Which Is More Important in Self-Defense, the Physical or the Mental?

The knee-jerk answer is “both,” and one that I would have agreed with until recently. But the longer I’ve trained and the more experience I’ve gotten the more I’ve drifted from one extreme to the other.

When I first started training back in the ’80s, I put the physical before everything else. After all, if you don’t know what to do and how to do it how can you hope to mount an effective self-defense? Punching, kicking, targets, techniques, joint breaking & throwing — these are the nuts and bolts of self-defense. With them you have a chance. Without them you have nothing.

How to explain, then, the superior technicians who were getting their asses handed to them on the streets?

And how to reconcile that with the crude bruisers I knew who had no training but plenty of notches in their knuckles?

As I moved my personal training slider from an infatuation with the physical execution and toward the attitude to get it done I noticed a direct effect on that physical execution.


The more I concerned myself with getting the job done — no matter what — the better my technique.

I became more creative, more powerful, and more effective. Instead of worrying about executing a certain throw, and being held back by that anxiety, I just dumped the man. Hard.

That directness had a way of smoothing out the actual technique — and got me the highest compliment I’ve ever received, “You have a certain meanness about you on
the mats.”

Which was funny since I wasn’t trying to be mean — I just wanted to get the job done no matter what.

I stopped caring what the other guy was doing, or trying to do. I stopped worrying about my technique. I put everything I had into putting the man down and keeping him there. I went on the attack and hunted instead of behaving like a prey animal.

Criminals do it every day, with no real physical training.

They win on pure intent — wanting to get the job done to the exclusion of all else has a way of spontaneously creating its own technique. (“Rock to the back of the head,” anyone?)

This doesn’t mean that the physical side of self-defense training is worthless. Because you’re not crazy or lacking in empathy it’s the only way you have of building that intent. Doing the physical work gives you the perspective of the sociopath.

The physical and the mental do go hand-in-hand, which is why they would seem at first blush to be equals. But in reality, the physical is just the means to achieve the mental.

And while you can do pretty well with nothing but intent, the same can’t be said for having nothing but technique.

You can have the biggest gun at the party but if you can’t pull the trigger it doesn’t matter. Meanwhile, the guy who has no problem pulling the trigger early and often can kill you
with a cheap .22.

So dive into the physical — learn what to break and how — but just remember that it’s not the end. It’s the beginning.

-Chris Ranck-Buhr
TFT Master Instructor

PS. To quickly learn how to integrate the physical with the mental, register today for one of the few remaining 2010 live classes. 2 days… is all it takes. Not weeks or months or years. Just 2 days. And your results are guaranteed. Check it out here.

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