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Almost every teenage boy wants to take martial arts for only one reason: to kick ass!  They want to be Jet Li and Steven Segal and have people say that they could last over a millisecond with Chuck Norris.  They want to be able to take down the bullies and get the girl and all that.  So, in a nod to my inner fifteen year old that still listens to heavy metal and wears a mullet, let’s talk about the four reasons that martial arts kick ass:

1. The first and foremost reason that martial arts kick ass is exactly that: you can kick ass.  Now we all know that you don’t start fights but you always finish them.  You don’t purposely walk down the dark alley in the middle of the night wearing the jersey of an opposing rival team, but if someone threatens you and yours you will do what needs to be done so that you can walk away.  With enough training you have the ability to defend yourself against almost anyone.  Maybe you can’t catch arrows, but how often are people walking around with bows and arrows anyway?

2. Secondly, martial arts kick ass because you learn to get your ass kicked.  In the early 1990′s I fought one of Mike Tyson’s sparring partners, a 6’4″ 240 pound left-handed red-headed Irish monster that was quick as a jack rabbit and hit like a mule.  I was a black belt candidate in my early twenties, a graduate student in nuclear engineering, and 155 pounds if I was fully clothed and wearing boots.  After this monster beat the crap out of a 6’2″ 220 lbs fighter for three minutes so badly the guy wouldn’t come out of the corner for the second round, it was my turn.  I flew across the space with a spin back side kick aimed right at the center of his chest that was about the size of a refrigerator.  He ducked underneath it and hit me with a jab that sent me back ten feet while breaking my nose and essentially knocking me out.  It only knocked me about ten feet because the wall stopped me.  But I came right back firing even though I was out on my feet and don’t remember most of that round.  I fought him for three rounds, and took one of the worst beatings of my life.  And you know what?  I didn’t die!  I learned to take more punishment than I ever thought possible and push forward when I couldn’t even lift my hands.  It helped my martial arts immensely, but it also helped my business career, helped me make it through my son’s health issues, and taught me to never stop fighting even if you can’t win.  Based on all the butt kickings I’ve taken over my life I’ve become stronger and tougher than any of my competition in the professional world.  And I don’t get beat the same way twice, because I’ve learned to analyze failures to create learning experience, so the scars are really notes from various lessons.

3. Those lessons let you kick ass in other realms.  I was able to out work everyone in my training class when I entered the financial services arena because of my martial arts experiences.  I was Rookie of the Year because I kicked everybody else’s ass.  I worked harder and longer.  I was more focused, and learned from every loss and every win.  I knew that I had to do something a thousand times to just understand it and 10,000 times to be perfect, whereas the other guys thought doing it ten times was hard practice and “good enough”.  Martial arts teaches you to kick ass everywhere else and in everything that you do because you learn that good enough is never good enough.

4. Lastly, martial arts kick ass simply because you have less ass to kick.  Face it: we get in good shape.  Wickedly good shape.  Like only my friends that are tri-athletes are in better shape, and they spend literally every waking moment outside of work working out, so they have no balance.  The hard workouts burn out any impurities in our systems, the hours of training give us cardiovascular systems better than runners, and we can eat almost anything because an hour-long training session burns off a thousand calories.  When I was competing I had body fat levels that were actually dangerously low.  My brother said my arms looked like French bread, and my girlfriend wanted me to go around shirtless to show off.  Chicks dug it!  That was definitely kick ass!

So to recap: martial arts kick ass because you learn to lose, you learn to win, you look good doing either, and you do it everywhere.  That is the definition of an ultimate ass kicker!

Over stimulated, over caffeinated, and hyperactive, Americans as a whole are way too stressed out.   This leads to high blood pressure, obesity, and short tempers affecting everything from family situations to business productivity.  But why?

One thing is that Americans load up on stress, because to a certain extent it is good.  Challenges get your blood flowing and releases creative and competitive juices in addition to adrenaline.  To a point that too many Americans go wayyy past.  Too much stress actually causes the body to inflect and produce cortisol and other chemicals that instead of helping the body be stronger and more engaged for longer actually start to break it down.  You become mentally and emotionally drained if under too much stress for too long.  Short periods of intense stress are fine, but longer ones are counterproductive and potentially emotionally and physically devastating.

