The first time I tried karate, I was about twelve. It wasn’t an official course or anything major, just enough to plant a seed in my mind. When the course finished for summer and didn’t start again, I was very sad.
When I was something like fourteen – fifteen (I’m not sure, to be honest), I found out that there was a gym in my hometown that held actual karate courses, registered for the official federation. I could not miss this opportunity: I went and enjoyed my first 6 months, even obtaining my yellow belt, before giving up for circumstances of life that were very much against my desires.
I spent the next twenty years thinking about it.
When I walked back into a dojo at thirty-two, I was not in good shape. I had been going to the gym for a few months, which meant I wasn’t completely sedentary, but the specific kind of fitness karate requires — speed, flexibility, coordination — was nowhere to be found. I was slow, stiff, even the warm-up had me on my knees and out of breath.
What I had, instead of fitness, was determination. I knew this was the sport I was supposed to have practiced my whole life, and that only bad luck had kept me from it. That turned out to be enough to keep me going on.
The first lesson was extraordinary anyway. I went home with every muscle hurting and a satisfaction I hadn’t felt in years.
For the first few months, I wasn’t actually doing karate.
A separate instructor took me and a handful of other out-of-shape beginners aside and worked on something more basic: unlocking our bodies. Joints, muscles, everything. He was helping us move. The real class continued on the other side of the dojo while we struggled through exercises that left us destroyed.
At the time I found it humbling. Not because I thought I was too good for that or anything, I just felt really bad because I knew I needed that kind of exercise.
Now, though, I’m grateful. You can’t build technique on a body that doesn’t move. You can’t throw ten punches if you’re out of breath at three, and you can’t kick an opponent if you can’t put your leg up.
I’m an orange belt now, about a year and a half in. Here’s what I’ve learned about myself:
Your body has a memory, and it’s been asleep. At twelve, certain movements become instinctive quickly — the nervous system is still forming, coordination comes easily. At thirty-two, you’re asking a body that has spent decades in a desk chair to suddenly become fast and precise. It resists, it doesn’t want to because it’s not what it’s used to. The unlocking takes time, but it’s real, it can happen. Sure, some things will simply be harder than they would have been twenty years ago, and there will be limits, but they are further than you think. You can still go an incredible length.
Age is not a sentence. I will never compete at high levels, and I’ve made peace with that. What I can do is keep getting better than I was yesterday — and a year and a half in, I am on a different planet from the one I started on.
There have been other changes that I didn’t expect, and those weren’t physical.
Especially since I started fighting, something has shifted in my mind, how I move through the world. Karate has taught me, in the most direct way possible, that there are no shortcuts for certain things. You practice, you sweat, you improve by degrees so small you feel stuck, until one day you realize you’re kicking someone taller than you in the face. That’s some real progress, for someone who sits all day on a chair because he works as a software developer.
It has also taught me something different. If you grew up as the stereotypical “good guy” and managed to get out of this mindset you’ll know why this is so hard: you don’t ask for permission. If you want something, you go for it. If someone else wants the same thing at the same moment, you have to be faster. If you’re not, you try again. There’s no committee, no approval process, no waiting for the right moment.
This is not how I have lived most of my life. That’s exactly why karate is working.
When I try to explain why karate specifically, I keep arriving at the same answer, which almost doesn’t make sense: it’s the opposite of the everyday personality I grew up with.
I am quiet, internal, and solitary by nature, while karate is physical and confrontational. It asks you to be present in your body in a way that sitting alone with your thoughts does not. It asks you to be quick, practical, to find ways to obtain the best possible result with minimal effort. It makes you modify your instincts to create new automatic responses, and then it makes you apply your newfound responses in combat, which is a totally different deal. Hitting a punching bag that doesn’t move is one thing, finding the right reaction to a kick to the face when you’re out of breath and your opponent has the elasticity of a rubber band is another.
Karate stimulated something that was always there — an instinct, a part of me that was buried under years of absence of real conflicts. During these years, I looked for peace, but I found hibernation for my mind and my body. Let me tell you something: we are not built for the lack of conflicts.
We are built to survive. We carry the capacity for fighting, for speed, for decisive action. Modern life rarely asks for any of it, and that energy has to go somewhere. If it doesn’t, our own nature falls asleep. I love the comforts of today’s life like everybody else, but without struggle we cannot realize our full potential. I want to tell you something: find your challenge and embrace it. It doesn’t need to be karate or even a martial art, it doesn’t need to be physical at all, if that’s not a part of life you always struggled with; it only needs to be something that completes you. I found mine, I hope you find yours.