On Winning and Safety

• LMA Curriculum

As a coach or participant in combat sports, it's easy to get caught up in the desire to win, but what happens when that desire comes at the cost of safety? What happens when we lose sight of the purpose of winning, which is about human flourishing? As care-informed and liberatory coaches and participants, we must recognize the moral issues and sacrifices that come with prioritizing winning over safety.

Combat sports and martial arts training come with inherent risks. The de facto goal is to outlast and defeat your opponent, which can lead to intense training regimens and a culture of pushing through pain, injury, and illness. However, as coaches and participants, it's our responsibility to ensure the safety and well-being of ourselves and other participants. As liberatory coaches and participants, our project is to change the training goals, pedagogy, and culture.

When we prioritize winning over safety in combat sports and martial arts, we put participants at risk of serious injury, disease, long-term damage, and even permanent disability and death. This includes both physical and psychological trauma, as participants may feel pressure to ignore their own bodies and push through injuries and illness to achieve victory.

In particular, ignoring illness for the sake of "winning" puts you and your community at risk. Moreover, it reproduces the death cult of capitalism onto the mat. As a result, training becomes a morally bankrupt endeavor.

Our bodies remember, not just physical injuries but even the psychological. Martial arts are meant to reembody us, not to disembody us further and cause even more trauma. When we make injury an individualized event and its prevention the individual's sole responsibility, the participant is ashamed to be injured or sick—retriggering fear of weakness.

Autonomy without community care is just hyperindividualism, which results in victim-blaming, bootstrapping, laissez-faire attitudes to pain and injury, and a "free market" approach to training. Ayn Rand on the mats.

But the moral problems of prioritizing winning over safety go beyond just physical harm. We create a culture of fear, anxiety, and deceit. Participants are constantly worried about getting hurt, letting the team down, or being shunned. As a result, they may feel pressured to engage in risky behavior, such as excessive weight cutting, overtraining, training through injury, hiding infections, self-medicating pain, training themselves to ignore red flags, and more.

It's self-defeating if combat sports and martial arts have you ignoring your internal warning systems for danger. What is martial arts "honor" if it only builds more intellectual dishonesty and cover-ups? The martial arts and combat sports "community" has already had countless reminders of the dangers when students no longer speak up or speak out. It's, unfortunately, lessons we never learn from, and that still continues.

Safety when it comes to injury and illness tracks with the martial arts world's record with sexual assault. How you do one thing is how you do all things. Consequently, a fundamental change in priorities will also reveal itself in all things.

Having the training environment be a competitive event also promotes an atmosphere of one-upmanship, with everyone trying to outdo one another. It turns fellow participants into enemies. It's dog-eat-dog. Survival games. A filtering process. Rather than valuing health, it mocks disability. Rather than affirming the person who is too ill to train, it's ableist. It tacitly tells people who have chronic conditions or disabilities that they should get over it or have known better. But isn't the job of martial arts to uplift the victim rather than initiate new victims and victimize them further? I suppose it depends on who you ask.

There's also the issue of consent. Participants agreed to training for improvement, self-empowerment, and autonomy. They did not agree to be soldiers. They were not informed the training hall was a simulated battlefield where other soldiers are also your enemies and that sparring isn't free play but rather a Squid Game to sort out the last person standing. But with that police/military culture also comes the blue wall of silence.

This kind of culture is not only morally wrong, but it's also counterproductive to the goal of winning. If participants are constantly injured or living in fear of injury or retribution, they can never get enough practice, repetition, and free play to improve their skills and techniques. You cannot play, learn, or improve without trust and safety.

Imagine parenting without trust and safety. Imagine any social relationship without trust and safety. Without trust and safety, it's no longer a social relationship but antagonism and division.

In a culture of anxiety, confidence may suffer, and as a result, so will performance. Libertarian cultures might have "achievers," but it's not because it develops community or even individuals. Instead, it sorts for preexisting advantages, privileges those who can achieve under the most toxic circumstances, and trains them to "win" regardless of the costs. It cannibalizes society for temporary individual achievements that only matter because it made itself the dominant framework. It does not develop but eliminates.

The culture and goal of liberation martial arts (and really martial arts in general) should be health, well-being, joy, autonomy, and empowerment. We must encourage an environment of transparency, give participants the time and space they need to heal properly, and ensure they feel supported and valued as individuals, not just as dehumanized tools to bring home trophies.

We must also recognize that winning is not the only measure of success in combat sports and martial arts. Winning feels good because it feels like your life is flourishing, but you can't flourish at the expense of your life or your community. It's like confusing the cup with water. The point isn't the cup, the point is to drink water. If every second off the mat is losing, how can we ever take time to heal? When will we ever drink water? If we never heal, if we never drink water, how can we continue to participate? How can we flourish?

Injuring a participant for the sake of "winning" at training isn't victory but rather the worst kind of failure because it betrays martial arts and combat sports as paths to safety and flourishing.

We need to focus on joy, participation, autonomy, and building a love for the art. When we prioritize these principles, winning becomes a natural byproduct of our efforts rather than the sole focus. When you love what you do, you do more of it. When you do more of it, you get better. When you get better, you win. You can't win if you're hurt—mentally and/or physically. You can't win if you're dead. You can't win without a community. You can't win if you can't participate. You can't do any of the above if you can't participate.

When you prioritize a safe and liberatory environment, winning will take care of itself. However, a liberatory environment also has no measure for success. You don't need to compete or be competitive to belong. Just be you without fear.

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