I’ve been training in martial arts for the better part of 10 years, and the impact it’s had on me is nothing short of staggering from my perspective.
For some context, my parents first took me to Canada’s Best Karate when I was in the 5th grade. They did this for mainly 2 reasons: I was overweight and not that fit, and I was getting bullied. I was really unconfident, and my parents thought that taking up a martial art would benefit me.
Now the real question, did it work? The short answer is yes! It definitely did, but it helped me in really different ways as I grew up.
How it helped me as a young child
As a child, it helped me lose weight, become more active, and care about my physical health more. Before doing martial arts, I really didn’t care about anything outside of playing video games and snacking on things. I didn’t even like going outside that much. There was no passion for anything, I was kind of just drifting along with no goal in mind.
My issues were that I was quiet, had no self-confidence, and didn’t really know how to speak up for myself. As a result of this, I didn’t really adjust that well to a transferring of schools I did in the 5th grade. I used to be in a very small private school that, if I’m being totally honest, catered to my every need and didn’t really challenge me to grow or overcome my weaknesses. It also didn’t help that I was the only child of the family, so I can say without a doubt that I was a little spoiled and not really independent. This made me a bit of an easy victim for bullying, which I am still slightly upset by to this day.
I’m not particularly upset about the fact that I was bullied (although I do think it shouldn’t happen in a school setting it did help me develop as an individual), I’m more upset about the fact that I wasn’t confident enough in myself to speak up and actually explain what happened, which led to the Vice Principal investigating the case to blame ME for aggravating the student that attacked me in the first place. My parents didn’t really have a good story to work with (and I blame myself for that because I wasn’t able to give them the full story just bits and pieces), but it somehow ended up working out in the end. I apologize for the tangent, I just really needed to get that out my system.
Anyways, you’re probably wondering how martial arts helped overcome this. Was it a fast an instantaneous change? HA! I wish. It was slow and gradual. The best I can think of it is that Martial Arts started a lifelong project for me. The project of bettering myself.
How did karate of all things help a 10 year old kid with no friends gain a little confidence and actually start trying to put effort into things? I’ll tell you in one simple sentence that was said to me that changed how I look at life permanently.
become the best person you can be
Yep, really simple isn’t it? At the start of every single class, students recite the Canada’s Best Karate student creed, and it starts like this:
“My goal is to become the best person I can be.”
I saw how much fun self-improvement can be. I saw the effort that all of the other students were putting. But more importantly, I saw how inviting both the instructors and my fellow students were. I’ve made friends that I know will last a lifetime from this place. To my parents’ shock this training made me a lot more energetic and passionate about everything in general. I was going outside more, hanging out with my friends, going over to people’s houses. I was socializing (hooray for younger Seb!). Things were looking up, and the mentality shift that karate introduced to me was actually really simple.
To paraphrase what my instructor said at the time:
You don’t need to be good at everything right away. We all have things that we need to work on. Everyday is a chance to be better at something. I encourage you to pick one thing, and it doesn’t even have to be karate related, and try to get better at it. One small step every day accumulates over time, and eventually those steps will lead you to your black belt and beyond.
To translate the message I took from that: Self-improvement isn’t about making big changes right away. It’s about making a promise to yourself to be better and doing little things everyday to make it happen. It’s all about consistency!
Ever since then I have been trying to give myself a big goal and working towards it every single day, step by step, and it pays off every single time. If you pick one thing to focus and improve on, I guarantee you with enough time it will get better and you will achieve your goal. But remember, everyone moves at their own pace. Progression is not the same for everyone, so patience is also key.
high school – mental health meets physical fortitude
By the time high school rolled around, I was feeling pretty confident about the future. I was ready to take on my next challenge….and then Covid happened. Yep, I lost most of my high school experience to the pandemic. So really I can say I’ve had about one genuine year of high school, which was my final year before going to Schulich.
