We are often asked how our instructors can be pro-Prepare and also pro-martial arts. It’s not hard! There are a host of similarities between mixed martial arts sports fighting, traditional martial arts programs and self-defense/violence prevention workshops. There is overlap with content and they all can help people feel strong, confident, and empowered.
“The fundamental difference is in the main objective of each discipline.
- MMA is a full-contact combat sport. The main objective is to win.
- Self-defense focuses on dealing with aggression. The main objective is to survive.
- Martial arts are practiced for self-mastery. The main objective is to improve.
Notice that I said main objective. Because someone can train to win, to improve, and develop survival skills at the same time. The difference is in the focus, or the ultimate goal.” – P. Fulop
Depending on your primary goal for becoming educated and skilled, you’d make the choice that works for you. If you have more than one goal, you might do more than one type of program at the same time or in sequence. Many of our instructors and our students have done just that. Some begin with Prepare, and then enjoyed it so much they enrolled in an ongoing martial arts program. Some begin with martial arts and then joined us at Prepare and then returned to martial arts. People might want the more varied options of a martial arts program/martial arts self-defense course if they are committed to longer-term training, but also be enthused about teaching and/or taking a shorter program with a curated list of skills, so they do it all simultaneously!
Martial arts systems had their genesis in a variety of contexts. Some were developed to foster national pride, some primarily for exercise and fitness, some are about culture and sport, some were about preparing for rebellion against oppressors. Self-defense as a movement for women in the U.S. arose as a complement to the backlash of acquiring the right to vote “to protect themselves physically but to empower themselves psychologically and politically for the battles they would face in both the public and private spheres.” (Rouse & Slutsky, 2014, p. 470).
For many women interested in training in decades past, there may not have been empowerment self-defense classes and/or women’s-only programs available in their community. There still may be few choices in some communities. For formal training programs, martial arts programs could be the only option. Additionally, martial arts schools often filled the gap by also offering self-defense programs or emphasizing self-defense applications of the skills they were already teaching, especially as students progressed to higher levels. The ever-present threat of sexual assault has always existed and surely there were many ways people learned to protect themselves outside of what we now think of as self-defense courses or more traditional martial arts programs.
Winning, surviving, and improving
Self-defense that ends an assault isn’t a win in the traditional sense of competition. In a competition or a sport, both participants have consented to a planned event and engage with an agreement about the contest’s rules; that is not the case in a situation where self-defense is deemed necessary to survive. In a self-defense encounter, one person didn’t consent and may even be surprised. To “win,” you have to be the target of violence first and that may not feel like much of a victory. Both aggressor and target might be injured and both parties might have to navigate the legal system when the assault is over.
Self-defense is about improving one’s odds of survival, but not about improving fitness, coordination, or moving through higher levels of tests and trials of progressively more challenging techniques to master. Rather it’s about techniques (verbal and physical) becoming easier to execute as you progress through a course, even when the scenarios presented become more challenging or the skills become more complex.
Survival can mean different things to different people, such as surviving attempted sexual assault, relationship abuse, or emotional boundary crossings. It might mean engaging in body-based healing for prior violence, and wanting general empowerment to manage the everyday experiences that wear people down.
For many, surviving means needing to have a variety of skills beyond physical strikes to avoid physical aggression. Not everyone has equal access to the legal right to self-defense, and engaging in self-defense may come with consequences. Not everyone is comfortable with or able to utilize physical self-defense. Improving threat assessment, increasing verbal response options, and emphasizing strategies for accessing help can be critical.
The idea of self-defense has long been coupled nearly exclusively with the idea of learning “fighting” skills to protect us from strangers. We address the larger likelihood of needing to manage violence and protect ourselves in the context of people we know – family, friends, and romantic or sexual partners.
Surviving can also mean building a sense of self and embodied power that allows people to live larger lives with more freedom and self-direction and joy.
Prepare helps people meet their goals of self-defense and survival.
Much can be said about martial arts and MMA training. Prepare’s expertise comes from the vantage point of self-defense and violence prevention. We focus on self-defense and survival by emphasizing the following:
- Providing relatable scenarios – ones that match the lived experiences and most likely risks of those being taught. Scenarios change based on who is being taught since that connects to what one is likely to face.
- Teaching accessible techniques – including accessibility for people with physical, developmental, and cognitive disabilities. When the desired time to invest in a program is short-term – for example a single day or multi-session program over a handful of days – then the list of techniques taught needs to match what one can integrate to a reasonable level of effectiveness in that time frame. Our goal from the start is to make the learning efficient and practical and to build confidence in one’s competence!
- Setting as the goal to shut down aggressors’ intentions and or capacity to continue. It’s not a “win” per se, but the interruption of violence that has begun.
That can mean using physical skills, but it can also mean psychological strategy, verbal responses, evasion responses, accessing help from others, and even skills to be able to provide help to others. Most people we meet deeply care about the moral and legal ramifications of delivering full force strikes, even in the name of self-defense. Our class participants consistently cite using their intermediate level strategies after class, and they rarely face the feared physical confrontations that motivated them to enroll.
- Trauma-informed training is a key component to making a space feel safer for survivors and others. For example, it’s very important to include acknowledgment that not resisting (by choice or because of physiological response) is also a valued or necessary option. If you are “in it to win it,” that wrongly implies failure when the choice not to respond is made. If you are geared to constant improvement that wrongly implies failure to improve since you didn’t best someone when given the chance. These perspectives are deeply hurtful to survivors who couldn’t resist, chose not to resist, or who resisted but were not able to deter their assailant.
Learning survival skills is a potentially emotionally laden experience, and we can create safer spaces by providing opportunities for peer support, acknowledging and sharing of emotions, and space to reflect on the connections people make with class experiences and their own lives. The class is explicitly not a hierarchy or a competition; there are no ranks – so each person can work on their own goals at their own pace.
We feel that everyone benefits from having varied options available. If pursuing more than one type of program helps people meet their goals, we are all for it!