Episode 755 - The Myth Poor Self-Defense is Worse Than None
In this episode, Jeremy and co-host Andrew Adams take on The Myth Poor Self Defense is Worse Than None.
The Myth Poor Self-Defense is Worse Than None - Episode 755
Do poor self-defense skills give a person a false sense of confidence? Does it make a person worse than someone who has no training at all? In this episode, Jeremy and co-host Andrew Adams take on The Myth Poor Self Defense is Worse Than None. If you are not comfortable hearing f-bombs, you are WARNED!
After listening to the episode, it would be exciting for us to know your thoughts about it. Don’t forget to drop them in the comment section below!
Show Transcript
You can read the transcript below.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Hey, what's happening everybody, welcome you are watching or listening to whistlekick Martial arts Radio. And in today's episode, Andrew and I are going to tackle the subject, our collective belief of how we phrase the myth that poor self-defense is worse than no self-defense. This is a claim a lot of people make on the internet and disclosure, I might get riled up here. So if you don't like that sort of conversation, you might not want to stick around or just be ready to turn it off. Right? Just a fair warning.
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And if your family understands why. All right, Andrew. The root of this is that quite often, the feedback, the comments that we see on videos of martial arts online, whether it's on social media, YouTube websites, or whatever, people will say, that's not good. That's going to get someone hurt. Or to say it more directly. That person has a false sense of confidence in their skills, and they're going to get themselves into trouble. There's this idea that somehow someone can learn elements of martial arts and be less prepared for a self-defense situation than if they had not done anything at all.
Andrew Adams:
Yep.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Am I framing that right?
Andrew Adams:
Yeah, you are framing it correctly. And, and I see it quite a bit. I have seen “reaction videos” online, so let's watch this self-defense video and basically make fun of it as to why it wouldn't work. Or I've seen videos where let's watch this self-defense tutorial. And let's try and actually do that. Let's see if they actually work. And they actually go so far as to actually try them to see if they work. And it's kind of become bigger and bigger in the online Youtube world.
Jeremy Lesniak:
And a lot of that is because we live in a time where we react more strongly to things that we dislike. We like to gang up and hate and throw shade or whatever words you want to use. And when we're talking about a subject that people feel skilled or qualified in, it becomes very self-serving to point to someone else and say, well, they don't know what they're doing. They're not as good as I am.
Because that's what they're saying. If I watch a video, and especially if I comment on a video say that wouldn't work. That's BS, whatever. I'm saying, you know less than I do. And that makes me better. Yeah, and that's not just martial arts. That's everything Right? I see it once in a while. I see some home improvement stuff pop up. There's a flock of Blue Jays floating around my window; sorry, it's distracting.
Jeremy Lesniak:
This one was like four or five. I find it to be ridiculous. Because let’s really break that down. I spent some time learning some self-defense skills That made me so unprepared as to I would be better off not. I don't think anybody out there is going to argue the fact that some things are more effective than others things. And some methods of training are more effective than others methods of training.
More time training will yield better results. Given the first two statements, are we on the same page there? Yeah, yeah. There might be one weirdo out there who was like, Well, I go there. Well, that's fine. I'm not, we're not talking to that one. Weirdo. We're talking to the general collection of martial artists who engage with our content.
Here's my problem. The arrogance required to make the statement that someone else's form and training format is so bad. As to be worse than no training, is, I'm going to do something I've never done on this show before. It's fucking ridiculous. And anyone who engages in that behavior is also fucking ridiculous. It doesn't make sense.
Andrew Adams:
Yeah, I liken it to my thoughts on quoting McDoJo's, and you know, people that do not know I've gone on the record publicly on other podcasts and saying that I hate and I don't use the word hate very often. I hate the word, McDojo, why I hate it, is because it has been brought, it has now been used to be anything that a particular person thinks is bad, right? And it is most often used to belittle other martial artists and in saying often in this context of self-defense stuff, or what they're learning, the students at that school, that's a McDojo like that.
They give out belts and what they're learning is so bad. And now here's how we relate it to this episode, that the self-defense that they're learning will make them worse on the street, that they're going to hurt themselves because they don't really know what they're doing. What they're being taught is bullshit. And they would have been better off not doing anything. And I disagree with that statement vehemently.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Here's the first place. And I think this is the most obvious place that we can poke a hole, a very large hole in that argument, confidence. Absolutely. Every time you approach the psychology of defense, self-defense, violent behavior, victims, whatever angle we're coming in on, the number one thing that is related to the person. It's not their skill at blocking or evading, it's not their knowledge of where or how to kick. It's not their speed or strength. It's their confidence. In fact, this is so relevant.
