“The most important thing in competitions is not winning or losing fights. It’s if you had victory over yourself or not.“
Martial arts training is always fighting against ourselves, not against our opponent.
One of the biggest priorities for doing martial arts is to be able to have victory over ourselves.
Defeat our weaknesses and overcome ourselves.
For example,
When you don’t feel like coming to the dojo to train because it’s a hot day, or you had a big day at work, or had a stressful day, but you still came. Already you had victory over yourself because you didn’t get defeated by your lazy mind.
In training, if you challenged yourself and made 100% effort instead of being lazy and not trying your best, you already had victory over yourself.
In competitions, aim to have victory over yourself rather than just defeating your opponent.
The most important thing in competitions is not winning or losing fights.
It’s if you had victory over yourself or not.
If you didn’t give up or run away even if you had fear, worry, pain, and tiredness, and you made your best effort to win, you had victory over yourself even if you lost the fight.
But if you lost a fight not from your fighting abilities but by giving up because you had fear, pain and tiredness, you got defeated by your weak mind, not from your opponent.
After a competition which you lost, using that experience to improve yourself and keep training hard, you already had victory over yourself.
Even though this time you got defeated by your own mental weakness in a competition and gave up during a fight, keep training hard and use that experience and try to not give up in the next fight.
Winning competitions doesn’t always mean you had victory over yourself.
If you always just pick an easy opponent, or not have any respect for your opponent, not having good manners, or cheating (Using steroids or something), you already have been defeated by your weaknesses and ego.
So, even though you won a fight, you were defeated by your mental weakness, and become a real loser in the code of martial arts.
We should aim to beat our mental weakness, and have victory over ourselves first.
That will automatically take us to be real winners in competitions too.
Martial arts training is always up and down.
Sometimes injuries, or you can’t win competitions, can’t do well in training.
The worst enemy might be your lazy mind, and sometimes you feel like giving up and quit training, but that’s why it’s a great way to improve as human being by overcoming them.
Achieving this kind of mental toughness and discipline is one of the most important priorities for training martial arts.
