If someone breaks into your house in the middle of the night and your family is asleep you are not going to prioritize your safety in response. You will stop the threat. If that includes calling for help, do it. If it includes picking up a tool, do that. If it means proceeding warily, locating the threat, identifying the capability of the threat, do that. But in that setting there is no option to hide, no one to depend on, and nothing to think about except what you need to do to stop the threat.
We prepare for that every time we train.
If you are a defender in a professional capacity, entering a building for an alarm call with unknown intruders, or searching with a team, you use your skills, isolate, contact and stop the threat.
Or let’s say you are stopping an erratic driver on the side of the road. You call in your location and the subject’s tag. You find that the owner (and likely driver) has lots of prior arrests including dozens for resisting, assault and fighting, you ask for backup. But if he bails out and runs, or he comes back toward you, it’s on you and only you, right then and there, to deal with it. You rely on your training and experience, your will and skill, and you do what you need to do to resolve that threat.
We are preparing for that in training too.
Although most of the people in the class do not and will not have that professional responsibility, or the training to deal with those specific conditions, the awareness, presence of mind, stress inoculation, physical skills, and the mental habits of will, courage, assertion and judgment are all cultivated in our training, and are all deployable if they are needed.
We minimize injury in training.
We progress step by step. Not sink or swim. Not all or nothing. Not gauging the level of challenge based on someone’s imaginary idea of “reality.” By gradually increasing the physical and mental demands of what we are doing we become well-conditioned, and we are not likely to get hurt in training.
Getting hurt in training does not help you.
It does not mean you are keeping it real. Getting hurt in training mean mistakes were made – either an error in technique, or an excess of pressure. As we proceed, we can and will endure training pressure that will far exceed our comfort zone, pushing us to a level of performance that we have not experienced before. But the training is designed to make everyone stronger, not to hurt them.
Too much pressure, too soon in training, reinforces bad habits. It limits the development of skill. To little pressure yields no improvement – in strength, skill or character. You can decide how much or how little you want to take on. Your instructors should help set an optimal range for each student, but if they can’t or don’t, it is up to you to take responsibility for your training pressure. The results of consistent training under correct and incrementally increasing pressure are increasing strength, skill, speed, flexibility, and determination, confidence and calm. The results of your effort will be yours.
Just as in a confrontation, in training it’s on you to do what you need to do.
Getting hurt in training happens from time to time. When it does, we modify techniques, work around the injury, continue to train the rest of the body and mind, and recover.
Getting hurt in training is an error. It is not a sign of strength.
To make music a guitar string is tuned to just the right pitch, just the right tension – not too tight and not too loose. The more skillful the musician the more accurate the tuning is set and maintained. That is the same for us in training.
In combat we cannot choose the level of pressure. In training we can and we do.
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Post copyright © 2025 Jeffrey Brooks, MountainKarateNC.com, Yamabayashi Ryu, Mountain Karate Dojo
Photo by Tarleton Brooks
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read True Karate Dō by Jeffrey Brooks
“One of the best books I’ve read in years, inviting and compelling. Jeff Brooks moves effortlessly from martial arts to Buddhism to consciousness studies, self-transformation, and related fields in this wide-ranging and Illuminating study that has much to offer both novice explorers and veteran practitioners. A splendid achievement.”— Philip Zaleski, Editor, The Best Spiritual Writing series