The Martial Artist's Relationship With Risk

Oct 5

7 min read

I've been thinking about how martial artists talk about risk.

There is a lot of discussion these days about concussions, CTE, injuries, hard sparring, training partners, getting older and whether combat sports are worth the physical cost. I understand why. If you're going to spend years participating in something that involves physical conflict, you should understand what you're getting yourself into.

But I think we sometimes ask the wrong question. We ask, "How can I make combat sports safer?"

That's a reasonable question, but it has a limit. At some point, if we're talking about learning to fight, we have to acknowledge what fighting actually is. You're learning how to use physical skills against another person who is actively trying to prevent you from using them.

There is risk in that. The goal shouldn't be to pretend there isn't. The goal should be to understand the risk, decide which risks are necessary, and avoid the ones that accomplish nothing.

You Can't Learn to Fight Without Fighting

This sounds obvious, but I think it gets lost sometimes.

You can learn an enormous amount without actually sparring. You can spend hours on the heavy bag. You can work focus mitts with a coach. You can drill combinations until the movements become automatic. You can practice takedowns, escapes, submissions and positional sequences with a cooperative partner. You can learn a fifteen-count combination on the focus mitts and perform it perfectly and still have no idea how to fight.

The mitts don't move away from you.
They don't counter your jab.
They don't change levels.
They don't shoot a takedown while you're throwing your combination.
They don't panic when you pressure them or punish you when you make a mistake.

Eventually, somebody has to fight back. That's what sparring is for.

Sparring is the evaluation of skills in application.

It's where we find out whether the things you've been practicing actually work when the other person has their own ideas. It tests timing, distance, decision-making, reactions, conditioning and composure in a way that drills simply can't completely reproduce.

That doesn't mean every round needs to be hard. It does mean that if your goal is to become a competant fighter, you can't permanently avoid meaningful resistance and still expect the same result.

At some point, the training has to answer the question:

Can you actually do this against someone who doesn't want you to?

Not Every Risk Is Worth Taking

This is where I think good coaching becomes important. There is a big difference between accepting the risks inherent in combat sports and taking unnecessary risks because of ego. If I'm teaching takedowns, somebody is going to fall. That's part of learning to wrestle. My job is to teach people how to fall, introduce appropriate techniques, control the environment and progressively increase the difficulty. If I'm teaching submissions, somebody is eventually going to get submitted. If I'm teaching striking, somebody is going to get hit. Those aren't failures of the training system. They're consequences of practicing skills against resistance.

But that doesn't mean every way of producing those consequences is equally useful.

There is a difference between hard sparring and a gym war.
There is a difference between trying a difficult technique because you're ready to test it and attempting something you're nowhere near prepared to perform because you don't want to look inexperienced.

The question I want an athlete to learn to ask is simple: "What am I getting in return for this risk?"

If the answer is better skill, better understanding, useful experience or preparation for something you're actually going to encounter, the risk may be worthwhile. If the answer is simply, "I didn't want to look weak," that's probably not a very good trade.

Hard Sparring Has a Place

This is where I'm probably going to disagree with people who think all hard sparring is unnecessary.

I don't think you become a great fighter by permanently keeping everything light. Most sparring doesn't need to be hard. In fact, much of it shouldn't be. We need rounds where we're experimenting, working specific positions, developing timing and allowing our partners to practice their own skills. If every round becomes a competition, you lose a lot of those opportunities.

But occasional hard sparring has a purpose.

At some point, a fighter needs to experience what happens when the other person is moving very quickly, hitting hard, pushing the pace and refusing to give them what they want. They need to discover whether their defense holds up when they're tired and uncomfortable. They need to find out whether their technique survives pressure.

There are things you simply don't learn from a heavy bag. You don't need to do it every day. You don't need to turn every round into a fight. But if you never allow the athlete to experience meaningful intensity, you're leaving out an important part of the evaluation.

