The Two Biggest Lies In Martial Arts

The martial arts are full of mystery and myth… and outright lies! Two of the biggest lies will weaken your power, limit your success, and even put you in danger. What are they?

First, let me tell you about my friend, Jimmy…

I was hurrying to class one day back in college when I spotted my friend, Jimmy, walking across campus. Actually, he was dragging himself across campus. He looked like he had been hit by a truck.

I caught up to him. “What happened to you?”

He answered, “I signed up for Judo.”

I laughed at him. “I thought Judo was supposed to be the gentle art.”

Jimmy grumbled, “There is nothing gentle about Judo.”

Ha! No surprise there. I had already discovered the ugly truth about Judo. Even though I was a Tae Kwon Do student, our classes were held in a Judo school, so, I saw judoka slamming each other into the mats all the time.

But Jimmy didn’t know that. In fact, he felt misled. He thought Judo was going to be soft, flowing, and easy. Nope!

Of course, Judo is not the only martial art that deals in false advertising. Judo’s mother art, Jiu Jitsu, also uses the Japanese character for softness, suppleness, and flexibility. Yet every Jiu Jitsu seminar I ever went to, or class I’ve ever seen, required just as much athleticism as any so-called hard art.

And what about Brazilian Jiu Jitsu? Watch a BJJ competition and you’ll see some of the strongest, fastest, most explosive athletes in the world. As a matter of fact, I’ve been injured more in BJJ classes than in Karate and Kung Fu combined! Gentle art… yeah, right!

My brother, JD, teaches fighting and fitness for a living. (Click here for our interview.) JD has a running joke…

When someone new trains with him, and they’re smaller, thinner, and weaker, he’ll say, “No fair! You have all the advantages! I’m 250 pounds and weighed down by all this muscle. All you have to do is relax and use technique and you’ll beat me every time!”

Ha! Not true at all. Which brings us, my friend, to the first great lie in martial arts…

LIE #1: The soft and yielding will always defeat the strong and aggressive.

Nope. Absolutely not true. And yet, this lie is repeated all the time.

You never hear a martial arts instructor say, “If you want to defend yourself, you have to be as big, strong, and aggressive as possible. So, lift weights and eat steak.”

Instead, instructors of pretty much every art—Judo, Tai Chi, Aikido, Karate, Kung Fu—preach the gospel of softness and yielding. They’ll say—

“Anyone can do this art. You don’t have to be big or strong.”

“We practice a non-violent martial art.”

“We use our opponent’s energy against him.”

“We fight without fighting.”

Wow. Doesn’t that all sound great? You can defend yourself just by relaxing, breathing, and flowing!

Isn’t that the main selling point of the martial arts? The promise that someone smaller, slower, and weaker can stand up to a big guy and win? Talk like that makes sense—it’s good business!

You can’t build a school scaring off students by telling them your art is violent, brutal, and requires years of hard work. No one will sign up if you tell them they need to unleash the wild animal lurking in the shadows of their heart and soul.

So, you lie. You paint a pretty picture of practicing in the park while the sun rises over your shoulder and a family of rabbits watches you become one with the universe.

That sure is pretty… but it’s also insane! So, I’m going to tell you the truth…

A smaller, weaker person cannot defend themselves from a bigger, stronger attacker by being soft.

There. I said it.

Yes, I know I told you in A Ridiculous Reason to Skip Class that the little guy can beat a bigger guy. I also told you in Martial Arts Are for Smart People that martial arts were developed for the little guy, not the big guy.

So, how can I say you can’t win by being soft? Well, let me be more precise…

You can’t win by only being soft!

My friend, Jimmy was wrong when he said there is nothing gentle about Judo. His mistake was thinking that Judo would be all gentle.

Judo is a gentle art, but it’s also a brutal art. Judo recognizes that soft combined with hard offers an advantage over someone who only develops one ideal over the other.

Reality check. You can be soft all you want, but to stop an attacker, at some point, you’ve got to stick it to him! And that means you must develop your strength, speed, and explosiveness, too.