Now because of Covid the dojo also closed for a while, and I couldn’t exactly train using the online classes they were offering because I didn’t have room in my house. So what did I do? I obsessively worked out in my basement for about 2 years. I gave myself one goal, lose weight and come back to high school looking totally different and unrecognizable. Was that goal achieved? Yes. Was the progress linear? Absolutely not.
To keep a long story short, I got so obsessed with losing weight that I was checking the scale every morning, afternoon, and night. I also wasn’t eating that much. And what happens when we don’t eat that much? You end up losing too much weight. Luckily some family members caught on to my obsession and let me know that I had what was most likely body dysmorphia because I couldn’t actually see how skinny I was in the mirror. So I bulked up and when the time came to go back in-person I was feeling and looking pretty good. This is when life started to stress me out. University applications, fear of my future and what it would look like, fear of being accepted at school. All of it came piling down on me in a very overwhelming way.
Conveniently this was also the time that I started going back to training at the dojo, and I remembered something that my Sensei had told me years ago.
“The dojo is your second home.”
Everyone needs a place they can go to decompress, forget about all their worries, and something else. I realized that place for me was the dojo. It was different from weight training, it calmed me and made me only focus on martial arts training.
Everyone needs a place like this, whether they think they need it or not.
I encourage those who don’t have a space like this to find one ASAP. It really helps you tune everything out for a while, especially in today’s busy day and age. I never realized the dojo did that for me when I was younger, and I was really feeling the impact of missing that space when I had stopped attending due to Covid (a big thanks to my parents for pushing me to go back I love you guys).
So this place continues to be my escape, even today. If it’s not a martial art that’s okay, but it should be a place where you move. Some suggestions of mine include: pickleball, tennis, run club, badminton, cycling, snowboarding or skiing.
This is about the time I realized your mental health is just as important as your physical health. Make sure you give your mind a chance to rest, you will feel better for it.
High school was all well and dandy for the most part, but the most recent lesson the dojo and my instructor taught me is the one that I think is the most important, especially in today’s fast paced world.
growing up and learning to slow down
Life at Schulich has been really enjoyable now that I have my own friend group. But I was having a tough time slowing down on training. I had reached a phase where if I took more than one rest day a week then I considered myself a failure.
I am not saying that you shouldn’t push yourself, I am saying that you should know when to take a break.
I was having a lot more trouble balancing my schedule with all the new assignments, midterms, and commuting life that Schulich had to offer. On top of that I was also training for my 2nd degree black belt at the time. I was training non-stop, ignoring any pain or discomfort I might have felt, and trying to get to my physical peak.
In the process I had also injured my back so much to the point where the pain didn’t leave my body for 5 months, and I ignored symptoms of appendicitis and ended up doing a very physically taxing black belt upgrade test while I had appendicitis.
Wait I did what???? Yes you read that correctly, I IGNORED the horrible pain I was having while walking around, the fact that I couldn’t sleep on my side, and the fact that I was running a slight fever the day before the black belt test.
So not only did I injure my back for a prolonged period of time, I ignored more serious warnings of an organ that was going to BLOW UP.
For symptoms of appendicitis click here. I feel like everyone should know these just in case it ever happens.
Anyways, I did the black belt test, got my 2nd degree, and then the next day when I finally slowed down and my brain caught up with the condition my body was in, I realized I had to go to the hospital the next day (what a wonderful way to celebrate am I right?)
Long story short I got my appendix removed, and I took some needed time off to recover. I realized that self-improvement won’t happen unless I also rest. I’m not a robot, none of us are. We need to listen to our bodies and recover when we need to so that we can maximize our potential growth, both physically and mentally. Our bodies and brains need time to recover, there’s no other way to put it. So next time you don’t feel that good, maybe it’s your body saying “hey, we gotta take some time off today, go have some water and take a nap or something.”
Slowing down is okay, it doesn’t make you a failure.
That’s all I have in terms of major lessons learned throughout my life as a karate student. If any other big event happens I’ll be sure to come back and update this post.
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Also, check out this video my boss made on bullying, I think you’ll find it interesting.
Thanks for reading!
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