I don’t think that learning a martial arts increase the chance that you will fight. People usually fight because they are afraid and their fight-or-flight response triggers. Being confident in critical situations because you know how to fight, reduces the chances of actually fighting.
I agree with your conclusion but not your reasoning. If you’re already in a self-defense situation, martial arts training probably makes fighting more attractive, and therefore more likely relative to flight (if possible) or freezing up (if not). The confidence you’re talking about does make fighting less likely in general, but it does that by reducing the chance that you’ll get into a threatening situation in the first place: unless you’re going around looking for fights, that implies someone else threatening you, and most of the people that’re interested in doing such a thing are going to be looking for soft targets.
Also, in such a situation, most of the sources I’ve read say that you’re more likely to avoid death or serious injury if you do fight back.
On the other hand, you do run a nontrivial risk of injury in training; martial artists are more likely to be injured on the mat than on the street. Most of that comes from being a high-impact athletic activity rather than from the self-defense motive, though, so choosing a non-defensive martial art probably won’t help you much. (Anecdote time: I’ve been hurt more doing fencing, which is defensively useless, than doing jujitsu, which isn’t.)
I don’t understand the point of fencing. From the videos I watched it is a very ungrounded activity with the contests hoping around instead of being a position that trains the kind of body language that you want to have in your normal life. It seems doesn’t look like fluid movement. It looks more like it’s about the guy with the fasted reaction time winning.
Olympic fencing’s pretty hyperspecialized. Especially foil and saber. It’s what you get when you take training for dueling weapons (mainly smallswords and Hungarian dueling sabers) and pile on a couple hundred years of refinements that make scoring or other aspects of sport practice easier or safer, or were originally intended as teaching tools (i.e. the right-of-way rules), but also take it further away from its roots: by now this includes everything from the shape of the piste to the scoring rules to the details of the uniforms. A lot of martial arts go this way eventually: kendo post-WWII is probably the closest parallel, but you can also see it happening with judo and Tae Kwon Do.
Some aspects and schools of thought are more baroque than others, of course. I’m an epeeist, and my main teacher was into the classical side of the sport, so my approach to it was a little more martial-artsy than average. And even at its most elegantly refined it’ll still teach you a lot about timing and distance.
(Reaction time isn’t as important as you’d think, incidentally; being able to read other people’s body language will get you farther. There was a seventy-year-old man in my old club who was by far the best fencer there.)
If I’m following your meaning, then that’s just hard in general. It’s easy to tell when someone’s throwing a punch as it happens, of course, but by that time it’s far too late to block or avoid; to get to it in time, you need to be able to see it in body alignment before it happens. And that’s not something we tend to get a lot of practice with in everyday life.
Whether reading body language is something that you practice in everyday life depends how your everyday life looks like.
Not bumping into other pairs while dancing Salsa on a crowded dancefloor needs the ability to read the body language to know where they will be. When it comes to experienced dancers who move fluently that works quite well. When you on the other hand dance next to a beginner who’s not dancing fluently you don’t know where they are going to be as easily and thing get much harder. Then it takes conscious effort to think about them.
Body language also matters for hugging other people. At least if you don’t have stickers. If I go for a hug, does the other person body language prepares for a hug or do the tense up? If they tense up, I stop the hug before it really happens and therefore I don’t invade the other person.
I don’t think that learning a martial arts increase the chance that you will fight. People usually fight because they are afraid and their fight-or-flight response triggers. Being confident in critical situations because you know how to fight, reduces the chances of actually fighting.
I agree with your conclusion but not your reasoning. If you’re already in a self-defense situation, martial arts training probably makes fighting more attractive, and therefore more likely relative to flight (if possible) or freezing up (if not). The confidence you’re talking about does make fighting less likely in general, but it does that by reducing the chance that you’ll get into a threatening situation in the first place: unless you’re going around looking for fights, that implies someone else threatening you, and most of the people that’re interested in doing such a thing are going to be looking for soft targets.
Also, in such a situation, most of the sources I’ve read say that you’re more likely to avoid death or serious injury if you do fight back.
On the other hand, you do run a nontrivial risk of injury in training; martial artists are more likely to be injured on the mat than on the street. Most of that comes from being a high-impact athletic activity rather than from the self-defense motive, though, so choosing a non-defensive martial art probably won’t help you much. (Anecdote time: I’ve been hurt more doing fencing, which is defensively useless, than doing jujitsu, which isn’t.)
I don’t understand the point of fencing. From the videos I watched it is a very ungrounded activity with the contests hoping around instead of being a position that trains the kind of body language that you want to have in your normal life. It seems doesn’t look like fluid movement. It looks more like it’s about the guy with the fasted reaction time winning.
Olympic fencing’s pretty hyperspecialized. Especially foil and saber. It’s what you get when you take training for dueling weapons (mainly smallswords and Hungarian dueling sabers) and pile on a couple hundred years of refinements that make scoring or other aspects of sport practice easier or safer, or were originally intended as teaching tools (i.e. the right-of-way rules), but also take it further away from its roots: by now this includes everything from the shape of the piste to the scoring rules to the details of the uniforms. A lot of martial arts go this way eventually: kendo post-WWII is probably the closest parallel, but you can also see it happening with judo and Tae Kwon Do.
Some aspects and schools of thought are more baroque than others, of course. I’m an epeeist, and my main teacher was into the classical side of the sport, so my approach to it was a little more martial-artsy than average. And even at its most elegantly refined it’ll still teach you a lot about timing and distance.
(Reaction time isn’t as important as you’d think, incidentally; being able to read other people’s body language will get you farther. There was a seventy-year-old man in my old club who was by far the best fencer there.)
Then the nonfluent body language is probably explained by people trying to move in ways that are hard to read.
If I’m following your meaning, then that’s just hard in general. It’s easy to tell when someone’s throwing a punch as it happens, of course, but by that time it’s far too late to block or avoid; to get to it in time, you need to be able to see it in body alignment before it happens. And that’s not something we tend to get a lot of practice with in everyday life.
Whether reading body language is something that you practice in everyday life depends how your everyday life looks like.
Not bumping into other pairs while dancing Salsa on a crowded dancefloor needs the ability to read the body language to know where they will be. When it comes to experienced dancers who move fluently that works quite well. When you on the other hand dance next to a beginner who’s not dancing fluently you don’t know where they are going to be as easily and thing get much harder. Then it takes conscious effort to think about them.
Body language also matters for hugging other people. At least if you don’t have stickers. If I go for a hug, does the other person body language prepares for a hug or do the tense up? If they tense up, I stop the hug before it really happens and therefore I don’t invade the other person.