Daves Walmsley's Articles

The Reality of the Martial Arts

In a few years I will be starting my 20th year in the martial arts. Time does fly! So having spent almost two decades in the arts I’ve developed some fairly strong opinions with the way things are taught, practiced and perceived.

Things really have not changed all that much since I began, I’ve changed a great deal but the martial arts are pretty much the same. From my perspective this is a bad thing. Perhaps the single biggest reason for it being bad is- the people taking the martial arts are, for the most part, living a lie. Lie may be too strong a word, deception might be a better term.

Now I want you to be honest. When you first began training in the martial arts didn’t you think that you were going to learn to kick butt just like all those martial arts guys

in the movies? Hey! I said I wanted you to be honest. So yes of course you did.

I’m sure when you began training you were hoping for the day to arrive that you could clean out a whole barroom full of toughs just like Steven Seagal does in his movies.

 Over the years I’ve had numerous phone calls from potential students asking if they’ll learn to take care of things like ol’ Stevie. I’m sure my answer of, "No, that only happens in the movies," is received by them as a lack of skill or ability on my part. What I’m really trying to do is- attempt to bring a reality check into their lives.

While the non-martial artist can be forgiven for his/her ignorance, any martial artist with 5+ years of training who still believes that a trained person can overcome any violent situation has a serious delusional problem. I can recall my first reality check in the martial arts. I was an orange belt in Goju Ryu karate and I was sparring with brown and black belts and I was holding my own. At the time I thought is was because they were holding back, that they were taking it easy on me. After all, wasn’t the holder of a black belt a trained killer? Didn’t black belts in some cities have to register their hands as deadly weapons? Okay, quit laughing! Don’t tell me that you have never heard about black belts needing to register their hands with the police. This is a lot of the crap that has put the martial arts into the sorry state affairs that it is in.

Anyway, back to my reality check. I finally realized why I was having success.

I realized that sparring was an athletic competition and that it had nothing to do with deadly skills or abilities. I was able to do well against the higher ranked belts because I was a better athlete than most of them.