What is it and how do we do this? Over at The Shotokan Times, there was an article about this topic. Below is an excerpt. The full post may be read here.
What is Fighting Spirit? And how to train it!
By Michael Ehrenreich
We can see if somebody possesses fighting spirit or not. Fighting spirit seems to be ubiquitous. We all know what fighting spirit is. Until we are being asked for an explanation.
Fighting Spirit: You Know It, When you See it!
When I started competing in the early 1980´s I heard a well-known German coach explaining to one of his students: “You lost the fight because your opponent had more fighting spirit”. I knew exactly what he meant. Even though I was rather inexperienced as a competitor I clearly saw that the other fighter wanted it a little bit more. But what exactly was this karate expert saying? Is fighting spirit something one has and somebody else does not?
Later as a black belt II understood that there is still a lot to learn. So, I went to many seminars. With all the big names. Unfortunately, fighting spirit never really became a topic in our discussions. Many of the well-known instructors would mention that fighting spirit was the most important thing for a fighter. I believed them. However, it never went beyond these one-liners. Thus, I researched in fields like psychology, education, neuro science, philosophy, and sport sciences. Being a sport scientist myself I came up with the following idea: Fighting spirit can be understood just like fitness.
The Puzzle of Fighting Spirit
Fitness is a complex and very balanced combination of a variety of skills like power, speed, endurance, strength, agility, and others more. We only speak of fitness, if all those virtues are being established at a decent level. The same applies to fighting spirit. To illustrated that I have created the fighting spirit puzzle. In this puzzle, all parts are interconnected . Together they constitute our fighting spirit.
The fighting spirit puzzle has six parts: self-confidence, persistence, determination, control, risk-taking, and competitiveness. This analytical puzzle helps us to to target specific weaknesses in us. It enables us to reach specific goals. Like in fitness, when we want to increase our speed, we need to work on our maximum strength, do plyometric drills, and practice a specific number of karate techniques at maximum speed. When it comes to fighting spirit we would apply the same principles.
We would train a specific part in order to increase our fighting spirit.
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