The Implications of Combat Experience in Self Defense 

By Idai Makaya

I am often asked the question by trained martial artists about whether or not an untrained fighter - or a less experienced trainee – is more of a danger to a potential attacker.

First of all, to address the controversial aspect of the topic – Yes, less experienced combat trainees are often more dangerous to opponents if these practitioners have reasonably decent skills. Anyone who does combat sports training will tell you that they’d rather spar (in training) against a champion than against a confident rookie – because the elements of controlled aggression and controlled force are only developed with experience and skill. The same is true in the heat of battle - an unskilled combat practitioner will have less control and less understanding of the consequences of his or her offensive and defensive actions. This could lead to excessive force being applied to vital/fatal areas of the opponent’s body.

What’s so wrong with that, some may ask? After all, you would have been attacked in such a scenario.

In the holistic New Age view of self preservation - self preservation also extends to one’s liberties. If you kill an opponent (whom, it can be demonstrated, was just out looking for a drunken brawl, you’ve applied disproportionate force - both in reality and in the eyes of the law). You are very likely to be deprived of your own liberty for a considerable period of time as a result. Was the altercation your fault in such a scenario? Of course not. But you will still have failed to uphold your self defense priorities.

In fact, you will have failed to uphold one of your highest self defense priorities – the maintenance of your liberty (and on that basis your preparedness for True Self Defense was inadequate). How do you get around this weakness? Through mental conditioning. Go over scenarios in your mind, whenever you have free time (and whenever you enter any new environment). Plan how you’d deal with all the potential threats that every environment you encounter could possibly generate. Go over it in your mind (how you would identify, manage and even neutralise all such potential threats). That is the solution - conceptualising and rehearsing scenarios is the key to self defense success.

This brings us to the other aspect of the same initial query – how safe are combat trained individuals who are quite skilful, physically, but have little experience? I strongly feel that an inexperienced combat practitioner is probably also a danger to himself/herself (because there comes a point in combat training when the student becomes confident in his/her physical abilities - but is lacking in experience - and he/she may overestimate the ease with which he/she can dispatch an attacker). This lack of experience may lead (and I have seen this often – and admittedly experienced it myself) to a sense of false confidence – which, in turn, actually leads to decreased vigilance. The student in such a scenario is so confident of his/her ability to defend himself/herself that he/she takes reduced evasive/premeditative action in the face of a brewing threat – thinking there will be no problem in dealing with the threat if it gets out of control.

This phenomenon is made worse when the individual actually manages to ‘get away with this sort of thing’ a couple of times.

The truth about violence (and self defense) is that nobody is invulnerable. Reduced vigilance is the biggest defect an individual can have in their defensive armoury.  Confidence is obviously a good thing, under the correct circumstances, but the confidence of believing that one can always win a fight is a major weakness. True masters of self defense (and even masters of combat) will spend all their energies in efforts to purge such impulses whenever they arise – because it is actually a form of slackness. True champion athletes are driven by the fear of defeat. The moment a combat athlete thinks he/she is certain to win, vulnerability has set in and defeat is always close.

The New Age Self Defense expert will exercise caution at all times, will diffuse situations from a distance and will never be caught up in a violent threat – except by ambush. Your chances of being ambushed are probably as small as your chances of scooping the Lottery Jackpot – I like to use this phrase and I am confident in that statistic. So those of us who have had to engage our physical powers often - in order to extricate ourselves from violent threats - rank pretty low on the scale of self defense mastery (and are very vulnerable, if attitudes are not swiftly changed).

A chain’s strength is measured by its weakest link. If your ability to pre-empt risks and avoid confrontational situations is poor – because that is such a major part of the skill of self preservation – your general self defense can be described as poor, too.

The lesson here is “Tighten up on your defense” if you are one of those people who has been regularly drawn into violence (whether or not you started it). Violence – for self defense purposes – is imposed in ambush situations and is genuinely a last resort action (Note that there is a specific way of applying physical defense in any self defense situation – once the need has been firmly established to do so – and this will be touched on shortly in another scenario).