Why Fight?

• March 17, 2012
• 1 Comment
• Blog, Combat
• Posted by Ed

Although there is a certain confidence that comes from knowing you can hold your own in a fight, that isn’t the point of combat training – not for me, anyway.

Recently, whilst training, I was struck by how odd what I was doing must seem to people who have never trained in combat. I thought it would be interesting to express my own opinion on the matter and explain why combat training is, by a long way, my favourite type of physical exercise.

I don’t expect anybody to care. I am, however, interested to see my own thoughts in writing. Perhaps I’m full of shit…who knows!

Providing you don’t ask for trouble, the chances of finding yourself in a situation where you need to fight are, frankly, negligible. Moreover, an actual brawl is inevitably nothing like a controlled (or sporting) fight. When they happen, fights are sudden, explosive and – more often than not – a total mess.

Everything you’ve learned goes out the window. You throw your hands up to protect your face…and that’s normally about it. Unless the guy you’re fighting knows how to fight as well, it’s always going to be a total chaos of flying fists, shoving and spinning around.

So, training in combat – for me – is not about actually being prepared to fight. So what is it about? Why push yourself to the point of agony and sickness? Why drill and train until your legs ache and your shoulders throb? Why spend hours of your life teaching yourself a skill that you’ll never, ever use in the real world?

For me, it’s a mental thing.

Whilst fighting, you are blissfully and entirely overwhelmed by the action. You can’t help but be. When you are under attack – and fighting back – every part of your being is focused on repelling that attack, on gaining an advantage and on overcoming what you are, at that very moment, subject to.

It’s not arbitrary, either. If you don’t pay attention, if you don’t concentrate and if you don’t fight back with every ounce of your strength – it hurts. You get tripped, punched or slammed and it isn’t pleasant. After a good session, you’ll hurt for a couple of days. After a bad one, you might not be back for a couple of weeks…

A typical response to this statement is, “Why? Why would you put yourself through that?”. The easy answer to that is that I don’t.

I don’t go training to get punched or slammed – I go training to put myself into a situation where I might get punched or slammed…if I don’t push myself to my limit. If I don’t get it right, if I don’t try as hard as I can, I’m going to suffer for it.

Only when you put yourself in that position as a regular part of your life can you understand what it does to you, mentally. You learn – as a typical state of mind – to push yourself as hard as you can. When else in life do you get that feeling?

When else in life do you actually have to push yourself? Daily life is, at best, placid. It’s a series of non-events, each as meaningless and unimportant as the last. As a result, I find my general disposition becomes…half hearted. Semi-numb. A state of having no shits left to give about the pointlessness of day-to-day concerns.

For this reason, I fight. I cannot fight half-heartedly. I cannot fail to pay attention. I cannot go about combat like I go about life, otherwise I’ll get torn to pieces and hurt for a week. It FORCES me to care when, in real life, I rarely do.

Also, I really enjoy it.

• Tags: combat, fighting, MMA