|
|
Is Your Martial Art a Viable Self Defense System?
Pick a martial arts school, any martial arts school, and you'll find an instructor who sells his martial art as self defense. And while some of these instructors may know a thing or two about self defense, the vast majority of them are teaching a powerful version of ballet.
Martial arts training and self defense training can be distinguished by the degree to which they recognize and work with the body's natural stress response system. The human body, under high stress, has a dramatic and natural self defense mechanism called the fight or flight response. The sympathetic nervous system elicits a slew of changes including increased heart rate, increased blood pressure and muscular tension, narrow vision, organ functions slow, and the body becomes stronger, faster, and impervious to pain.
But this response is not all good; it comes with a few negative consequences that many martial artists don't recognize. Under this powerful stress response, adrenaline surges through the blood stream creating power and tension in our bodies. This eliminates fine and complex motor movements, or movements that rely on coordination, timing, and sequential movement. A great many martial arts techniques are fine and complex motor movements, and a great many of them will not work when our bodies are juiced with adrenaline and trembling from head to toe.
Our body's gross motor movements however, are enhanced in this state. Gross movements mimic natural compound movements like pushups, squats, lifting, or pulling. These movements become much more powerful, and therefore one should reduce their practical self defense training to techniques which work with this natural response, while eliminating those which require fine motor skills. This will allow the average trainee to transition from training to street ready.
The best way to practice these techniques is in full contact fashion, where the trainee uses all their power to strike moving targets held by a trainer. This of course is assuming the trainee is not interested in full contact fighting, which would be the ideal training method. The body often shakes with nervousness once flooded with adrenaline, and the best way to learn to control this is to defend full contact strikes by blocking and then countering. This creates reflexive blocking ability, the knowledge of hard impact, and the ability to deal with impact and keep mental focus.
This is not an argument for reducing martial arts to gross motor movements, but it is a case for distinguishing martial arts training from self defense training. There may be significant cross over in technique training, but instructors should draw clear lines between these two categories, and not sell secret, advanced or complicated techniques as self defense tools.
Martial arts training offers a much larger arsenal of tools for self defense and personal development which, when mastered, will allow an expert to function calmly when faced with a life threatening situation. He will then have access to a wider variety of tools than the average person. But this should not be sold as common self defense training to the average person, which it is not.
|
 |
Please Rate: |
|
Rating: |
 Processing ... |
(Average: Not rated) |
| Views: | 34 | |
|
| More Articles from Martial Arts | | |
| Top Articles in Martial Arts | | |
|
