Building Body and Brain: Lessons From Martial Arts

If you look at different martial arts and examine only techniques, each can look very different. If instead you look at different martial arts and try to perceive the core principles, they all look the same. Understanding this is a critical ingredient for success whether in physical training or our daily psychosocial interactions. A forest is a forest, regardless of the types of trees within, but applying what this means in daily living takes practice.

Core Principles in the Palm of Your Hand

My favorite thing as a professor was mentoring folks in research. A big part of this involved understanding how projects that were focused on discrete, seemingly independent research questions were actually just expressions of common themes within a lifelong research program. When discussing this with trainees, I would literally hold up my hand and spread my fingers apart. Each finger represents a single project. If they are taken in isolation without consideration of the other fingers and especially the palm from which all the fingers emerge, they are isolated ideas. They could still be important, but isolated ideas usually aren't helpful to advancing core research themes contained in the palm that will have broad impact and shift and change fields of science. By simply thinking about the relationship between the fingers and their common origin in the palm, project planning and implementation can proceed in a way that is mutually reinforcing and can shift paradigms.

A Palm Can Both Strike and Shape Thinking

When I guide folks in martial arts, I take a similar approach to training. Except now techniques and combinations are like the individual research projects and common principles of response to attack are the core themes. Martial arts like Aikido, Judo, Karate, Wing Chun, and Bagua, to name only a few, seem quite distinct with disparate emphases on joint locking, throwing, striking, close fighting, and circling. Their techniques are different. Yet the core of what they teach about response to physical threat is quite similar if you look at what principles the techniques are intended to enable and bring to life.

Each involve general body movement that shifts you to a safer place, sets you up to respond, and trains techniques that focus on incapacitating an opponent by distinct joint locks, throws, strikes, intercepts, and whole body attacks. So, the core principles of what a martial art does is the same despite the fact that the methodologies used to enable the expression of those principles varies.

The Common Core of Martial Arts and Life

I am now in the fifth decade of my martial arts training journey, one which started in the early 1980s with Japanese Karate, then Okinawan weapons, Yuishinkai Okinawan Karate, with later additions of Northern and Southern Chinese traditions Bagua Zhang, Xing Yi Chuan, and Wing Chung Kuen. While the specific techniques and weapons are quite different in these martial traditions, there is a common set of core principles:

• Do not directly confront an opponent's power; get out of the way or control the line of attack so you are safe from the initial threat and are a more difficult target.
• When controlling the attacking line, place your body in a good position to support your attacking threats on the opponent.
• Keep hitting, locking, choking, throwing, and so on until you can escape or the threat ends.

Seeking to understand and apply the core principles of who each of us is as a person and what we are trying to achieve in the world is really no different. Instead of evasive body movement and martial arts attacks, our daily lives include many opportunities for tactical positioning, realignment of thinking, and refining of our reactions and responses in our words, actions, and deeds. All these activities involve practice and self-reflection. Although our hurried society doesn't really encourage reflection and self-improvement, carving out time and space for both can be part and parcel. And, in fact, training in traditional martial arts can be a real catalyst for both bodily self-improvement and actualization of who we want to be in the world.

(c) E. Paul Zehr (2026).