Learning to be Brave

Saturday, May 9th, 2015

Real training can remove that nagging doubt about whether you could handle yourself in a fight:

It’s probably different in most martial arts, but in an MMA or boxing gym — which is to say, a real fighting gym — it’s always scary. When it’s grappling night at the MMA gym, I never go in scared. The worst that’s going to happen to me is I’ll tweak my elbow or somebody will choke me a little too hard and I’ll go to sleep for a bit. But I’m not scared.

However, you go into the real sparring nights — we call them “Punch in the face” nights — and you know you’re going to get punched lots and lots of times in the head, often by men who are much bigger and much more skilled than you are. We have a pretty small gym, and you can’t always fight in your weight class. So I’m always sparring with big heavyweights who can’t even pull a punch.

What you do in a fight gym is learn how to be brave. You’re learning how to punch and kick in a proper way, of course, but above all else, a fighter is someone who’s got courage, who’s dead game in a fight. Most guys don’t come into the world that way. You learn to be brave through that process of getting your fear and timidity beaten out of you night after night after night.

It’s an empirical question whether training makes one more or less likely to get in a fight outside the gym. In some ways, I’m probably more likely to get into a fight now, because I feel more competent, and I know what it’s cost me in the past to back down from fights, and I don’t want to feel that way.

I would amend that slightly. Experienced grapplers aren’t scared of grappling night. New grapplers are fighting panic from the moment they can’t escape the crushing weight or constricting grip of a more experienced grappler.

Comments

  1. Steve Johnson says:

    I think I agree with the author. In a pure grappling gym, you can feel the panic in a new grappler when you roll with him. I think it comes more from being in such an unfamiliar situation — men all have some idea of how to throw a punch and avoid getting punched (even if their execution of those ideas is terrible without practice) but most have zero idea how to grapple.

    On the other hand, if you know that the next day you’re going to have to defend from getting punched in the face that might change your perspective — the feedback in grappling is much more psychological than physical in comparison to striking. Tap to an armbar early enough and you’re totally uninjured but you have to mentally deal with the fact that if your opponent was really trying to hurt you you’d have a dislocated elbow (or unconscious and helpless if it was a choke). That takes a mental toll unless you don’t have time to focus on it. Mess up your defense in boxing and you get hit in the face – that feedback is much more weighted towards the physical (of course, there’s a huge psychological element too – realizing that getting hit isn’t the end of the world).

Leave a Reply