It took me a long time to accept this. You see, I’m an idealist. So, when I first heard the lie that I could become invincible by staying relaxed and flowing, I wanted to believe it.

Unfortunately, no matter how hard I practiced, when I got stuck in jam, I called upon my muscles to get me out. And guess what? It worked!

But all that grunting and sweating made me feel like a failure. That’s because I was chasing the ideal that fighting for an advanced practitioner should be easy and without effort.

I wanted to be the little old man who throws big guys around with a flick of the wrist. As a result, my training was torn in two…

• I would lift weights, but feel guilty for spending time in the gym.
• I would see opportunities to attack in sparring, but held back because it felt like cheating.
• I would use my speed and strength, but hate myself for resorting to barbaric tactics.

For years, I felt like I was praying to two different gods—the God of Soft and the God of Hard. The God of Yielding and the God of Strength.

Until one day in Kung Fu class. One of my teachers at this time was a gentleman named Albert Marrewa.

Al is a teacher and counselor in L.A. He is also an author. A while back he wrote a self-defense guide for women called, The Feminine Warrior, which I recommend. He also just published a three-volume collection of wise words, called The Tao of Masculinity.

Anyway, it was a Saturday morning class. There were five or six of us throwing each other around when Al told us to sit down. He was upset with our training.

Al stood over us in silhouette, the sunlight behind him, which made it feel like we were being scolded by Darth Vadar. His main message went something like this…

This is a fight. A fight for your life. If you have muscle, use it. There is no shame in using your strength.

If you’re bigger than the other guy, and you want to pick him up and throw him through the window, do it. You’ve got to commit yourself mind, body, and soul.

If you have an advantage and you don’t take it because you think it’s not fair or it’s not proper martial arts, you’re being stupid. You’re giving your life away.

Exactly. Thanks to Al’s speech, I suddenly felt it was okay to sweat. It was okay to unleash the beast and attack. After all, if you don’t let the beast out, how can you ever control it?

To clarify, Al wasn’t saying you should use your muscles foolishly. You shouldn’t waste your energy forcing the wrong technique at the wrong time. Instead, you relax and flow until you find an opening. Then you explode to make it work. That’s what timing is all about.

You know when to flow and you know when to go.

I have said again and again that the body is limited and, therefore, your training should focus on developing the mind. But I never said you should let your body wither away!

Your body may be limited, but you should be operating at those limits at all times! You must train yourself to be as fast, strong, and flexible as possible.

Fact: Your mind alone will not save you. The perfect idea will fail if you cannot execute it. Your strategy for success must balance thinking and doing. Feeling and following-through.

You must be soft, then hard. Or soft and hard at the exact same time!

The reason this lie bothers me so much is because believing that softness alone will save you puts good people in danger.

I’ve met so many martial artists who believe they can be effective just by flowing, relaxing, and yielding. They imagine they can breathe from their dan tien, draw up chi from the earth, and steer the swirl of energy of hand to hand combat any way they choose.

I know that sounds like I’m making fun of Tai Chi or Aikido students, but I’m not. I respect students who are willing to follow an ideology to its extreme, but my respect doesn’t matter when someone grabs them by the throat, slams them on the ground, and starts punching them in the face.

The truth is when your life is on the line, you need some muscle. You need to buck and thrash and explode.

I’m just as critical, by the way, of students who believe you always have to be hard and aggressive to be effective. That’s just another ideology taken to an extreme. You don’t want to be a snarling beast all the time any more than you want to be a leaf floating down a stream.

To be an effective fighter, and a fully enlightened human being, I believe you should be comfortable doing anything and everything you need to do to survive.

You should be able to fight soft with hard and hard with soft.

You should be able to walk away from a fight and attack.

You should be able to say, “I’m sorry,” and, “I’m going to kill you.”

That’s what makes martial arts training so powerful. It allows us to explore the extremes of life and death. Of being merciful and merciless. Of being a saint and a savage.

So, don’t be fooled by the guy in the shimmering silk robes, standing in a field, waving his hands in the air while a swan floats by on a koi pond. But also don’t be fooled by the guy pounding the heavy bag at the gym with veins popping out of his neck while sweat drips off a flaming skull tattoo on his forehead. Both of those guys are distortions of what you need to be complete.

