The words “fighter” and “martial artist” are often used interchangeably…
However, John Danaher doesn’t think they mean the same thing.
For Danaher, there is a big difference between the two – most notably, in the sense of why they train:
There’s a sense in which a fighter gets ready for the next fight, whereas the martial artist is more interested in: “What is the course of my life overall? How will this training influence me as a person?”
Their training is not for a specific event, but it’s an end in itself.
The training is an end itself, as opposed to the fight.
In other words, if you were to take the lucrative things out of the equation, the martial artist would still train nevertheless, whereas the fighter would stop altogether:
Fighter training is a means to an end; it’s prize money and fame, it’s glory.
And if you took those things away, they wouldn’t fight. But martial artists will still train.You put a martial artist and a fighter on a deserted island – the fighter is gonna sit on the beach and the martial artist will be doing knuckle push ups in the sand.
View this post on Instagram
What do you think, do you agree with Danaher?
Let us know!
