Motivation to train varies by student. Some need to vent their aggression. Some want to exercise. Others are attracted to the competition. Police officers are trained to protect themselves from the violence exposed by their profession. A street fighter may be driven by emotional issues or adrenaline. When I meet new students for the first time I try to understand their underlying motivation. Are they training to get into shape? Do they want to better defend themselves or fair well in a bar-room brawl? Sometimes it’s not a clear-cut division.

Fighting is fundamentally a combination of violence, sport, and art:

• A competitive fighter will focus on the sports aspect, wanting to learn skills so they can win in a competition.
• A violent fighter’s goal is to hurt their opponent.
• A martial arts practitioner wants an outcome where they will not get hurt, and even try to settle the altercation without severely hurting their opponent.

In a combat situation, understanding an opponent’s motivation is important. A street fighter facing a martial artist is a conflict of diverging motivations: The martial artist wants to leave the conflict causing minimum harm while the street fighter wants to inflict maximum harm.

Violence is a mixed bag of anger, fear, and heightened emotion.
Martial Arts concentrate on the skill, composure, and technique.

Students who are motivated by self-defense typically won’t stick with training for long. They find themselves leaving after a short time, once they’ve learned enough self-defense to satisfy their minimum requirements. Most violent confrontations are the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Practitioners of Krav Maga such as police officers, bouncers, or bodyguards – are often situated in the wrong place and at the wrong time.  A majority of society will not see such violence if they avoid locations where violence occurs. In other words, training for an altercation that is unlikely to occur in one’s lifetime is not a reasonable objective. Spending years training for a chance encounter is not a good balance of one’s personal investment against personal risk.