There have been studies and we've talked about this once or twice on the show where they've taken perpetrators of violent crime, and shown them videos of people walking down the street and asked them to identify, who would they attack. Who would they go after? Guess what? Do they get there in common? Do they pick the same people? Yeah, because they present themselves as victims. If I spend six to 12 months learning awkward self-defense techniques, poorly taught. And I really don't know anything different, but I think I did. And I think I'm better prepared.
I will carry myself better now might be a huge difference. But we're not talking about the argument. That doesn't make you much better. We're talking about the argument that makes it worse. All we have to prove to blow up this ridiculous argument is that it doesn't make you worse. Confidence makes it better. Absolutely. There's our first attack on the argument.
Andrew Adams:
Yeah, absolutely. The concept of you know what, what students are learning at that school is garbage. Like they should come here and train here. Well, here's the reality if the students over there are happy with what they're learning, whether it is “effective” or not. If what they're Learning, brings them joy, they're happy. Who am I to say they're wrong? Right? And they are learning stuff that you brought up that will make them more confident. So they will tend to carry themselves in a different way. From someone who has no training whatsoever.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Not everyone trains for the same reasons. I'm not aware of any martial artists who don't have a Better man who have their self-defense skills on the list. But it is not at the top of everyone's list. It is just off the top of my list. Yep, the number one reason I train is not self-defense. It took me a very long time to feel like I would have a reasonably better chance to defend myself on the street. It was decades. And I was fine with that. Because I knew I would have a better chance. But I am small. I've always been small. But I trained for many other reasons, most of which we've talked about on this show.
Here's another place that we come to you. You brought up this idea that it's bad because it's bad in comparison, there's always a comparison. There's no objective way to point to something and say that it's crappy. It can only be crappy in comparison to another thing. What are the people who make these arguments, always comparing it to the thing that they do? I have never seen any of these folks say what this person does sucks. What I do sucks less. But what that person does over there is much better.
So we should all be doing that. Never seen that happen before. So again, I come back to it is fucking arrogant to say, what I do is correct. what that person does is incorrect. Now I recognize not everyone saying correct versus incorrect. I recognize that most of these arguments are bad versus good. How much experience do you have with what that person has been taught? In most cases, it's virtually none. It's a single video of one to two minutes. Guess what? You can find plenty of videos of me not doing a good job.
If you feel me learning something new, or at a seminar, hey, guess what? I teach seminars. Sometimes I screw stuff up. Even in the seminars, I'm teaching based on the material that I put together. None of us are perfect. So if you boil things down to that, what's the equivalent of a soundbite? You're always gonna find a reason to drag somebody. How does that make anything better?
Andrew Adams:
Yeah, yeah. And the other one that I see sometimes is there will be a video of some self-defense thing. And people will be like, That's dumb. That would never work. Well, here's a little story that I'm going to tell in Storytime with Andrew. I have in the past gotten food stuck in my throat. The very first time it happened. They had to put me under anesthesia to go in and pull the food out of my throat. I basically didn't chew my food enough. I was in a hurry. And I was in a rush. And I wasn't because it didn't clog up my airway. I could still breathe, I can still talk. I just couldn’t swallow literally anything, couldn't swallow water, nothing was going down, it was completely stuck.
And when they pulled it out, they let me know that you know it has expanded your esophagus. And so it is more likely to happen to you now because it's happened once. So it has happened to me three or four times. And I've only had to go to the hospital a couple of times. But here's the story that I need. It's gonna relate guys. You gotta just bear with me hi costume. I went to Thanksgiving Day a number of years ago, I just took the turkey out of the oven. It's ended up like, so can I start to carve it up and I like us. They're so good. And I put a piece of Turkey in my mouth. And it got stuck in my throat. And I said to my ex-wife, yeah, I can't get it out. Like we're gonna have to go to the hospital.
