Have you heard about the website “Bullshido”? It’s a community of martial artists who brand themselves as crusaders against “fake martial arts”. Mostly, they’re macho, 20-something chest thumpers who want to convince themselves that what they learned is better than what other people learn.
But they have a point.
Martial arts is (a) shrouded in mystery, (b) built around a topic few people truly experience, and (c) has an integral hierarchy that encourages blind obedience. This triple threat means there can be a lot of bad advice out there. Much of the time, that bad advice is being taught by people who don’t even know they’re giving bad advice.
That’s one of the biggest risks of deciding to get some self-defense training, and if you’re part of martial arts culture you know it’s one of the most common and least productive arguments novice practitioners get into. It’s real, but it’s not what I’m here to talk about today.
Today, I want to talk about the biggest lie in martial arts and self defense training. I’m speaking to this lie after nearly four decades of experience, and to me it’s the most important safety lie you’ll find in family security circles.
The Biggest Lie in Martial Arts Is…
That you should ask a Navy SEAL to teach you self defense. Let me tell you what I mean by that.
A Navy SEAL is in better physical shape than you or I have ever been. He has extensive knowledge of defensive tactics. He’s probably armed. His response to injury and danger is different from ours. He has been trained to never hesitate about hurting a human being who threatens him.
How many of those traits and qualities describe you? How many tacit assumptions will he make about a defensive encounter that simply won’t be true about you in the situation he’s discussing?
Hell, folks. I’ve trained for 37 years as of this writing. I’ve had guns pulled on me twice, been stabbed once, got sucker punched four or five times. I’ve split up bar fights, had a (unjustly) jealous husband come at me with a bat, and was once mobbed by wild dogs in Malaysia…and I’m not up to the speed I would have to be for a SEAL’s self-defense assumptions to match my reality.
This isn’t just about Navy SEALS, either. I’m 200 pounds of aging, male jock who’s been in more tussles than anybody could call intelligent. The tacit assumptions I make about what self-defense will be won’t be true about a 110-pound suburban mom who’s last fist-fight was in 7th grade after gym class and who’s peak athletic experience is her Wednesday spin class.
Or consider a lithe, athletic female instructor trying to tell somebody with a disability how to respond while under attack. Or a white, middle class, female martial artist explaining to a young black man how to talk to police.
Okay, So…What’s My Point?
Everybody lives inside of a context, and that context impacts how we keep ourselves and our families safe. If you’re learning family safety — and here I mean self defense, but also fire safety, mental health, first aid, everything — it’s important to consider how your teacher’s context differs from your own. Ask yourself:
Are they larger or smaller than you?
How might their gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation impact how they interact with the world?
How much experience do they have with violence, trauma, and stress compared to your own?
Is their moral compass congruent with your own?
Do they have a family to protect, or are they responsible just for their own safety?
What legal rights and responsibilities do they have that you don’t, which might impact assumptions they make about security and safety?
How does their mobility and athleticism compare to yours?
Do their goals for safety, self-defense, and training match your own?
What equipment do they regularly have with them, compared to what equipment you regularly carry?
How much more often do they train than you do?
All this isn’t to say that you should ignore training from somebody who’s not essentially your twin. Everybody can learn something valuable from anybody, on any day, if they want to. This is to say that you should view anything you learn about keeping your family safe through a lens that includes your instructor’s context.
Start by identifying the context. Move then to how your contexts differ. Then consider what changes you might need to make, and what questions you should ask during your training, to modify what you’ve learned to suit your context.