3 Reasons Why You Should Do a Combat Sport
I love training Muay Thai. It's something I'll probably do for the rest of my life in some capacity (boxing if I can't find a Muay Thai gym).
The punching, the kicking, elbowing and getting hit.
It really toughens you up, boosts your testosterone and makes you feel happier and more optimistic.
From a practical standpoint, it's so useful in an actual street fight. It's also made me stronger, increased my stamina and made me heavier than I've ever been due to more muscle mass.
So, I want to break down why you should do some sort of combat sport as a man, regardless of your age.
Let's get to it.
1 - Excellent for your mental health
I know...
Mental health is so cliche, pushed by women and soy boys as an excuse for everything.
But in all seriousness, physical training and combat sports are excellent for your mental health.
Men are best able to process and handle complex emotions and stress through movement and action. It's also how we socialize with other men, through doing an activity.
This is why lifting weights is so beneficial and doing a combat sport with other men, even more so.
Combat sports and physical training are excellent for mental health in numerous ways.
The ability to endure stress, handle stress, act through stress builds mental resilience and trains a dominant mind.
The socialization aspect and physical exertion boost your mood and help kick you out of a negative mood (or rut).
Bad things are going to happen to you, but they won't kill you. You can handle pain. Pain can alchemized into aggressive energy.
"Talk therapy" is helpful to men only in the context of lacking the language to articulate and understand their experiences. To map your emotions and understand your patterns.
Releasing and processing those emotions is done through physical movement.
That negative energy gets trapped in your body. Only through the body can you move through it.
Men communicating with one another about serious shit is usually brief conversation for this reason.
Men are not women.
Commiserating in emotions and talking about them over and over does nothing for the psyche.
Men that think they need this kind of therapy and that it is something all men should do, have been internally taken on a feminized psyche.
2 - Learning how to fight and be fit
If you don't train, you don't know how to fight.
Training in a combat sport in addition to weight lifting will teach you how to fight and will build up the stamina required to win an actual fight so long as you don't get knocked out right away - and no I'm not saying you should fight... avoid fighting at all costs unless your life is at risk.
Having the capacity for violence is a requirement as a man. The reality though is that some men have more of a talent for violence more than others (think Mike Tyson), it's for this reason why you as an average guy need to train.
So you're not weak and useless.
So you have the confidence and capacity to protect yourself and others if need be.
To develop your capacity for violence even if you don't have a talent for violence so you're not a mark for predatory men.
Be fit
You need to have a physical presence that garners respect. Look, I've been on both sides of this coin:
The young man on the right, people would mess with. The guy on the left, not so much.
When you're in shape, you look fit and competent. You're then treated as such, a competent man.
Life is short, it's a shame to go through life being out of shape, fat and unattractive.
As Socrates put it:
It is a shame for a man to grow old, without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.
By getting fit, doing something healthy and social, dressing well, you'll find it much easier to make friends and that other men will be more welcoming of you and want to hang out with you.
When I was that 27 year old guy, I was an out of shape goof from Connecticut. I didn't look cool, dressed like a typical sloppy American and the reactions I would get from both men and women was sub par.
Thai people would also mess with me by trying to cheat me out of money, not respecting my boundaries and just overall thinking I was just some dumb guy.
Just by getting fit and dressing better made a world of difference for how people responded to me.
When you look like the man, you're treated like the man.
3 - A good way to make friends
Young men reach out to me and ask all the time - "how do I make friends."
Do cool shit - even if that means you have to go alone sometimes.
Most of my friends I've meet through other people or through doing activities like Muay Thai. Sometimes this did involve me just going alone and winging it.
Then, you deepen the friendship over good conversation and doing things together.
Like my friend Romeo. He's a Korean American guy I meet through my female friend Lita. Yea we talk over beers and what not, but we also do stuff.
Like going for a 4 mile run in the morning in Bangkok.
I've also made a few friends through doing Muay Thai as well.
This merges with #2 a bit, but when you look cool people want to associate with you.
So, by being a cool guy in an environment around masculine guys training, it makes it easy to make friends through a shared activity.
You just need to be open to hanging out and like I said, be open to going alone sometimes.
I went to the Muay Thai gym without knowing anyone and through going every week you just socialize and talk. Then, it become a great place you look forward to doing.
I do this regularly in my life and it's how I meet people. I met Lita because I took a solo trip to Khon Kaen Thailand and met her at a Tawadang (this crazy Isan bar/club in Thailand).
I'll do this again with other activities. Like checking out a local yoga studio in Bangkok. Maybe it will be fun and I'll meet people, maybe it will be lame. You don't know unless you go.
My dad would always say "ain't nothing going to happen here" - what he meant was that you have to give yourself the opportunity by being present in a place where things happen.
Sticking your patterns, to your loop causes your life to be on repeat. Nothing wrong with this if you like the loop you're in and it's working for you.
But if you're stuck in a rut, you want to make new friends, then engaging in a combat sport is a great first step.
Friendship purgatory
I wrote about this in more detail here:
Edge of David
But my idea with this is that when you're growing as a person, sometimes you won't have friends because you need to let go of the friend circle you have.
An extreme example would be if you're someone who has a problem with drinking and you want to stop.
Well, most of your friends are probably drunks. So now you need to enter into friendship purgatory where you're in this weird place where you don't have friends.
You need to stop associating with the crowd that's holding you back, but you also don't qualify yet for a higher quality group of friends.
You're in purgatory so to speak.
I only bring this up as breaking your patterns, your loop and doing something different may require you to go through this if you're a bit of a socially awkward, out of shape kind of guy.
Just know it's not permanent.
Combat sports are a must for men
So to wrap this up, combat sports are a must for masculine men. You'll start to look great and feel great. After an evening of physically sparing men for 2 hours, I sleep like a baby. Waking up the next day bright and early ready to get to work.
So take up some sort of training, don't be shy, don't put it off. Stop playing video games and stop being a side character in your own life.
Till next time,
-David