So we went to the emergency room. And the doctor said, Okay, well, we're gonna start with a muscle relaxant. And you know, it's gonna we're gonna do you with an IV, so we don't want to put you under if we don't have to. So they put the IV in me and they're like, it's supposed to be a muscle relaxer and we're gonna let it take its time, and then hopefully it'll just pass down on its own and you'll be fine. So they give it to me about 5-10 minutes later. She comes in and says, Here's a glass of water, see if it'll go down. And it went down and she When I said, yeah, she's like really worked? And I said, Yeah, I did. She said we try this on everyone. It never works. This is the first time it's ever worked. But we always try it because it doesn't hurt to try it. And, you know, it's amazing. It works.
Well, that dumb technique that that person does. Like, let's say it's a, you know, your wrists are bound, and you do this thing to get them done. Well, that's so dumb, that'll never work. Well, maybe it doesn't work 99.9% of the time, but maybe there's that 1% of the time that maybe it will work? And would you rather try something that might not work? Or just sit there and do nothing?
Jeremy Lesniak:
Well, remember, remember, if we're only going to do the things that work most of the time, everyone knows, like, three punches and two kicks. And that's it. Yeah. And that's all we do. All the time. Yeah, that's really boring. How many people are going to stick with that? How many people are going to get better at that exam for martial arts would be dead?
Andrew Adams:
So at least that, “dumb” thing that they saw on the video that they try, maybe it doesn't work, but maybe they're the 1% person that you know what, it doesn't work for them? How are they worse off for having tried it?
Jeremy Lesniak:
Sometimes learning that a thing doesn't work often. But being able to understand it is a good thing. This is what is the argument that comes up against forums. And I've seen people make the same argument that we're spending your time on forms is a waste of time, it makes you less prepared because you're never going to do those techniques in that way. Well, it's spoken by someone who doesn't understand what that form is, and why we train it. Forms help me understand my body, what I do with someone else, to understand how my body relates to somebody else. It's safe, I don't have to train it in a way where I'm panicked, that I'm getting punched in the face.
I can also train strength, reaction time and speed, and a whole bunch of other things using forums. Yep, absolutely. It's a good story. I knew pieces of that I didn't know the whole thing. Do you think this is inevitable? Is this? Is this a sign of martial artists trying an important sentence? Let me try. Is this a sign of martial artists being so passionate about what they do? That they are trying to elevate the entire industry by, you know, iron, you know, iron sharpens iron? Or is this a sign of the times when nobody can support what anyone else does? Because if there's another good way of doing something, it could mean that there's a better way of doing something than they already do it.
Andrew Adams:
I think it's more the latter than not the former. And here's why. When I see the reaction videos of people talking about it, they they don't often say that it's dumb, what is being taught, they say they should do it this way, they should do it my way.
So I tend to see it more as people wanting to put other stuff down to bring their stuff up. As opposed to saying, and even if it was couched in such a way that we don't think that this way would work. Here are some options you could do. But it's never that way, you should do it this way. Instead, it makes a definitive statement as opposed to an open-ended statement.
Jeremy Lesniak:
What I find interesting is that there seems to be a bit of a bell curve on this related to time training. Brand new students are running around generally trashing what other people do. People who have been training for 30/40/50 years are generally not running around trashing what other people do.
Andrew Adams:
That's a really good observation that I have never thought of.
Jeremy Lesniak:
So we had a conversation off air where I referred to someone that you know, that I know a little bit as a baby blackbelt. Not a baby in terms of age, but someone who kind of has trained six-eight years.
Yeah, of time you know, certainly earning their black belt certainly deserves it. But do not have enough time with other people and understanding themselves and how they relate to martial arts and martial arts relates to them.
And not that we were talking about specifically this but there was an element of Well, this way that I do it is right. And I don't know that I can agree with other people doing it differently as being acceptable. And the word you used was valid.
Andrew Adams:
Yep, yep. I hadn't thought of that. And, I think it's important to know, like, we're using the term baby blackbelt. It is not in a derogatory way. It is just meant in terms of like, they haven't been a black belt for that long.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Yeah. The same way that all the vampire shows, you know, it's a baby vampire. Yeah, exactly.
Andrew Adams:
You know, that's a good point, though, that, you know, someone who has been training a lot longer in the arts, I would say, as a general rule, tends to be a little more open and accepting of other things.
