Freedom from Fear #1

As you'll see in the following section, "chickened out" isn't really an option in my martial arts style.

Fear Training Martial Arts

We are afraid of fear. We shouldn't be, because the fear response in your body is communicating something to us. We have talked about this before.

In my mind, if you want to get good at something, you have to train for it.

So, if you want to be good at fighting while afraid, you have to train for fighting while afraid.

For me, I felt that my early training didn't prepare me in two ways:

Let's look at my early martial arts training:

It taught me some defense skills, but not the best for a schoolyard fight. And they didn't teach me anything about fear.

I still use some of the Judo I learned, but I still feel that it is not a complete system for dealing with aggressors.

In my young teens, I moved on to Tae Kwon Do. This was a very cool school. They had a giant fist AND a giant cobra in the window -- and you could get a patch for your jacket of either symbol. Very cool.

This place taught me discipline. They also made me a lot more flexible at the time. They taught me to punch and to kick (and to block).

They also had us spar.

They didn't teach much about it -- we just did it. You either sank or swam.

And of course, I learned the hard lesson that sparring is in no way shape or form anything like a real fight.

This particular TKD school, now long gone, was excellent at producing tournament fighters.

(But I wanted to learn to defend myself.)

So ...

a few years later, I started Shotokan Karate.

I wanted to be able to defend myself!

I learned more discipline. More blocks. More kicks. More punches.

But were they preparing me for self defense?

Were they teaching me to handle my fear of fighting?

The answer kept rearing its ugly head ...

On three different occasions, recently made black-belt practitioners had occasions to use their art.

Once, a new black belt was attacked. And twice, new black belts went to bars, to celebrate, and got in fights. In one case, the guy picked the fight on the night of his black-belt promotion.

In all three cases, these guys got their rears kicked.

So, here I was, studying like crazy, so I could get to the point, where I was proficient enough to get beat up in a fight, just like my superiors.

If your martial training emphasizes sparring competitions, you may not be learning the most practical self defense. If your school is more like a club where folks hang around and 'sort of' train, then you may not be learning the most practical self defense.
In my 20s, I went in search of the most practical martial arts I could find.

Fortunately, I found a school that taught me to deal with fear in a fight, and taught me a set of skills that 'worked.'

The next article in the series will show you some of the factors that are/were important in permanently getting rid of that body-numbing fear you feel in a fight. Once you internalize some of these factors ... Freedom from Fear #2