One of the most important things a superior martial artist can have, inside the ring or out, is the gunfighter mentality. The best fighters, like BJ Penn and Rashad Evans, have this intuitively in their personality. The second place guys don’t.

Interestingly enough, the Gunfighter Mentality used to be part of the training in the classical martial arts. I remember training back in the middle of the last century, and everything we did was geared towards this ability. While there were many factors involved in the death of this principle, people like Bruce Lee probably drove home the spike.

Bruce Lee added circling and bouncing to the martial arts. The Gunfighter Mentality depends on stillness, being coiled like a snake, and here was this fellow acting like Mohammad Ali, circling and jabbing and destroying the mindset of the Gunfighter. Now Bruce Lee would have won most any fight anyway, but a generation copied him, and they gave up the deadly zen stillness of the Gunfighter.

Now stillness is the heart of true fighting, when it comes to the martial arts, and there are several good reasons or this. There was much interchange between karate and zen principles in Japan, and people who sat in the zen position for long hours began to see the benefits of sitting, waiting, and cultivating silence. In the silence one could better perceive, could empty themselves enough that their intuitive nature would take over.

When one is silent, just sitting, when one just relaxes, the world begins to open up. Try it, just plop yourself down in a chair and relax for a while. The world will start to come alive, tell you things, and you will become a brighter, sharper, calmer person.

Once the student begins to appreciate that his perceptions, and thus reactions, will work better, the true martial arts can be developed. In the silence we used to set our stances downward, sink them into the ground, and search for the best set of the leg, the best position to spring from. In the silence we would examine the turn of the foot and the angle of the hip, trying to make every single part of our bodies into totally responsive and explosive mechanisms.

Freestyle matches, instead of dancing around and wasting energy, would be subtle shifts of the body and edgings forward. Instead of throwing a hundred punches, many of which would miss, we would set up to throw one punch, but every ounce of our might would be instilled in that one punch. And, most important, we walked away from the dojo as different people, aware people, patient people.

The Gunfighter Mentality in the martial arts has fallen by the wayside, and it is unfortunate. I believe that if the fighters of today began developing the attributes of a good Gunfighter the Martial Arts would take a turn for the better. This might not be good for mixed martial artists in such places as the UFC, however, as the techniques might become too deadly for the ring.

Al Case has learned martial arts for forty years. A writer for the magazines, he is the originator of Matrixing Technology. You can get his free ebook at Monster Martial Arts.

Tags: Self Defence