Jeremy Lesniak:
I think it's two prongs there. I think they're more open. And I think they're also far less interested in what other people are doing because they realize it doesn't impact them. Because here, here's, I will push back on this and say, Why do you care? This? You know what? Even if it does, let's pretend I completely disagreed with myself. And I would say, You know what? Yes. So they're more likely to get hurt. So what? Will martial artists have a bad name? Only because you're saying shit about it? Yeah. The general population isn't running around going. What a lot of martial artists say to other martial artists, the only reason they even know is that we post stuff publicly showing us tearing each other down. Yeah, good point. So sick of it. We did a whole episode about that. Martial artists are the reason martial arts aren't bigger. What episode was that?
Andrew Adams:
Just a couple of weeks ago,
Jeremy Lesniak:
Doesn't mean 745. Somewhere in there. Yeah. I don't know if there's more to say or if we're beating a dead horse at this point. What do you think?
Andrew Adams:
Yeah, I don't know. I think we both have come down pretty strongly on the same side, which is unsurprising. I mean, we can continue to rant but I think we've, I think we've gotten our point across
Jeremy Lesniak:
Ranting for the sake of ranting is pointless, doesn't make anybody's life better. And, you know, maybe people enjoyed us ranting. Because it's not a thing that we do. Yeah. But here's what I'm going to recommend. Don't participate in this. If you see someone, post material. And your initial reaction is to think critically. That creates an opportunity to ask a question, why? There's a gentleman that I am social media friends with, we've never had a conversation, but I follow his accounts on his account on Tiktok. He follows mine. He puts up materials while working through some things. At no point is he claim a level of experience or rank, or knowledge doesn't claim to be a teacher. He's putting himself out there saying, This is what I'm doing. And he gets so much hate. There's no reason for it.
We are our own worst enemies. And if you want martial arts to advance, one of the surest ways to advance is to get more participation. The more people doing a thing, the better the thing gets. Oh, but no, no, no, it doesn't matter. resist that. Think of the worst way to train martial arts you can imagine more people training in that way means some of them will want to do something differently. And they will move on to something else. But what is most important is that people have a positive experience in their training, especially early on. And one of the surest ways to stop them from having a positive experience is to tell them that they have made a terrible decision.
Training is that way at that place, and then they should just stop or they're wrong. Because we live in a time where everyone is so critical. People are terrified of making any decision. So instead, they will make no decision. Yeah, people are so afraid of making the wrong decision. They will make no decision. It is overwhelming. It is exhausting to think about all the different options of all the places you could train for most of us. Sometimes you just got to start.
Andrew Adams:
Yeah, you know, there's the question: a rising tide raises all ships, right? I would rather students go train at the school across the street, even if it's a and I hate using this term quote unquote MC dojo in some people's eyes, even if they go to train there. Because there are possible chances that those students will go they're not like it and come to my school instead because they're totally different.
They trained in two totally different ways. And they like what they see at my school better, great. But if they don't get involved at all, there's less of a chance they're going to come to buy school. And vice versa, students may come to my school and not like what I do. If they're happy trading over at that school across the street, great, more power to you. I'm just happy you're training. Because you will learn stuff at that school and be happy at that school and not at my school, great.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Every school, every style, and every training methodology is not equal for all people. Yes, but they are all equally viable. How do we know? Because they exist. If nobody found value, in this school over here doing things in this way, it wouldn't exist, and that method of training would die out. Absolutely. So to round this out in a non-ranty way.
If you're someone who feels so strongly about the way other people train, I will almost guarantee 99.9% Chance suggests that you need to spend more time looking at yourself, and your own training. And most importantly, there is a lesson that you have missed in your training. And that lesson is, the more time you spend worrying about other people, the more likely you're going to get a punch upside the back of the head or sensation eye or whatever it is right. Like you, I think a lot of us, if you trained like an adolescent or teenager, you probably know what it's like to be so worried about what somebody's doing two spots over that you get something upside the back of the head.
That lesson is not simply for while you're in class, correct worry about yourself. Because you can't change what other people are doing. Invest your time in modeling, better behavior, and better training. Because you do have complete control over that and let other people discover what you are doing. And lastly, to any of the trolls or haters that made it this deep in this episode, I never see videos from any of you. You're going to take shots at people and what they do, and you're not willing to put up a video of yourself.
Your opinion is as irrelevant as I could imagine. I want to thank everybody for listening or watching. Remember, we're all over social media. These videos are on YouTube. We do two episodes each and every week, connecting, educating, and entertaining. Hopefully, we checked all three of those boxes for you today.
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