Risk Management

Avoiding Uncalculated Risks.

- Wayne Belonoha

TRAINING IN martial arts is a form of risk mitigation. In order to get the most from your training, it’s important to train the right things and to focus on training the skills that are going to be most useful in a fight.

Further, as skill grows and the “low-hanging fruit” has been picked, it’s practice and the small details that will fill in the gaps and allow for unlimited skill growth. When a person estimates risk incorrectly, either too much or too little, their actions will not match the real situation they will encounter. As a result, this blind spot may cause them to lose a fight.

Fighting is an inherently dangerous business. If you get in a fight, a real fight where there are no referees, there is a very real possibility of injury—and possibly worse. Because of this, we train in martial arts. We carry guns. We avoid risky locations and times. We, essentially, manage risk. Risk is not well understood, even by martial artists who are, at their core, trying to manage the risk of injury.

So, for this issue, I want to talk about what we all are really trying to do. The first step is to understand risk a bit better.

A risk is a two-part thing. Part one is the event—the thing that we don’t want to happen. It could be getting injured. It could be getting attacked. It could be falling down some stairs or getting hit by a car while crossing the street. It could be appearing weak or losing a job. All of these are risks; we live in a world of risks.