from toxic people and relationships, some more than others. But how? Why? And how do we defend ourselves?

Wolves choose their prey; they don’t challenge the strongest in the herd, they go for the weakest. They’re not looking for a fight, they just want food as quickly and as easily as they can get it. Predators choose their victims in the same way, they want to get what they want with as little injury to themselves as possible. And as ugly it is to say, and as hard to admit, I’ve seen that abusive relationships really are a two-way street. A toxic person looks for the type he knows will suffer his abuse, and the victim allows the toxic person space in their lives for the abuse to take place.

I know it’s not as easy as that makes it sound. And it’s not about placing blame. It’s about personal responsibility – the personal ability to respond – while recognizing that the distribution of responsibility lies in shifting degrees. In a perfect world, the toxic abuser will exercise responsibility for his thoughts and actions, and act to create mutually beneficial relationships instead. In a perfect world, the victim will exercise responsibility for keeping herself safe from toxic people and act assertively. But it ain’t a perfect world.

If you can teach someone to overcome mental and emotional barriers to keep themselves safe physically, can you teach someone to overcome mental and emotional barriers to keep themselves safe psychologically? How would you do it? Especially for people who have had a pattern of playing the victim role in an abusive relationship?

1. There is Only Time for Decisions
2. Martial Arts is Dealing with Self-Defense Failure
3. Degrees of Delusion

Most people think that learning a martial art teaches you self-defense. But actually most martial arts don’t teach you self-defense – they only teach you how to deal with self-defense failure. That’s something I realized only after practicing martial arts for nearly 15 years.

The Difference Between Martial Arts & Self-Defense

Here’s an easy way to understand the difference between martial arts and self-defense, and why one doesn’t always equal the other.

Scenario A

It’s 4 in the morning, and you’re going home by yourself after a late night out. You wonder whether to take your usual short-cut through the back-alley. It’s dark and deserted, but you decide to anyway.

Halfway through, a man steps out and threatens you with a knife, demanding you hand over your wallet. You don’t want any trouble so you hand it to him, but he lunges at you after taking it. Your martial arts training helps you sidestep the attack, disarm the man and throw him to the ground, after which you run like hell back home.

You reach home a little shaky, but safe. You realize you should have been more careful about taking the back-alley earlier.

Scenario B

It’s 4 in the morning, and you’re going home by yourself after a late night out. You wonder whether to take your usual short-cut through the back-alley, but it’s dark and deserted, so you decide to walk the well-lit and busier main road. You reach home safely, but a little late, and think you were probably too paranoid earlier.

Good at Martial Arts, Bad at Self-Defense

In Scenario A, you displayed good martial arts skill when you avoided and disarmed the threat. You were bad at self-defense however, because you placed yourself in danger through a bad decision. Had any of the many variables been different, you could have been hurt, or worse.

In Scenario B, you displayed zero martial arts skill, but excellent self-defense because you kept yourself safe all the way until you reached home.

See the difference between martial arts and self-defense now?

The Spectrum of Danger

The difference between self-defense and martial arts is when they come into play along a spectrum of danger. On one end of this spectrum, you have safety. As you progress along this spectrum, risk increases with physical danger, and the end point of the spectrum is the ultimate danger: death. The odds of getting physically hurt in violence varies. The odds of getting physically hurt without violence is zero. Even if you’re successful at handling it, it’s always safer to avoid physical violence than to engage in it.

Effective self-defense starts from the point of safety, minimizing physical danger as much as possible – that might mean just choosing the main road over the deserted alley. Martial arts fits later along the spectrum, when physical danger is already threatening you and your previous attempts at self-defense have failed.

Self-Defense is More than Martial Arts

Martial arts practice techniques in situations where you are already far along the spectrum of danger; with the bad guy already a threat. A technique might be taught, for example, against a bad guy already swinging a knife at you.

In reality, violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum – there’s a time and place where it occurs. Effective self-defense enters earlier along the spectrum, and asks why you would go to a place with the bad guys in the first place?

Although the martial arts can form a part of self-defense, self-defense is larger than martial arts. Martial arts today usually don’t address the context of self-defense and the fact that a lot of things had to go wrong along the spectrum before someone starts swinging a knife at you. Good self-defense instruction has to teach not only physical self-defense skills, but also awareness training, tactical thinking and emotional management.

Awareness in Self-Defense

Awareness is the early warning radar that lets you know when something’s going to go wrong. Why has that person been staring at me for the last 10 minutes? Why is that person walking closer and closer towards me? Why is that guy just hanging around the ATM?

Tactical Thinking in Self-Defense

Tactical thinking is using your wits to keep you as close to the safety point of the spectrum as possible. Avoiding the dark, deserted alley in our scenario is tactical thinking. So is not using that ATM when you see the guy just hanging around it for no good reason.

Emotional Management in Self-Defense

Emotional management is training to deal with the actual emotional rush just prior to, during and after the fight.

Your gut tells you something’s wrong when you spot that man lurking behind the corner – do you listen to it? You’re arguing with somebody and you sense both tempers spiraling out of control, can you take a step back out of this moment and re-assess the situation tactically? A punch’s just been thrown at you and you’re shocked, can you get yourself out of your freeze to respond? You’ve just gotten home after being attacked in the alley, your nerves are frayed and your body’s shaking – what do you do to recover from the trauma of nearly being stabbed by a violent stranger?

Emotional management is just as critical a part of self-defense as physical martial skills, because self-defense is not just about defending your body, it’s also about defending your emotional and mental health. Most people used to a peaceful lifestyle can’t just go through sudden unexpected violence then go back to normal again the very next day. Emotional responses to a violent confrontation have to be processed. Now that you’ve survived, what do you believe differently? How do you feel differently? Are those changes useful or not, and if not, how do you change them?

Martial arts is about training for the fight. Self-defense isn’t just about the fight. It’s about what happens before, during and after. It’s useless if you defend yourself successfully physically but end up an emotional wreck afterwards.

An example of how awareness and tactical thinking combine to keep you on the safety end of the spectrum and away from physical danger – it’s good self-defense, and martial arts skills don’t even come into play.

Where to Learn Effective Self-Defense?

This is a tough question, because I’m still finding out myself. There are two particular authors however, without whom I would never have understood the differences between martial arts and self-defense.

First is Marc ‘Animal’ MacYoung, who keeps the encyclopedic website No Nonsense Self-Defense, a brilliant introduction to effective self-defense. This website is a great place to start. His book Cheap Shots, Ambushes, And Other Lessons is the first that got me started thinking about self-defense versus the martial arts, and I was lucky I was introduced to the book the year I started learning martial arts.

Second is Rory Miller, a martial artist and ex-corrections officer who wrote Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence, one of my best personal growth books of 2009. If Cheap Shots, Ambushes, And Other Lessons got me started, Meditations on Violence gave me a swift kick in the ass. If you’re serious about learning effective self-defense, this book is a must-read. It clarified so many doubts I had as a practicing martial artist, while opening my eyes to so many areas I never even considered.

Rory recently wrote a series of posts on his blog detailing 7 stages of self-defense and violence (links to parts 1 & 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), it goes deep into the details of self-defense and in addition to No Nonsense Self-Defense is well worth reading.

Reading about self-defense is not the same as knowing self-defense, just as reading about swimming doesn’t make you a swimmer. Like a favorite saying of mine goes; knowledge is only a rumor until it’s in the muscle. But I hope this post and these resources will help you make a better choice with whom you choose to train with.

1. Self-Defense: Fighting Under Stress
2. A Question about Psychological Self-Defense
3. Facing Violence by Rory Miller