Ernest Hemingway wrote that sometimes he needed to read what he had written in order to remind himself that he could write.
Self defense skills are both physical and mental and we need to practice as much to maintain our physical skills as to remind ourselves that we must be ever vigilant when it comes to protecting ourselves and our families.
As a competitive pistol shooter, I have found that my skills deteriorate unless I practice every day. Fifteen minutes a day of dry firing is better than an hour every week at the range. Muscle memory is a funny thing. We do not forget it all and if we have even been good at something, it doesn’t take long to retrieve those movements from the deep freeze and defrost them, but we do lose the subtleties we once worked so hard to incorporate into ourselves.
Several years ago, I took a series of defensive knife fighting courses with our local police department. The style was different than I had been taught as a nineteen year old, but after a while, meaning about half a day, it all started to come back. The good news is that by the end of the first day, I seemed to have recovered most of my old skills and all of the mental set and awareness. The only problem this pointed up was that it took time to recover those muscle memories, time I would not have had in a confrontation outside of the training room.
I find that while acquiring new skills is fun, maintaining them is work. It is work, however, that may pay the ultimate dividend. Paraphrasing Mr. Hemingway’s thought, I practice not only to be able to defend myself and my loved ones, but to remind myself: NEVER GIVE UP.
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