Step into many dojos today and you’ll see students moving through kata and floor drills with a kind of casual rhythm. Their stances are loose, their strikes lack conviction, and their eyes drift as if the mind is somewhere else. The movements are performed, but the spirit is absent. This is not how martial arts…
Tag: Critical thinking
Crowds Can Kill: Riots, Protests, and Panic
We’ve all been in a crowd, a packed concert, a highwaytraffic, a rush-hour subway platform. Usually, it’s just an inconvenience. But a crowd has a mind of its own, and when that collective mind turns volatile, it can become one of the most dangerous forces on earth. In these high-density, high-stakes scenarios, the difference between…
The High Cost of Toughness
There’s a certain reverence in martial arts circles for the old-school mentality; the grit, the grind, the stoic endurance of pain. We’ve all heard it: “Push through.” “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” “Tape it up and keep going.” “Suck it up, buttercup.” “Walk it off.” Injuries, in this mindset, aren’t just inevitable. They’re worn…
Lessons from the Samurai
I was sitting in the emergency room. I had undergone a routine procedure early that morning and gone home. The surgery had caused parts of the outer wall of an artery to be torn off. I managed to tear the rest of it open through the highly dangerous act of eating chicken soup. As time…
Overlooked Self-Defense Elements 2: Avoidance
This is part two of a series of articles where I look at the elements needed for a self-defense or self-protection course to be of real use. In a previous article I listed the required elements as follows: Awareness Avoidance Pre fight indicators (pre-fight rituals) De-escalation Adrenaline effects And last, actual physical skills Avoidance. Men…
Wallace Smedley 