Reflections on Violence, Part 1: Classical Budo as a Mental/Emotional Compensation for Realistic Martial Arts Training

About a week ago, I was having yet another late-night angst-ridden conversation with an old friend and training partner of mine when the talk turned, as usual, to martial arts and fighting and the impact they have had on both our lives. After having spent over twenty years in the martial arts, we have both noticed that martial artists tend to be troubled, angry people and, lo and behold, we both realised that is exactly what we both are.


So what exactly makes them that way? Is it because the martial arts tend to attract such people in the first place, or does the process change them to become that way? A bit of chicken-and-egg, really.


Before I go on, my friend comes from a colorful background, to say the least - one that involved running with all the wrong sorts of people and more than a few close shaves on the streets. He's long since gone straight, of course, and done very well for himself, but the circumstances that first led him to practice martial arts of his own volition - fending off violent juvenile gangsters as young teenager in school - have always been uppermost in his mind, as have the circumstances that kept him in them for the years I'd known him in school, namely challenge fights and weaponed street brawls as a gangster himself later in his teenage years. A former national athlete as well as a street-tough fighter, he is about as far from the stereotype of a classical budoka as one can get and, for many years, this was the essential dichotomy between us as I had cut my martial teeth on karate - a classical budo - whereas he had started out in muay thai and then moved on to BJJ - both modernised martial arts with only one end in mind.


Yet, on the night of the conversation, he told me he had been giving a lot of thought to how his training and thinking on martial arts and combat has changed his personality, and not necessarily for the better. The fear that had led him to martial arts had sublimated into seething aggression just barely held in check, and apt to blow its lid at the slightest provocation. Considering how my friend works in the investment banking industry, where everyone is rude and aggressive by default, it is definitely causing him a lot of stress. The thought of someone like him carving a trail of carnage through his colleagues did cause me no small amusement (I have no sympathy for most investment bankers), but the thought of him going to jail for it did not.


As anyone who has studied Systema or any other realistic combat system for some time would understand, effective combat training is ultimately a process of psychological remodelling. The most destructive weapon in the world is only as dangerous as the operating system guiding it. Likewise, the most finely-honed body in the world is harmless in a fight if the mind behind it hasn't been trained to guide it rightly in combat. And, unfortunately, as countless studies and observations of individuals and groups - highly-operational military and law enforcement personnel, hardcore gangsters and jailbirds and even refugees - optimised for survival and function in the midst of violence have shown, being optimised for violence all too often leaves one unfit to function and reintegrate into peaceful society. Adaptation to survive violence and fight back entails not only psychological resistance but a willingness to be proactively aggressive - 'getting in your self-defence first', as the saying goes. Enough stimulus to adapt and this can graduate towards an uncontrollable tendency or even a taste for aggression. Without a suitable outlet for this surplus aggression, the individual can very quickly spiral into patterns of self-destruction and become a danger both to themselves and others - incidences of substance abuse, depression, suicide, domestic violence and violent crime among war veterans attest to this, as does the pathological need to engage in violence for its own sake amongst street thugs who have spent long periods of time in violent surroundings.


In Circular Strength Training (CST), the concept of compensation is of prime importance. This principle states that for every training impulse in a given direction, a training impulse must be applied to the functional opposite, and also tension in the primary training dimension must be released, all in the interest of fostering balance and health in the organism under training stress.


A simple physical example would be as follows:


Distance runners, because of their stride technique, tend to be tight and overly-strengthened in their inferior posterior chain, the network of muscles down the back of the body including the gluteals, hamstrings and hind calves and loose and insufficiently strong in the anterior chain, the functional opposite. My sister, who was a cross-country runner in school, had this syndrome with especial severity because her coaches had absolutely no concept of compensatory training and trained to performance only. Plus, as a carefree teenager, she spent her time hanging out with friends and doing absolutely stuff-all from a training perspective during the off-season. As a result, she had severe lower-back stiffness and all the attendant postural deficits arising therefrom. Had she worked, for instance, on the Downward Dog pose of yoga, which is a posterior lengthener and anterior strengthener, it might have gone a long way to alleviating her problems.


Again drawing from CST pedagoguy, the Training Hierarchy Pyramid progresses from General Physical Preparation to Specific Physical Preparation, Skill-Specific Preparation and, at its apex, Mental and Emotional Preparation. At each level of the pyramid, imbalance can occur and compensation must be applied to correct it. And so, just as musculoskeletal imbalances can be compensated for with appropriate training methodology, might not mental and emotional imbalance be likewise addressed?


To draw on a historical example, when the Warring States era ended with the ascension of Tokugawa Ieyasu to the Shogunate of a unified Japan in the mid-17th century, a lot of samurai - career soldiers born into a social class bred for war - found themselves out of work. Those who remained in their old jobs found that their job scope had changed. In a unified country (largely) at peace, practical martial skills came a distant second to skills in administration and the general exercise of sound judgement. Essentially, an entire social class had to find a new reason to exist. No surprise, then, that this was the time of the flowering of classical bushido - the mindful pursuit of any given task at hand with the diligence and discipline required of a martial art, both as an end in themselves as well as way to educate a career warrior with the broad-mindedness and tolerance necessary to administer a country.


Judging by the unity and relative peace Tokugawa-era Japan enjoyed for some 300 years, this method by which wartime soldiers transitioned to peacetime administrators must have had some value. Of course, Tokugawa isolationism played a role also, but that is a story for another time.


This shift of emphasis from simply developing fighting skill to developing character and inner equilibrium through martial arts training enjoyed a second renaissance during the late 1800s and early 1900s, during which it became known as classical budo. For the purposes of this discussion, I will use the two terms - bushido and budo - interchangeably.


So now that we have established that those who train for violence require a moderating influence to keep from destroying themselves emotionally, what practical steps can be taken in this regard? Good question. Tune in for the next installment of this article, in which I will discuss concrete methods by which the astute student of combat can ameliorate the potentially destructive effects of a psyche overdeveloped for violence.


Train smart, train hard.