Now, I feel pretty safe making that argument, because who’s going to argue against balance? Who’s going to disagree with the importance of relaxation and strength?

I’ll tell you who—martial artists!

But why? Why are there so many smart, decent people training and living at half-power? Why do they refuse to explore both extremes of tactics and behavior?

The answer is rooted in the second big lie in martial arts—

LIE #2: Fighting is easy.

How many times have you seen an instructor demonstrate techniques while talking to the class? Or not even looking at their partner?

How many instructors have you seen drop their student to the ground without breaking a sweat? Or protecting their head? Or even bending their knees?

But the real question is how do these instructors look when they’re not demonstrating? It’s hard to say because many teachers don’t roll, don’t spar, and don’t put themselves into situations where they can fail. These are the teachers who say things like—

“If the guy is choking you, all you have to do is this.”

“He’s got your arm trapped. No problem.”

“So, the guy has a knife to your throat. Good—he’s right where I want him.”

Crazy talk! But once again, making self-defense look safe, gentle, and easy is good for business. It’s also an irresponsible lie.

Any teacher who gives you the idea that fighting for your life is easy is either a liar or an idiot.

Too harsh? Maybe you’re right. Maybe they’re just excited to share a cool move. Or maybe they’re just trying to boost their students’ confidence. I admit to being guilty of that.

I don’t want students to get discouraged when they get caught in a bad position, so I’ll show them a move that seems easy to do. That way, instead of giving up, they’ll give it a try. But here’s the important part—

Once they’ve tried it, I make sure they experience resistance and failure so they’ll still respect the dangers involved. A bad teacher, on the other hand, allows students to go on believing that the technique works every time.

So, in case I’ve ever been unclear, let me lay out the truth…

Life is hard. Fighting is hard. Happiness is hard.

No matter what you want to achieve in life, it takes work to make it work. To be successful, you must use everything you’ve got mentally, physically, and spiritually.

Your martial arts training should bring together all of your powers and focus them into a point. A spear, if you will. A spear so sharp that it cuts through all the noise, resistance, and danger that crosses your path.

That’s the goal, anyway. The fact is that even with a spear, you’re still not guaranteed anything in this world.

You can still lose. You can still go bankrupt. You can still die alone and forgotten.

When it comes to success, the odds are already stacked against you. If you don’t commit every part of your mind, body, and soul to the fight, then you have no chance at all.

That’s why we must never handicap ourselves. We must never hold back. We must never cut our powers in half.

If you have a talent, use it. If you have a strength, employ it. If you have an idea, try it.

Never feel guilty for who you are or what you can do.

Imagine a lion. If a lion goes out to hunt and decides to only run at half-speed and to never use its claws, that lion will never catch a wildebeest. The lion will be left hungry. It will suffer and get sick.

By the time the lion grows desperate enough to do whatever it takes to eat, it’ll be too late. The lion will be too weak to run and will die.

That’s a ridiculous example, right? A lion would never feel guilty about running at full speed. A lion would never feel ashamed for using its claws.

So, why do we? Why do humans hold back? Why do we feel guilty? Why do we create ideals that work against us?

Forget those questions! Instead, just make the decision right now that you will never be one of those people who weakens their own power and limits their own success.

Embrace the yin and the yang. The soft and hard.

Value all tactics and techniques. The passive and aggressive.

Be comfortable doing anything and everything to fight your fight. Explore your extremes.

Don’t believe the lies, my friend. Life isn’t easy. It requires hard work. And to succeed in that work, you need every tool you can get.

Stop holding back. Stop pretending you aren’t smart enough or strong enough or tough enough.

Stop thinking you have to think a certain way or move a certain way.

No more lies. No more false hopes.

From now on, move through the world as the true you. The whole you. The all-powerful you.

Because in the fight for a happy life, you’re going to need everything you’ve got.

This article is based on Episode 34 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, Two Big Lies in Martial Arts.