So how can you deal with the too much information always on and going on in the world, short of ditching your cell phone and going to a mountaintop?  Balance your stresses.  Create eustress in your life.

Eustress is a term I first heard Tim Ferriss use a few years ago.  It is the opposite of distress, and it is that which pushes you while stimulating.  Positive as opposed to negative stress if you will.  One way to generate it is to take total breaks from your normal stresses, which reduces them down past the inflection point so that they once more become energizing.  Turn the cell phone off during dinner with the family.  Stop in the middle of work to walk around the block, or meditate.  Watch a Three Stooges clip on your computer and laugh until you cry.

This last one is actually a stress of a different form that allows your body to rest and reset.  Similar to the active meditation of doing forms or going for a hard run while wrestling with a problem.  They all create a different form of stress on your body that allows your body (and mind) to not focus on the negative pressures and alleviate them partly through a different outlet.

We Martial Artists are actually very good at this shifting to blow off steam.  I went to see my Master once after about two weeks of hell at work and he could instantly see that things were not right.  Testing my blood pressure it was 200/140.  Surprisingly I didn’t have blood coming out of my eyes. “Get downstairs now and do your forms.”  45 minutes later I was back to a fairly normal 130/90.  Because of eustress alleviating the distress.

So go do your forms.  Take some time and meditate.  Go smell a flower, or hit a heavy bag for a few rounds.  Create something to oppose the distress in your mind and body so that you can work through these tough times.  Use your Arts as Miyagi said “to find balance.”

Why do martial arts make you a better person?  The reasons are truly as numerous as the stars in the sky or the sands on the beaches, and every individual will have a plethora of unique outcomes from their experiences training in the Arts.  I want to boil it all down into three areas and give one reason from each that will have broad appeal in that the majority of us that have studied will relate to these.  The three areas are really the three components of Martial Arts that many of us have heard our teachers talk about repeatedly: Mind, Body, and Spirit.

The Body is the first component where we see direct improvements from martial arts training.  There are decreases in blood pressure, heart rates that can rival those of endurance athletes, and strength and flexibility.  The most applicable physical benefit to the rest of our lives just might be endurance.  As martial artists we get used to hard work over extended periods of time that we can directly translate beyond the training hall walls.  We can literally work harder and longer that our peers in essentially any field that do not train in martial arts.  It doesn’t matter if you are a trial attorney or a lumberjack, the constitutional improvement from the long hours of pushing yourself as a student creates a direct physical benefit in the real world that can be a deciding factor in success in that you can out work others, even with the time allocated towards training.

The second area is mental: focus.  The attention to detail while practicing and being physically exhausted improves our mental strength.  The ability to focus on a single goal over an extended period and through adversity, be it a tournament or perfecting a single technique, is something the outside world really does not understand nor appreciate until it becomes dramatically obvious.  The ability to block out distractions is one of the reasons why students of the martial arts tend to see improvement academically: our minds become trained much as our bodies do via repetition of forms and pushing through the pain of burning legs and everything else.  The ability to ignore the extraneous and focus on the target makes us great, in all walks of life.

And the greatest reason we in the martial arts become better people:  we train and understand our spirits.  The Art of War, one of the greatest books on leadership ever written, succinctly says “He who knows his enemy and himself shall ever be victorious.”  If you know your opponent (be it in the ring, or the office, or in the arena of life), and you know who and what you are, you are much better prepared than others.  This knowledge comes from pushing yourself past the point of giving up physically and emotionally.  It comes from reflection which begets understanding.  It comes from not giving up when it would be so easy, from the discipline of leaving the nice warm bed to train in the dark before dawn.  It comes from learning how to not hurt others, and the wisdom of understanding to teach and model the behaviors of those that taught us.  It is being better because we learn what better is and naturally evolve towards it.  By understanding ourselves we are better able to understand others.

This three fold improvements in Mind, Body, and Spirit interact to allow martial artists significant growth potential, the chance for us all to become better.  Better martial artist, and ultimately better people.