Nov 21 2007
You can know all the martial arts in the world, but if you are too afraid and you freeze in fear you will lose, regardless of your knowledge. Training therefore should not be merely technical, emotional considerations should be address in any realistic training program. When you are training to protect yourself, it is important to keep in mind that fighting is a matter of survival; it is not a game, a sparring match or just a form of fitness!
How do you get confidence through training? That's a question that I have think about through the years. Confidence comes through competence. If you practice realistically to the point that you can shut down an attacker who is moving in full speed and force with random attacks, naturally your confidence to handle an attack will increase. That's why practicing realistically is so important. You should not practice things that we see in a lot of martial arts demos where everything is staged and you should not attack each other as though you are in a sparring match. There's a world of a difference between a sparring match where your partner will start 15 feet away, circling around you, dancing and probing you, compared to some nut rushing you without warning from 3 feet away with full force non-stop attacks. To develop confidence you need to handle realistic attacks and therefore you need to design realistic drills. I know it is difficult at first but the rewards are really worth it.
The next question, once you can shut down realistic attacks ( you are hitting him, he's not hitting you successfully) is whether you can realistically put down an aggressive and larger attacker when you hit him. In training, assuming you can hit really hard, you cannot hit each other full force without somebody suffering injuries. Since most people studying martial arts do not do it for a living, constant full force contact training is not very productive. That's where heavy equipment training comes into play. If you can shake and move a 200 pound bag, knocking out a big guy is not all that difficult considering that the neck only have 20-40 pounds of resistance. Likewise, if you can shake and move a 300 pounds kicking apparatus with one stomp, breaking a big guys knees is rather easy.
So 2-man realistic attacking/countering drills allow you to realistically know if you can score on your attacker without getting hit; it lets you know if you can hit him. And heavy equipment training lets you know what will happen when you do hit him. The result of this kind of training once you have a high success percentage is natural confidence. Nothing can compensate for hard training and the courage to honestly examine your performance level through proper testing.
High skill and confidence is no reason to get cocky and conceited because there is always situations that you cannot prepare or counter against. (heavily outnumbered, random shootings etc.)
The most beneficial thing about confidence gained through fighting /training is that it will help greatly with the challenges that we have to face in our daily life. Many people panic and get stress out about things that are nowhere near life threatening. If you can handle real world violence with a relative degree of calmness, there's a good chance that you can handle other "challenges" in your life much easier. Very often when students get good at fighting, they get a little cocky; that's normal. It's just a phase and it is understandable because all of a sudden, you feel like you have this new found power. But it is really an illusion because for most people, how many life and death fights are you really going to be in anyways? If your training is limited to only fighting then you are seriously short-changing yourself. We should use our arts everyday to handle daily challenges. Once you can handle someone that is trying to kill you, most everyday problems seem pale in comparison. More often than not, your new found calmness when dealing with things will allow you to be more relaxed and compassionate with people and that to me is the greatest thing about training - compassion through confidence not acting nice because you are scared inside.
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