Martial arts training, what’s your goal?

I know I should ignore this type of stuff but…

Instagram threw me up a short clip of some male influencer going into a rant about ‘real fight gyms’ versus the ‘McDojo’; delivered as if only the two extremes of the spectrum exist – the typical black and white thinking you get from the popularist playbook. It was a blatant, simplistic and hollow argument, totally ignoring the huge range of martial arts that exist out there in the world.¹

He presented one model (the ‘McDojo’) where nobody gets hurt, they pay for their belts, punch air, but can’t fight.

In the other, the ‘real fight gyms’, “bones are broken”, “they are f*****g each other up badly”, numbers are few (because most people can’t hack the training and the people who get good can’t afford the belts the gradings that the McDojo offers), blah. blah.

Though both of the descriptions might be caricatures, the reality is that to any sane individual neither of them looks appealing. Both of them defy any kind of logic, particularly the ‘real fight gym’ version.

The ‘bones are broken’ argument was addressed over 140 years ago in Japan, when the founder of Judo sought to take that problem head-on and developed a good functional randori, free-flow fighting. It was tough and bred some formidable fighters, but the system had a heart to it and a degree of ethics and morality. The Kodokan judo people had to live within civilised society and hold their heads up, not skulking around scowling at everyone with their knuckles dragging on the ground, and an imagined threat lurking behind every corner. Yes, there were some ‘characters’ in Kodokan judo, but that’s what you get when obsessives find their niche.

Sadly, what our ‘influencer’ presents is the fictional Tyler Durden’s ‘Fight Club’ wet dream.

Are they fighting to learn to defend themselves? If so, from who?

I discussed this in my posts on the other platform (‘You’d better hope you never have to use it’ https://wadoryu.org.uk/2021/12/19/youd-better-hope-you-never-have-to-use-it-part-1/ )

A brief mention of the real physical threat and how ‘self-defence’ might look in the real world.

If I were to be brutally honest, if you are a young man in the UK at the moment and you want to be able to survive an attack, don’t take self-defence or martial arts lessons, buy yourself a stab-proof vest, or, like the above mentioned influencer, get yourself a bodyguard (he is quoted as saying he is so fearful of walking around London wearing an expensive watch he has to have a muscular minder to hold his hand).

Knife crime in the UK is statistically worrying, but the usual models of self-defence are not the answer. Any young guy who believes he can fight is probably going to come unstuck, primarily because he is inclined to be over-confident and living in a John Wick fantasy in his head. Skills in threat recognition, de-escalation and sprint running would serve you much better. There are too many people out there who are inclined to be a bit…stabby.

Underground artist Banksy defined it nicely by designing a version of the stab-proof vest for grime, and rap artist Stormzy for his 2019 Glastonbury headlining appearance. The vest was meant to be a parody of the John Bull, very British, iconic waistcoat, and also make a statement about young men being the victim of knife crime in the UK inner cities.

Don’t get me wrong, self-defence can be taught, but it has to be taken out of the clutches of the fantasists and put into the hands of the grown-ups in the room.

Example; self-defence for women is often best served by women themselves and not left to ‘some guy’. There are plenty of competent female instructors around.

Pose potential and bragging rights.

If you are a martial arts student and serious about what you do you are probably inclined to keep quiet about it. You don’t try and shoehorn your credentials into every conversation in casual social interactions. If you are like me, you’ll find yourself dreading those engagements because the majority of people just don’t get it (as I said in my piece, ‘Karate – How do we explain what we do?’ https://budojourneyman.substack.com/p/karate-how-do-we-explain-what-we ) and it’s so difficult to do justice to the subject.

With the above-mentioned influencer, everything is about pose potential. Sadly, young men are buying into this form of overinflated macho materialism. Its root origin is fear, as well as being left behind in a world where women are finding their feet while men remain sitting on their hands and bellyaching about it. For these young fellas, martial arts and fighting skills become a bargaining chip, like a notch on life’s bedpost.

It’s a status war and young men are feeling short of ammunition. But in terms of real status and worth as a human being they are looking for the ammunition in the wrong place.

Popularist influencers of this type, like conspiracy theorists, see enemies everywhere, come up with over-simplistic arguments and tell people what they want to hear to chime with their own deep-seated paranoia and fear.

Be wary of simple answers to complicated questions.

Please feel free to comment below.

1. I won’t name this individual, he gets far too much oxygen of publicity as it is, and not necessarily the good type.