I think the idea of becoming a good fighter while avoiding virtually every uncomfortable aspect of fighting is fantasy.

If that's what you want, there are easier ways to exercise.

The Risk Changes as You Develop

One of the responsibilities of a coach is understanding that the appropriate amount of risk isn't the same for everyone.

A brand-new student doesn't need to be thrown into the deep end and told to figure it out. They haven't developed the movement skills, defensive habits, physical preparation or judgment to deal with that environment yet.

An experienced fighter is a different story.

As the athlete becomes more competent, we can expose them to more difficult problems. We can increase resistance. We can make the situations less predictable. We can increase the speed and intensity. Eventually, we can ask them to solve the entire problem.

That's progression.

And I don't think progression should be confused with trying to make training risk-free.

The purpose of progression is to make the athlete capable of handling more difficulty.

That's an important distinction.

We don't protect people from failure because failure is dangerous. We give them increasingly difficult opportunities to fail so they can learn how to succeed.

The same principle applies to risk.

You don't eliminate the difficult parts of the sport. You prepare the athlete to handle them.

Some Risks Can't Be Coached Away

This is the part that I think we need to be honest about.

I see people talking about CTE and brain trauma, and I understand the concern. If you're going to train a sport involving strikes to the head, there is a risk of head injury. Good coaching can reduce unnecessary exposure. Better training practices can reduce unnecessary damage. Choosing when and how to spar matters.

But we can't honestly promise that learning to fight comes without that risk.

I'm teaching people how to fight. That means I'm teaching them skills that include hitting and being hit. There is no clever training methodology that completely changes that fundamental reality.

And I don't think acknowledging the risk means we have to tell people not to participate. Adults make decisions about risk all the time. People choose activities that carry physical consequences because they believe the experience is worth what they're accepting.

Combat sports are no different.

If someone decides that the potential risk isn't worth it to them, I respect that decision.

But if someone decides they want to become a fighter, I think they deserve honesty rather than reassurance.

There is a bargain involved.

You get everything that comes from learning a difficult physical skill against real resistance, but you accept that the activity carries real risk.

You get to decide whether that bargain is worth it.

Toughness Isn't the Same as Recklessness

I've spent a lot of my life around people who value toughness, and I still do. But I've learned that toughness isn't simply the willingness to accept punishment.

Sometimes toughness is walking into a hard round when you're nervous because you know you need to test yourself.
Sometimes it's trying the technique you aren't confident in and being willing to fail.
Sometimes it's getting submitted and coming back to work on the problem instead of making excuses.
Sometimes it's telling your training partner that you need to back the intensity down because the round has stopped being productive.

Those things can all require more discipline than simply going to war. I don't want athletes who are afraid of risk. I want athletes who understand it. A mature martial artist should eventually become capable of looking at a situation and deciding, This is difficult, but it's something I need to learn. They should also be capable of looking at another situation and deciding, This isn't teaching me anything. It's just accumulating damage.

Learning to tell those two situations apart is part of becoming a good martial artist.

The Risk Has to Be Worth the Reward

I don't think the answer to risk in martial arts is to eliminate it. I don't think the answer is to ignore it either. The answer is judgment.

There will always be some risk involved in learning a combat sport. If you remove every situation where you can fail, get taken down, get submitted, get hit or become uncomfortable, you've also removed some of the things that make combat sports valuable as a way of learning to fight. But we don't have to be reckless about it.

We can choose good training partners.
We can control intensity.
We can progressively increase resistance.
We can teach people how to fall, how to tap, how to defend themselves and how to train with other people.
We can recognize when an athlete needs more preparation and when they're ready for a greater challenge.
We can occasionally turn up the intensity and find out what we've actually built.

That's the balance I'm interested in.

I'm not trying to make combat sports risk-free. I'm trying to make the risks worth taking. Because if we're going to spend years learning how to fight, the point isn't simply to survive training.

The point is to become good at something difficult. And sometimes finding out whether you're actually good at it requires somebody to fight back.